Posts by Squander Two 1109 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2012
Well, this is the problem with the absurd insistence that you can't be a teacher without a teaching degree, which should be seen for the teachers' unions' protectionism it is and abolished. If Stephen Hawking applied for a physics teaching job at a British school, they wouldn't even interview him, because he's not qualified. Allow people who are really good at stuff to teach stuff, and then the schools would simply be able to hire actual programmers to teach programming. This should not be a revolutionary idea.
> 1: Daily PE rather than weekly, with no BS excuses to get out of it.
Right, so you want to make sure the kids who are reckless enough to allow their intelligence to show get a daily session of institutionalised bullying. And, somehow, this will improve educational standards. Because that's what happens: if you punch someone every time they get an A, they get more As, right?
And don't give me any of that shit about ensuring children keep fit or tackling obesity. If schools had the remotest interest in either, they wouldn't devote so much effort to conditioning children to associate physical exercise with torture and humiliation. Twenty-five years later, the reason I and millions of others avoid exercise and sport like the plague is that we were taught to at school.
> in Britain people were locked in the stocks so people could walk past and mock them. (I think fruit throwing is exaggerated for modern humour)
You're quite the optimist about human nature. In fact, the crowd would throw rotten vegetables, manure, sticks, and might well piss on you. If you had enemies, they could arrange for men in the crowd to throw stones. The pillory was generally more dangerous than the stocks, apparently (no idea why), but men died in both.
> Amazon's the only large internet company that's been willing to forgo profits over what they consider an immoral or unfair situation involving a government.
They're not an Internet company, but HSBC's response to the USA's appalling extra-territorial FATCA legislation was to pull all their business out of the US -- which is a pretty bloody big sacrifice for a bank. Every other bank is capitulating.
While I support the French in their move against Google and generally admire their whole national-interest-first-and-the-world-be-damned attitude (I think the world would be better if more civilised nations behaved like that), got to disagree with a couple of your points there.
> I mean it really took off because the French were one of the few nations that actually stood up to the USA in the UN over Iraq.
The French, like other NATO nations, after 9/11 invoked and signed Article 5 of the NATO charter which asserted that an attack on one is an attack on all. That clause had always previously been understood to be a de facto declaration of war -- that was the NATO security guarantee that protected Western Europe from Soviet invasion, after all: attack France and you're at war with with the whole of NATO, including the USA. America spent fifty years pouring their money into military spending on the understanding that they intended to use their military to back up other NATO members, then discovered that the rest of NATO regarded Article 5 as a way of trying to constrain American military action when America was attacked. And the attempt to constrain American action started with Afghanistan, not Iraq. I'm not commenting on the rights or wrongs of this, but pointing out that, had France wanted to stand up to -- i.e. actually oppose -- the US, they could have refused to sign Article 5. Instead, they signed a declaration that they would stand with the US militarily and then made it clear that they regarded that declaration as meaningless.
The whole affair brought long-standing French attitudes to America to the attention of the American media and thus the general American public, and I can see why they might have been pissed off by what they saw. The word "American" is near-enough an insult in France, and quite a significant part of their culture is built around rejecting and despising everything about a country that has never acted as anything but an ally to France. And then that book claiming that 9/11 was faked became a best-seller in France, and then opinion polls revealed that a huge proportion of the French public actually believed it (I forget the precise stats, but it was way more than fringe conspiracy-theorist nutters; it was a mainstream belief). That's what pissed the Americans off.
And why the hell shouldn't it? Imagine that 3000 French people were killed in an attack and opinion polls revealed that, say, 20% of Americans believed the French government had faked the attack and another 10% believed the government had carried out the attack themselves. Would the French insult America? Even more than usual, I mean. Damn fucking right they would.
> there's gratitude for helping out in the War of Independence
After the War of Independence, French soldiers and citizens were welcome in the USA. After World War 2, American soldiers were expelled from France by De Gaulle, as if they were invaders. There's gratitude.
> I mean the chief surrender the French are known for historically was against a fully militarized Germany and if it's okay to be beaten by anyone, that has to be near the top of the list.
Yes, but the French also hold the distinction of being the only Nazi-occupied country that did not require German assistance to round up Jews and load them onto cattle trucks (The Nazis themselves were rather surprised by this). They didn't just lose militarily; they surrendered ideologically. Not all of them, obviously, but enough for a reputation.
> I mean what are you going to do - just keep charging at longbows and dying in droves like General Haig sent British soldiers against machine guns in WWI?).
This is a myth. British military tactics evolved faster during WW1 than probably any other time in our history. Tactics that failed got updated. Generals did not keep sending men charging against machine guns again and again and again despite repeated failure; they developed new and innovative and successful ways of trying to suppress the machine-gun fire. Quite apart from anything else, how do you think an army that never changed its losing tactics won a war, exactly?
> Why would I want, or need, to log into a local PC on my Network, with an Internet email account that rarely gets used?
You don't have to. Microsoft do not force you to use a Microsoft email address; you can attach whatever address you like to your Live account. I believe I have a Hotmail account somewhere that I haven't touched in years, but my Windows account is under an address on my own personal domain. On top of that, you don't need to use a Live account to log into Windows 8 and you can indeed specify a local name of your choosing. The Live account is useful for certain functions -- the sort of thing you'd expect: tying it to other accounts, paying for things in the app store, syncing with your Windows Phone over the Net -- but not vital.
The problem referred to above is to do with the way Microsoft can insist on verifying your account using an out-of-date email address, not that they tie you to using a particular email address for the account itself.
I rather like Windows 8, but what you've described right there is a major fuck-up. I ran into exactly the same thing setting up my wife's PC: she'd provided a secondary email address many years ago for some reason, never needed it since, and now Microsoft insist on using it for verification even though it no longer exists. The really stupid thing is that they have her phone number -- she has a Windows phone -- but they won't use that for security verification. And she didn't have any of these problems attaching her account to her phone. I think it's a problem with Microsoft accounts in general rather than Windows 8 per se, but 8's reliance on an account to get the full experience means someone at MS really should have addressed this, especially since they apparently did fix it for Windows Phone.
Yes, but the same applies to all of them. Most of those XP users have to use it at work, and I know a lot of them hate it.
Besides, Microsoft don't care why you buy their OS, as long as you buy their OS. "I'll buy it but I don't like it" makes exactly the same amount of money as "I love it so I'll buy it."
> how does a net filter that presumably would be turned off by that type of person help?
I never said it did, and don't particularly support the Net filter. I made a point a few posts up about people who claim to oppose absolutely all censorship under all circumstances, plenty of whom pop up in discussions of the Net filter. I don't think it is true that pointing out that most such people don't really want to follow through on what they claim to believe is exactly the same thing as wholeheartedly supporting the current government's Internet policies, but some people here seem hell-bent on interpreting it that way.
> The TV Broadcasters also have a code of conduct to live up to
Yes, which constitutes censorship, which was my point.
> Again you seem to not accept the rights and responsibilities - you choose the playgroup / airline / sensei - you do this using due diligence and protect your child that way, not by saying the government should ensure anyone that my child may see/meet needs to be checked so I don't have to think about it.
The government? But here's what I actually wrote:
> The reason we are able to [delegate responsibility] with some confidence is because rules are in place. Some of those rules are merely social, some are codified as law. Some of them constitute censorship.
I don't think it is true that saying that there are social norms (hardly a controversial claim), only some of which are enforced by law, is exactly the same as refusing to look after my children myself because I think the government should do it all for me.
For the record, I think compulsory police background checks on anyone who works with children is a bad (albeit well-meaning) idea that has had terrible results.
> My world my be a stupid place
Your world appears to contain no middle ground between absolute and total opposition to all censorship and wanting to live in the USSR, so yes, quite.
> The former would be an abuse of authority
Er, how, if there is no rule against it? What you're saying here amounts to "It's censored, so we don't need to censor it."
> anybody -pro or anti-censorship- would kick up. It's a silly example and not particularly relevant to the subject of censorship.
In other words, you are completely against all censorship as long as discussion of those examples where you do in fact support a bit of censorship is disallowed for some reason. Which was my point. Thank you.
I hate to break it to you, but kids get to leave the house occasionally before they're eighteen. No, really. Parents don't absolve themselves of responsibility, we delegate responsibility -- to teachers, doctors, nurses, playgroup attendants, air stewards, youth club volunteers, karate senseis, ballet instructors, social workers and a whole bunch of other people who are sometimes in charge of our children when we're not. The reason we are able to do so with some confidence is because rules are in place. Some of those rules are merely social, some are codified as law. Some of them constitute censorship.
In your world, if a teacher shows brutal porn to a seven-year-old, that's the parents' fault for absolving themselves of responsibility by sending their children to school, and all the teacher has done is exercise their own choice in a wonderful censorship-free utopia. In my world, it's the teacher's fault, and illegal, and rightly so. In your world, if a TV network chooses to show "Hostel" at 4pm immediately after some "Tom & Jerry" cartoons, it's the parents' fault if their child sees it because they should be watching every single second of TV their child sees. In my world, parents are able to gradually teach children how to be trusted to do things without constant supervision -- and thus to grow up properly -- precisely because there are rules in place -- censorship -- that enable us to trust that that won't happen. Your world is a fucking stupid place.
A lot of people like to claim they oppose all censorship. In my experience, most of them don't really mean it. Either you think it's OK to show hardcore horror porn to seven-year-olds or you believe there should be some censorship. The real argument is over how much.
Yup, good point. The CAP in its current form is bloody awful and needs to be scrapped, but it should then be replaced with some less extreme measure to keep a bit of farming ability and infrastructure in Europe. People forget that the CAP is not only an economic measure but also (effectively) part of the defence budget.
You might just as well object to "damn" being used to describe things that haven't actually been and are never likely to be damned by God or "sinister" being used to describe people who aren't left-handed or "terrific" being used to describe things that do not cause anyone to experience any terror or "nondescript" to describe something that is actually known to the world of science or "fast" to describe something that can move or "fucking" to describe something that isn't having sex. And maybe you will.
Well, if I may out-pedanticize your pedantry, I agree that "unique" is an absolute concept and didn't say otherwise. What I said was that the word "pretty" conveys a linguistic signal beyond and apart from mere modification of the word "unique". So nerr.
> That's like saying that two wrongs don't make a right, when they clearly do.
Upvoted, sir.
Language isn't maths and doesn't work like maths. If you insist on seeing the word "pretty" as having no purpose other than to describe the word "unique", you get it wrong. That's not how people actually use words. That everyone knows perfectly well what "pretty unique" means, even if they object to the usage, demonstrates that the phrase sends its intended signal perfectly effectively.
> Therefore, if Samsung were allowed to use "iPhone" for a new smartphone ...
Why Samsung? They've established their own brand. A better example would be, say, me and a couple of friends making utterly shit phones and selling them on Ebay under the name "iPhone". In your world, the ripped-off customers would have no protection from us and no legal grounds for complaint. You're insane.
> if it turned out to be rubbish, then people would call it a cheap ripoff and avoid it
How would they avoid it? I'm faced with twenty completely identical boxes, each saying "iPhone" on it. (The boxes would be identical in your world, since the distinctive features of packaging design that enable companies to differentiate their products are trademarks.) Each is roughly the same price. Some are good, some are shit. How do I avoid the shit ones? You have no idea; you just claim that this would happen.
> People will gravitate to manufacture and quality.
No, a few people gravitate to quality, which establishes reputation, then everyone else gravitates to reputation. This is precisely why trademarks are valuable and useful.
> If a company can claim trademark on "Sky" what's to stop anyone forming a company called BCloudB and claiming trademark on "Cloud"?
Nothing, but they wouldn't be able to use the trademark to overrule prior use, so everyone who was already selling things called "cloud" would be allowed to continue doing so. If your surname is McDonald, you can start a burger bar called "McDonald's" but you can't use the golden arches or make adverts with Hamburglar in them -- which is of course precisely why companies have more than one trademark. Like I said, trademark law is pretty reasonable.
So, in your world, each company would be allowed just one trademark? Every car manufacturer in the world could make something called a Mondeo or a Clio. There would be no iPhone or iPad or iPod or iMac, just Apple computer A, Apple phone B, etc. There would be no way to distinguish between Coca-Cola, Malvern Water, and Odwalla food bars, as they're all made by the same company. And I could make any old shit in my shed and call it Imigran and sell it to Migraine sufferers, before selling loads of crappy music under the name U2. Have you thought this through?
Trademark law is actually quite reasonable most of the time. I for one would like to see its use-it-or-lose-it aspects extended to copyright law.
> The question is, given the real intent of trademarks, did this harm you in anyway, or did this make you purchase Microsofts SkyDrive solution over the SkyDrive solution offered by BSkyB?
That's not the real intent of trademarks -- or not all of it. Yes, BSkyB would suffer if you bought Microsoft's product instead of theirs by mistake. However, BSkyB's business also suffers when they have to field loads of phonecalls from Microsoft's mistaken customers, as answering those calls cost money. Since people's time is valuable, those unnecessary calls are also costly to the people making them.
Furthermore, BSkyB are actually obliged to pursue this sort of case to prevent trademark dilution. If a software firm were to launch a broadband or TV product in the future and call it "Sky", they would be able to use the fact that BSkyB had not challenged Microsoft's use of "Skydrive" as a defence in court. It is part of your legal responsibility as a trademark holder to actively protect it; if you don't, you lose it. So that's another way BSkyB would have suffered by not bringing this case.
> If Sky are confusing their customers by using a common English word to describe their services ...
But they're not. Sky customers do not confuse BSkyB's services with the actual sky, do not confuse them with Skyholidays.com, did not confuse them with the films "Skyfall" or "Vanilla Sky", and don't confuse them with records released by Skye Edwards. iPad owners are not confused about whether their devices were manufactured by actual edible fruit. People don't accidentally book river cruises down Katie Price. The confusion you are referring to does not exist: people are perfectly capable of distinguishing between nouns and proper nouns and trademarks. Where confusion can occur, and can cost people money, is between competing trademarks in the same context, which is why there's an arbitration process to sort such matters out.
> Microsoft made up a word skydrive and their hearts are not content.
Microsoft picked a brand name that was OK in the US but not in the UK. They then faced the choice of rebranding in the UK only or worldwide, and chose to do so worldwide. This is such a common ordinary event for companies that trade in multiple jurisdictions that I doubt they give much of a damn, to be honest.
> a reasonable person would not expect the trademark to be relevant except in a narrow context. The court seems to have stretched this notion beyond reasonable
A lot of BSkyB's business revolves around allowing their users to access files from the cloud. They don't allow uploads, yet. Seems like a very minor difference to me.
> If I make a product titled Skybox Editor to edit backgrounds for video games (where skybox is an established technical term) by your reasoning PC users with Sky broadband could get it confused with BSkyB products or services so Sky would be entitled to sue me.
No, by my reasoning it all depends on the context of the use. Sounds like a very interesting case.
> I don't accept this argument that they are entitled to take a common and ancient word like 'sky' and appropriate it.
But they have done no such thing. You can use the word "Sky" to your heart's content without their permission. Authors can use it in books -- hey, they can even use it in titles. The producers of the film "Skyfall" were not sued, obviously.
Furthermore, being a wealthy company has nothing to do with it. You can take out a trademark, if you like. Takes some time and some legal fees, but not massive wealth and you don't need to be a company. A student at my university took out a trademark on "21st Century Fox". (True story. Made lots of money.)
All trademark law does is prevent confusion among customers. And customers were confused: Sky customer service were getting calls from customers asking about Skydrive. Remember, most people don't set up their own PCs and routers and so on. People are given a PC with a Sky broadband connection, a Sky Go service, and a Skydrive on it. Conflating them is hardly a stupid mistake.
And there's no point viewing Microsoft as victims in this just 'cause they lost the case. Trademarks work both ways: Microsoft have been prevented from being associated with BSkyB's next major fuck-up.
If you want to see a really good example of how all this works, look up the history of the Apple vs Apple case, another common everyday word that's a trademark. Neither company owns the word "Apple", only its commercial use in certain clearly defined contexts.
The thing about the rootkit fiasco was that it was symptomatic of the structural problem with the firm itself. In the 80s, they decided to buy up record and film companies -- made sense at the time: become a one-stop shop for media and the gadgets to play that media on. Little did they know that record companies and tech companies were going to become bitter enemies. Some firms have resolved that dichotomy. Sony haven't. What the rootkit made clear was that their tech arm is in thrall to their media arm, and will willingly cripple their own products -- and even go so far as to vandalise their customers' property -- if Sony Records tells them to.
And the rootkit wasn't a one-off. Around the same time, I spent an entire afternoon fixing my best friend's laptop. It was broken because he'd plugged his Sony mobile phone into the USB port and it had sloppily edited the registry, disabling the DVD-drive. Fuck's sake.
So, until they sell off their media bastards, I won't buy Sony digital stuff. (I'll buy their headphones. They make good headphones, and they don't contain code.)
> Although Surface revenue more than doubled since the first quarter, it still accounted for just $893m of the total. Rather, the lion's share of the Hardware division's $1.9bn revenue ...
Er, what? 893m is 47% of 1.9bn. Surely better wording would have been something like:
Surface revenue more than doubled since the first quarter, and now accounts for nearly half of the Hardware division's revenues.
I keep reading people on here saying that an Office 365 subscription is terrible value. I don't get it. I needed Excel on my own machine for a few weeks, for a brief spell of working from home. I paid a few quid a month for Office 365 for about three months. Then I cancelled, with no hassle whatsoever. If I need it again, I can renew, with no hassle whatsoever. And that price covered all the computers in my house, not just one. And, while outside the subscription, the software still sits on my machine and allows me to open and read (but not edit) Office files for free. What an absolute bargain.
True, but that slowness would be offset by the taking of continuous readings. Fingerpricks which give you a more up-to-date reading but which only happen six or so times a day versus slightly behind-the-curve tear-duct readings which happen every second? No contest.
> They have never had difficulty in maintaining their diabetes after their recent "training" that the NHS provided
As far as you know. Not everyone talks about it all the time. In my experience, diabetics, like everyone else, prefer to get on with their lives, and telling everyone about every hypo is a way of making their life all about the diabetes. Further, the standard NHS training you refer to is a way of keeping it broadly under control and stopping you dropping dead, but is far from perfect and doesn't even aim to be: if followed really really well, it will enable you to keep your blood sugar below 10 most of the time, whilst a normal person's would be at a steady 5(ish). And most people aren't that good -- obviously: if all it took to successfully treat diabetes was a quick training course, no-one would be bothering with research like this, or with developing the various other superior training courses such as DAFNE. Add to that complicating factors like the effect antibiotics and steroids and other medicines can have on your blood sugar, medicines which counteract insulin, and the extreme danger of getting a vomitting virus while there's still active slow-release insulin in your system, and it's an extremely difficult disease to maintain.
You say that your friends' training was recent, so I'm guessing they're not fully au fait with it all yet. It's quite normal for diabetics to go through a period of denial after diagnosis, which is hardly surprising, as they've just been told that their life expectancy has dropped.
As others have said above, the real boon of this will be continuous data curves. Connect it to an insulin pump, and you'd have a pretty bloody good fake pancreas.
Medicine is not short of people with chronic life-threatening diseases who are willing to volunteer to try new treatments. There are people out there with beta products in their hearts and brains. People have beta surgery.
The key thing about this product for type-1 diabetics isn't that it sits on your eye (urgh!) but that it doesn't pierce the skin. They'll leap at this.
That is interesting, and quite odd.
> you're forcing a swap-out of the paused programs, and of parts of the running programs & OS as well.
OK, but if closing an app doesn't really close it, then this should be the same regardless. And my experience is that it isn't: closing apps makes a difference.
As I've said elsewhere, I have a couple of such criticisms of 8 myself -- why can't we create an ad-hoc wi-fi network any more without running a bloody custom batch file? But, as you can see throughout this thread, that's got nothing to do with it. The overwhelming majority of people who hate Windows 8 just want their old Start menu back and tiles to be banned, and that's it. They may say things like "Why can't Microsoft just give us choice?" but then they also downvote me when I suggest that, if MS must bring back the Start menu, could they please make it optional.
> Arguments such as claiming that things were just as easy to use, that Windows 8 provided the exact same user experience as 7, or at least could be made to do that. Well, in the latter case it couldn't without the help from 3rd party software (think Stardock).
I've not seen anyone say that 8 priovides the exact same user experience as 7. Why would anyone say that? They're different UIs. Obviously.
As for Stardock, I always hated the Start menu -- I came to Windows from Macs in the min-Nineties, found it clunky and annoying and fiddly then, and never thought it improved with age. I've been quite surprised by how many people apparently loved the damn thing. Funny old world.
Anyway, I find Windows 8 preposterously easy to use. Took me minutes to pick it up. That's the only reason I like it. I have sod-all time on my hands, and wouldn't like anything that wasted my time forcing me to learn how to use it before I could get on with what I actually want to do, whether it was new or old. And I hated iOS, even when it was new.
Some people are just going to have to accept that different people have different opinions. But they're finding it really REALLY hard, and prefer to cope with my bizarre claim to liek Windows 8 by accusing me of bribery or idiocy or lying or just anything rather than that I might actually enjoy using it, just like I say I do.
> the reason Windows 8 starts programs so fast, is because it never closes them. When you close a program in Windows 8, it is minimized and the UI hidden.
I use Ableton Live, which uses pretty much all the machine's resources when running at full tilt. If your explanation is correct, can you explain why it makes so much difference to performance when I close apps -- either closing everything else to stop Ableton hiccupping or closing Ableton to allow Netflix to run?
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