Posts by Buster

We should realise that, while we think of ourselves as users, as far as advertisers are concerned we are a collection of commodities, and to Google, nothing more than AI training serfs training AIs' so that Google can further, and more efficiently, exploit us. Happy Monday!

Virtual whelk stall for sale - one careful but skint owner.

US tech companies had a market of hundreds of millions on their doorstep with little international competition and instead of direct state aid, the US government give them a pass on copyright and regulation to turn the users into serfs. So the UK will be trying to emulate them with most domestic UK users invested in non-UK platforms, the EU in a hostile posture (this has been the case for decades), the US in a protectionist mode, US and EU lawmakers looking to regulate and tax local income.

Not hopeful.

While a Gateway coloured box, that seems never to get thrown out, haunts the less frequented corners of the loft, my daughter still uses the speakers that came with it in her own home.

An image can only do so much and if you want an image to create the context without referring to already established tropes and at stock prices good luck there. I am a photographer and when of the clock and talking to people in business they will ask why is there no business stock photography they can use which is UK style-specific I have to point out that the US has 50 odd markets plus Canada while the UK does not. In EU terms there are style differences which make that market difficult. The real issue is that if you want to have good stock you can use you need to pay for a shoot or create a market by paying what the US pay for good level stock. Most UK business who use stock images, paid or otherwise, tech sector as well, are transmitting to the world how cheap they are.

Root

The root of the problem is that Youtube/Google exposed the user to legal action by having the default mode as broadcast to the world rather than share with family and friends which was the intention of the user. Youtube/Google wants all the benefits of being a publisher without the risks and the creative work of producing content, treating creators with contempt -- as in effect serfs.

Google = "the companies dominating the space". More like colonising so much of the internet that it becomes a form of imperialism where they cannibalise economic activity in order to create channels to feed money to themselves, starving local, regional and national economies of resources. At the same time turning creative workers into serfs creating the content they need to run advertising over and the rest into nothing more than consumer drones to exploit at every level and in every posable way.

The cold hard economic benefit of cultural artefacts that have not been digitised is that to see and experience them you have to get of your shiny arse and pay to get to them. Then you get an unmediated experience that cannot be blown up or reduced to fit a screen with texture and colour range that is not limited by technology. Rarely is flat art all that flat so however well lit a reproduction is, it can only ever be a singular reference. Scale is one of the most important choices an artist makes and in a way everything that follows is bound up in that decision. It may seem arty farty but if you value seeing your favourite film in a cinema it is not all that different. Mind you it may be a digitally enhanced version that is just not the same.......

Warning. Sometimes there will be an emotional event that will be hard to describe.

The original reports kicked up a minor shit storm in the 3D printing community (some of whom are makers though not "The Maker" as far as I know) largely because the initial and secondary reporting media jumped on the "3d printer" angle because it generates clicks and thus traffic and not because it might be reasonable to wait and find out what actual happened using all that sexy CSI science stuff. I am surprised that CSI wherever have not included additive manufacturing processes in there storylines because surely the first question any detective worth their salt should ask is "where is the 3D printer responsible for this carnage". Maybe the makers of CSI have a firmer grip on reality as well as a huge stock of meaningful pauses.

There is already an open source 3D printer on the way that can print in four colours and more.

http://prusaprinters.org/original-prusa-i3-mk2-multi-material-upgrade-release/#_ga=1.69159447.748668875.1472122440

While at the moment it is four individual unmixed colours there is the possibility of mixing colours on the fly in the future. CMKY is a bit optimistic because there is no way that just mixing secondary colours with black, in effect as pigments, are going to produce an acceptable gamut without white. To get the sort of gamut that designers would need there would need to be a few more pigments as well possibly as many as nine in total.

So there is your lock in system because to step up to another supplier you would have to dump the unused HP stock including the rarely use extra ones. Then of course we are not talking grams here it will be environmentally sealed 5 Kg capacity cartridges.

Cook!

You don't have to heat up Soylent Green it tastes just as good cold and plumbed directly to your room.

US business has refined Stockholm syndrome as a HR policy to the extent it has become a national ideology. Looking at some of the remarks here it seems to be catching.

Considering San Francisco is one of the most liberal cities in the US the city government has done SFA about mental health issues, substance abuse and homelessness in 40 year in my experience of traveling and working there. These issues seems to have become a part of the furniture, that like most US cities, just becomes invisible as people learn not to go to places and not to see stuff. There is a enormous number of people who as civilians help out and for most it is a real thing and for some it is a sort of good-person-kudos tourism trip. But there is a political and cultural acceptance that the unfortunate are the victims of the system, part of the Hobbesian contract and to some extent a warning and an element of social control.

It us just that SF tolerates and does not harass, move on and ghettoize in the way that they do where Justin comes from. And there will never be a disruptive tech solution because there is no place to insert a profit taking layer.

Journalists are supposed to be witnessing and reporting on what goes on in the world and therefore should not be stuck at their desks. Too many of our quality papers rely on rehashed, repurposed reports from other newspapers and press releases with a light sprinkling of what might pass as real journalism if you did not look too closely. The main index of how sedentary journalism has become is the acknowledgement on the photographs. If its PA it could have something to do and related in time with the story. If its Corbis, Alamy, Rex or some other stock agency then the chances are that the image could have been taken at any time in the past and is chosen to suit the bias of the paper. The Telegraph have used a photograph of a monolithic slab of flats in south London to "illustrate" a story on social housing at the other end of the country even though the flats in the photograph were knocked down years before and don't bear any relation to present conditions anywhere in the country.

WTFisitium

Whereditgoium

Ifyoudon'tpostascreenshotitdidnothappenium

Trollinghardium

No shit Sherlock

The EU bods fall for some half baked idea dreamed up by Google glove puppets and their brainless meat bots that sounds like something the EU should be behind. EU bods start bleating on about Geoblocking as usual without a clue of how the AV markets work and how difficult it is to get a script made into a film and the economics of the multitude of national industries across Europe. EU Bod crap themselves on mass when they discover what a straw man Geoblocking is and how it would fuck up the EU wide film industries.

Cue next "crisis/problem of copyright"..........................

Not unlike the Orphan Works problem that was not so much a problem as a minor issue that could be used to mobilise anti copyright lobby groups. So the UK has an OW scheme which while has many problems (It is run by the IPO nuf said) it requires minimum effort by a prospective user and the payment of a nominal licence fee. It has allowed a number of publishers to cash in but as for the release of all the masses of pent up Orphan Works that will have such a massive impact on internet and mass culture SFA. This is because it is competing with free and anyway that was not the purpose because the purpose is to give the anti copyright walkers a sniff of blood.

Me! No, I am not Sara Connor.

Honest father, I was searching for "rack storage solution".

Believing in your product is for losers

It is no surprise that Twitter has not been able to harvest the sort of user information that would allow it to target advertising more directly to users. Twitter having a limited character count lends it self to condensed messages that have little or no extraneous information from which to harvest user information. The way that Twitter is used to fanboy, propagate jokes and hash tag punnery is less about things as it is about people makes it more difficult again to harvest the advertising life blood of internet entrepreneurship.

But of course the only thing that matters is puffing up you concept enough to generate the most sellable value and palming it off to some deep pockets -- believing in your product is for losers.

Ripper!

Not only great work but excellent communication of the science.

Missing the point.

Film production companies rarely distribute and certainly not in all the markets (countries) in the EU. They rely on licencing the distribution rights to distributers and so have the liquidity to carry on producing films without having to wait to get all the money in. Distributers act as a sort of buffer smoothing out the risk and making sure that the folk who make the films, so many people think that they should not pay for but really, really want, keep getting made more frequently than they would if the film companies had to wait for all the dosh from the showings. The distributers take a load of risk but also add value because they know their markets and how to get the best returns for their market that often has a lot to do with just when is best time to release a film into the mix of their own local production. No blockbusters when 90% of your audience is at the beach for the month etc..

Its analogous to other cultural production that has a pan EU appeal.

Buy a tech gift and you are indentured to be technical support for that and any subsequent device for the rest of your life. Not just the tech support who at the other end of a phone can bale and gets paid but the tech support who deals with the rage, recriminations and the emotional fallout in fucking person.

Even normal shit like updates slowing the system and badly built websites that take an age to load, ISP outages and the eternal fuckup that is Trusteer Rapport that periodically gets installed are your fault. FFS spend an hour every so often clearing shit out of your partners system and leaving it on long enough for updates to complete will add years to you life and sanity.

Bulshit..... I thought all the world resources of BS had be used up by Interstellar.

It's Transactional Cost Economics

One of the economists advising the Hargreaves (we don't have a clue but we will pretend anyway) Review was an expert on TCE. Since most of the economics of the exercise involved plucking figures out of the air, ignoring how the economics of the creative industries worked and was there to brown nose the "vision" that David Cameron had when he was so impressed by visiting Google, it lacked any real basis. So having an expert on something was at least one thing that could be pointed at and applauded.

TCE is all about understanding and reducing the costs of transactions mostly between large businesses and working out how all the businesses involved can benefit. The HUB is the outcome of that expertise and is based on the need to simplify the difficulties of obtaining licences for specific pieces of work and to solve the complaint from unauthorised users that it so difficult to get permission to use copyright works and that is why there is so much infringement. The trouble is that what the HUB is supposed to solve is not so much a problem as an excuse. It may prove useful in making some types of works more available for licencing and provide one less excuse for works listed on it but it is not going to change the fundamental problem.

The Hargreaves (we don't care what you say we are going to do what David wants anyway) Review only plucked one straw from the bundle that is TCE in that the HUB should provide a simple easy mechanism for obtaining a licence. What it failed to take into account is the cost to police and enforce the licences. It seems that to have a creative business that is profitable the cost of running it increase because there is no point in licencing something at a price that you cannot afford to enforce.

Capita.......Smart anything.......Oh dear now I have to recalibrate my Ironic-shit-O-meter.

You need to go back to the 30's

According to this:

http://tropicsofmeta.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/feuer-narrative-form.pdf

As early as the 30's radio manufacturers in the US saw TV as a way of selling families to advertisers. They sold the concept of Public Benefit to legislators who were then convinced that broadcast TV with programs interrupting the advertising stream would be a good thing. Well as least they paid for and created the content from the advertising income.

What is the point of protest.....

While this was an unfocused damp squid as Anonymous events tend to be and dulled the keen mind of the reporter to the point where their brain almost shut down leaving only the sub Daily Fail part of the brain working, without some people fighting for our current freedoms we would not have them. So just slagging off people as the usual suspects only betrays the writers frustration at being helpless and impotent in so many ways. You where there, you looked at stuff, you applied your prejudices, you failed to ask why or show any insight, then you wrote about yourself. Sad really.

It's about the beam stupid

The resistance to bending is dependent on the Second Moment of Area of the cross section of the object being used as a beam. It is a power 4 relationship so reducing the cross section of a simple square beam by 10% reduces the resistance of the beam to bending by 34%. Compound the dumbassery by failing to understand that the distribution of material as far away as possible from the neutral axis can improve resistance to bending in the same power 4 relationship and you have the IPhone 6.

Watch out Google. It will be the “Sun wot did IT”………….

Oh good, tax fail Google get to appear to do something to boost tech skills of the young through the most populist organ to the demographic least likely to be boosted. Even less likely on Merseyside where the Sun is not welcome. What has Google got against Liverpool?

Google can now get polishing its philanthropic credentials, to the extent that they becomes entirely composed of shine. And its friends in the Government can claim to be doing something without ever having to understand the question because they have the best brains in the tech world to do that for them. They must be ...look at how rich the are......... and they are American.....and they pay SFA tax....now that is really clever.

Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 excludes copyright

The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 specifically excludes copyright from its protection. Why should producers of IP, who are mostly self employed individuals, not be protected by this legislation which covers every other aspect of commercial activity when they are such an important part of our economy. This was brought to the attention of the Hargreaves review, the IPO and the minster/s in charge and it was ignored.

They are missing a stroke. All they need is number plates that change to foreign/diplomatic/Chris Huhne’s automatically when exceeding the local speed limit.

Since sarcasm depends on Irony and since the sarcasm detector will be located in the USA it would need to be shielded from the intense irony flux by some sort irony proof Faraday Cage for it to detect anything.

MoJ could not.....

find their arse if it was tagged.

The BB rider that photos of the band taken at a gig should only be used for specific editorial purposes is slight overkill, as a non-editorial use would require their specific permission anyway. BBs appear to be just as much up themselves and deluded about their cultural signibficance as most other bands which plays against the irrevent posture of their music. These days many bands demand that professional photographers are only allowed access to gigs on the proviso that they only are allowed to photograph a short segment of the gig and that all photographs must be handed over for the bands sole use. It makes the BBs look like towers of enlightenment.

Go to any old style camera shop and you will find a box with cameras for 1£ that can be adapted for pinhole.