Posts by Matt Siddall
88 posts • joined Thursday 26th July 2007 16:39 GMT
Re: I'm confused
"How do you work that out?
If no one is paying taxes now, it's a level playing field (sale price - costs).
If everyone pays taxes it's a level playing field (sale price - tax - costs).
In fact it gives smaller companies an advantage."
Not quite. If all companies have to deal with 9,600 separate taxing districts, there's a certain overhead involved. The costs of preparing for such a thing are fixed (get lists of tax rates, setup software, etc) so someone like Amazon would hardly notice it, but it could be a massive chunk of the profitability of a smaller firm.
Generally speaking, regulations favour the bigger companies.
Posted in British bookworms deem Amazon 'evil'
Re: What sort of cretin buys a Amazon Swindle anyway?
"THEN they discover they've bought into proprietary DRM-saturated Hell."
How do they discover this? When all the books they buy from amazon automagically appear on the device? When the books they buy elsewhere can be fairly easily converted and transferred to the device by plugging it in to the computer, or by sending an email?
If Amazon prevented you from loading your own books onto the kindle and made it so that every book on their had to be purchased from them, I'd agree with you. But they don't.
Posted in British bookworms deem Amazon 'evil'
It's not even locked in really
Use something like Calibre, and download books from anywhere you want - Calibre can convert them to kindle format.
I can particularly recommend Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/
Also, it's very handy being able to email books onto the kindle. My dad has one, and when he's run out of books, he calls me and we talk about what I have and what he fancies reading next, then I just send an email and it appears on his device as if by magic. It really is easy!
agreed
Why is it ok when those working for a private sector company spill the beans on their dodgy activities (whistle blowing) but not when someone working for the government does the same?
Re: Anyone else getting tired..
Not that I'd ever encourage anyone to buy apple, but:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/01/30/the-apple-boycott-graphically-explained/
The point being
If the people involved were terrorists, then there might be an actual danger to someone, so justifying dawn raids, etc. In this case, surely the purpose would be served just as well by the police showing up at 10am and showing some degree of respect to those arrested - after all, "innocent unless proven guilty" ?
no need to hack
You can do it completely legally (well - it might be in violation of Twitter's T&Cs) by just creating a new account with a name that's an awfully like that of the person you want to get into trouble.
and once again
they make it so that the pirated versions are better than the officially purchased versions - can't they see why this is a problem?
It is important to be precise
Technically speaking there is a cost for the replication, be it in clock cycles, bandwidth, power consumption, or whatever. By your argument, since human beings can be replicated infinitely, they too have no value.
It is also worth considering the cost of information, and the value of relaxation. Value is a very subjective thing.
Root, Cyanogenmod and S2E gets around the space problems - you can format part of your SD card and have the phone treat it as internal memory and use it for storing apps.
I'd say so - it's so much more customisable than the sense interface, and runs really well.
Repeat after me
Jobs are a cost, not a benefit!
Next thing you know
What's the betting that this will be installed at the houses of Parliament. They're already adept at pissing away our money...
I think the main issue is that we have a significant amount of transfers within the EU. The home counties pay a lot more in tax than they receive in services, and a number of places receive a lot more than they pay.
So it could work across the whole EU if Germany were willing to give large chunks of cash to places like Greece, Italy, Portugal, etc. Oddly enough, the Germans are not overjoyed with this idea...
<pedant>
It's not feasible for the govt to take 100% of the GDP as taxes. Even after Labour's stealth taxes and the like, we're still only at about 50% here, and the Greeks are well known for under-collecting.
But even if the Greek govt could collect 50% of the GDP as tax, then it would be like someone with an income of £10k owing £32k.
According to http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/48/27/41498733.pdf the 2006 %age of GDP taken as tax revenue was 31.3 (2006 is the latest I could see, but I didn't look that hard). at 31.3%, it's the equivalent of someone earning £10k who owes £51.44k. So the original statement was actually pretty close...
</pedant>
If MW3 were under £15, then you might have a point
I was wondering
I'll preface this with the fact that my knowledge of quantum physics and relativity are both rather shaky, but I did have this thought:
Given the references to the Supernova, in which case the Neutrinos travelled 160k or so light years and arrived 3 hours before the light itself; and comparing with the OPERA experiment where the difference was relatively bigger (scaled up to 160k light years, the OPERA result would have meant the Neutrinos arriving about 4 years ahead of the light); I have to wonder if matter plays a part.
Hypothesis: Neutrinos are able to travel slightly faster than c through matter (whether by quantum tunnelling or some other method).
This would mean that the Neutrinos in OPERA would travel slightly faster than C for a significant part of their journey, whereas those from the supernova would travel faster than C for a very small part of their journey (as there's not a lot of matter in space - but there is a little space dust and the like). So then the effect would be more pronounced in OPERA than it was with the supernova - as observed.
I've put a post on my blog about it that lays it out perhaps a little more clearly (http://thoughtsonmorality.blogspot.com/2011/10/those-neutrinos.html)
Anyone know if this is possible, or measurable?
I thought the issue was that Apple had refused to license the patents previously. What happens if they can't agree terms now? Can Samsung just be unreasonable (one meeeelllion pounds!) ? I'm guessing not, given what the judge said, but in that case who decides what's fair?
Do Apple just get to pay the same as anyone else who's licensed it? And if so, what if they refuse?
There were rather a lot of pebbles just a few systems over, roughly where it used to be...
Charitably?
Given that our sun's diameter is about 870,000 miles, I really don't see how 0.5 million is a charitable guess. I'd say err on the side of caution (i.e. to downplay your results) and go for 1m each, at which point they're only 21 diameters apart.
Bear in mind also, as others have noted, that unless you're viewing them from a perpendicular direction, they will appear to be closer than this (hence eclipses being possible).
against my better judgement...
I've just upvoted this post.
I think it's a work of art, and must be a very carefully crafted troll. Observe the lack of punctuation, capitalisation and grammar. Look at words like dnagers and cuz. The long run on sentence. But above all else, the implication that world war 2 was caused by a computer game.
This is a work of art, and should be recognised as such. I applaud you, NomNomNom!
Posted in Google+ succumbs to Facebook game envy
Two things
First of all, the article could perhaps be a little clearer. On G+ you have 4 separate areas at present. These are:
- Stream - where new posts from people in your circles come in
- Pictures - where you can see pics from people in your circles (pics also appear in the stream when first shared)
- Profile - where you can sort out your own profile and how the world+dog sees you
- Circles - where you can manage your circles.
Games is to be an additional area, and any game related information will be confined to the Games area - so you won't get farmville or vampire spam clogging up your stream - you'll have to go to the games tab to get it.
The other thing is that a lot of people are still waiting for an invite. I put an app on the google market that lets people submit an email address to request an invite and I've invited over 7,000 people to date. The app works through php (although all invites have to be sent manually due to google's t&cs) and anyone still needing an invite can request one by going to http://zelazny.co.uk/links/gemail.php?email=whatever@domain.com - just replace whatever@domain.com with your email address. You'll get one email straight away to confirm that I have your email address, and then you'll get an invite within 24 hours.
Alternately, grab the app from https://market.android.com/details?id=appinventor.ai_zelazny.Gplus_invite (there's also a paid version available, but I figured most people would want the free one).
Posted in Google+ succumbs to Facebook game envy
actually
It looks like they're taking that into consideration. You don't get game updates sent to your main stream, so crap like farmville won't be spamming you every 5 minutes. You only see that stuff if you go to the games tab, which presumably those who want to avoid the gaming will not...
What's to stop them
using robots.txt ?
Posted in X-COM UFO: Enemy Unknown
Psi was great, but caused a lock on at least one occasion
If you took control of an alien, you couldn't access their inventory. But, you could open the inventory of one of your men, then use the "next trooper" button to move to the alien.
iirc they had a single clip of ammo, but if you removed it another one appeared. This did cause a problem on at least one occasion, as I clicked on the ammo but didn't actually have enough APs to move it to another location. A new one had appeared and I couldn't put it back, so had to reboot the computer.
Never figured out if you could use it to get infinite ammo - but I did always make a point of having any aliens I controlled drop their weapons...
@What About
"Putting all these patent trolls, companies and lawyers onto a deserted island and let them slug it out."
Already been done. It's called America
I guess they've figured it out
The only 100% safe forum is one that's not on the web...
Posted in Amazon's anti-iPad arises 'in October'
Yeah, but
Thing is, it only applies to things that were installed via the Market. If you install something from the apk downloaded from the web, then they can't touch it. The idea is that if someone starts distributing malware through the android market, they can remove it from people's phones (and thus avoid any liability).
If someone goes and installs it themselves, then Google won't touch it, and won't really care that much (as it's not their problem).
And incidentally, you can use things like Titanium Backup to remove the market link so that even if there is a recall notice, you won't lose the app.
All this "google can take things from my phone" stuff is a little overblown - all they can remove is things that you installed through their market.
beer
through a straw is the safest way
Title
At which point you could use:
Lego Operative Hurled Aloft Naked...
Just as a thought
What about the Kinect for horizon detection? It has some impressive sensors/cameras in there, and can be hooked up to anything that can use USB. Get someone to figure out some drivers to run Kinect on a mobile and you've got quite a potent package...
Doesn't have to be real
Robert Heinlein described a bed filled with water as a relaxing way for a wounded man to recover from his injuries (having some experience of medical problems himself) and this prevented the patenting of the waterbed, as it constituted prior art.
Spock
Spock was fully capable of lying. He just mostly chose not to as it would not make logical sense to do so.
See for example the city on the edge of forever and this side of paradise.
not sure about this
There's this: http://current.com/news-and-politics/88858559_help-them-pensioner-jailed-2-years-writing-to-grandson.htm
But there's not a lot to back it up. I can't view the youtube clip from here, but I'd expect there to be rather more coverage :S
as opposed to
Rather than leaving it as it is now, where the companies can just spend the money on the overseas businesses without having to give even 5% of it to Uncle Sam?
nonsense
Of course it's not. What they're saying is more like:
"We've got stacks of cash outside the US that we could be putting to use inside the US, but it's not worth bringing it into the country as the govt takes so much of it. We'd rather just leave it outside, and spend it there, unless you want to lower the tax rates..."
They're offering the government a way to make more money, not less.
more like
Actually, it's more like they're saying:
"hey, we have all this money overseas that we've already paid local taxes on and don't fancy paying even more tax so that we can bolster the US economy. If you let us bring it in to America at a low tax rate we might use it to buy some Beamers and shit which will be great for the economy."
kind of
at my company (the company I work for - sadly I don't own it), each computer has the same identity, which is the name of the company (or at least what the company was called when we got the computers, the name has changed twice since then), so it's not too useful to see "xxxx Consulting is in this file"
seems a bit pricy
1GB a month is not a lot, and the out of package data charges are - as always - eyewateringly steep. You say that it can be used to tether, but do so and your data use will go through the roof (and through the 1GB limit) quicker than you can say youtube.
Posted in Folder Organizer
Customiseable is good
but the big downside I can see with this is it's size. As it runs widgets, you can't put it on your SD card, and 5+ MB is a hefty chunk of internal memory. Otherwise looks good though...
Android emulator
Is monstrously slow, even on a relatively new 8 core machine, my phone is massively faster.
If they can make a faster version, count me in.
Re 85%
You lose 20% for having no apple logo, so it's actually a really really good phone :p
e-car grant?
I thought that the e-car grant was equal to a quarter of the retail price of the car, up to a maximum of £5k. In this case, you'd only get £1,672.50. Still means you get the car for just over 5k, instead of twice that from any other supplier, mind.
I'd think they'd be better off retailing it at 7.5k and giving three years battery rental free. The cost is the same overall, but people would be able to get nearly an extra £400 off the govt from the grant to put towards it.
Link to the computers on sale might be nice
http://www.ecycleonline.co.uk
not sure that it works
If they have to pay 2 Yuan to have the malicious app installed on the phone, then remove it for a payment of 2 Yuan, how are they making any money from it? Surely they'd lose money due to some people not having it removed, or taking the phone elsewhere to have it fixed...
Is it everyone?
I don't know about you guys, but I don't have any nude or compromising photos of myself... Seems that any time a celeb phone or email account gets hacked there's dodgy stuff on it.
If you don't want the photos getting out, don't take them? Or at least store them on an encrypted drive, not on gmail (don't get me wrong, I love my gmail account, but it's already being trawled to serve up ads, and how much do you trust the staff at google?).
Posted in London's Olympic clock claps out
Perfect metaphor for big government spending
or just the Olympics?
Original Desire on CyanogenMod
Just because I was curious, very similar to stock 2.2:
5712.6ms +/- 4.2%
can't be a gay and christian?
Sure you can. Jesus died for our sins - it'd be a bit of a waste if we all stopped sinning - he'd have died for nothing...
Everyone - it's your god-given duty (kinda) to sin as much as you can! Get to work!
So, let me get this straight...
"When she contacted the bank, she was told everything had been spent on Xbox Live, with 25 payments alone made in the last two months. In one month Brendan spent £350. His entire expenditure totalled £1087."
Presumably the one month in which he spent £350 was the highest spending, else why mention it? So he must have taken over 3 months to spend all the money, and she didn't notice anything wrong with her balance until all the cash ran out?
People really should be checking their credit card statements - what if someone cloned her card and only managed to spend £500 on it. She wouldn't have noticed? How many other people have had fraudulent activity on their cards and haven't noticed?
I could certainly see Microsoft refunding the money to her had she come forward within a month or so, saying that she didn't authorise it - but having let him play with all the goodies for at least 3 months (probably a lot more) I really don't see why they should refund anything. At best, they might offer to refund the last month of transactions as a goodwill gesture.
And didn't the kid realise what he was doing? I'd think he should be in a world of trouble right now...
