Posts by frank ly 6112 posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"Having given up on getting a cut of the transaction fee the mobile operators are now hoping ..."
Why should the telco operators expect to get a cut of transactions? That would be like UPS getting a cut of the value of the contents of any parcels they delivered. Keep them as dumb pipes because they have a difficult enough job doing that properly.
Your story does not make easy reading and is very confusing. Is there any way you could explain this 'scam' better, because it doesn't make sense to me, not as you've written it. (Note: I'm in the UK and if I was selling puppies, there is no way I'd ship one abroad so your example had my barriers up immediately.)
The examples given (time shifting of broadcast works, for later private viewing, as a service) have nothing to do with 'cloud computing', except that the service just happens to use the internet and networked storage, somehow and somewhere. These particular examples have been thrashed out in the courts in various forms over the years, with various technologies 'in the dock'.
I would suggest that this 'study' is being used (badly) as a justification and a stepping stone to modification of copyright law and/or the control of copyright law, by people with vested interests in seeing this happen.
"Unless you modify copyright law, the bright and shiny future of cloud computing (and your cut of a multi-billion pound/euro industry will be threatened" Yeah, right.
Also, for large aircraft, there are ATC systems which have collision prediction and flagging tools to alert ATC staff; and large aircraft fly on predetermined routes at predetermined times. When they converge at at airport, there are established systems staffed by experienced people to monitor and direct them. The PAV will not have these systems (apparently) and so it will be a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult to predict/control and avoid accidents.
As for cars: In the town where I live, there are cars for hire that will take you where you want to go and you don't need to drive. They have built in AI that understands human speech (usually). They are called taxis.
Steady on Jon. You're talking about old fashioned analogue technology, which was replaced by the new digital methods to avoid all the problems with fidelity and copying distortion that went with that old fashioned and discredited technology. And you'd need another computer to convert and record the first computer's audio output; it gets silly.
When I first started running around the internet unsupervised, at the tender age of 40, I was shocked, saddened and annoyed by trolling and griefing in various places. After a while, I developed coping strategies and recognised behavioural patterns and markers that alerted me to the type of people I was dealing with. Now, it's water off a duck's back.
Maybe it's good for children to see trolling and griefing on the internet before they encounter the real thing in the real world.... develop their recognition and coping techniques at an early stage?
"Business Secretary Vince Cable offered his "assurances" that future changes to the law in these areas would be subject to "proper parliamentary scrutiny" and that, in practice, the "order-making" powers would be used to ..."
Oh yes, you can always believe politicians when they tell you what new laws will be used for and how there will be proper scrutiny if they are modified.
I thought that parody and pastiche were already protected under copyright law, as was a 'reasonable' level of copying for genuine comment and criticism?
"...most of Google+ activity is in private circles."
So, do you spend your evening jerking from one circle to the next, or can you take part in more than one circle at a time? (I do have a Google+ account but nobody has invited me to join a circle. I was thinking it might help if I made myself visible.)
I'm not. 'Birth' as a veb is often used for the physical act of giving birth, e.g. as in 'birthing pool'. The verb 'bear' has the implied sense of carrying along a burden (joyfully we hope) during pregnancy and also supporting a child after the moment of it's birth.
As such, for inanimate objects such as stars, to say that a galaxy is 'birthing stars' seems fine to me.
It's a standard way of talking about visual records. When you show a picture of a family gathering that was taken 10 years ago, do you say, "At the time this picture was taken, my brother was eating lots of cake", or do you say, "There's my brother, eating lots of cake."?
Ok... set up and use icannstuff@mydomain.com, filter everything to go to spam unless it's from icann.com (or whatever they use). This is the technique I use to get rid of 99.99% of spam sent to my 'mydomain' email addresses. I also use yahoo adresses and autoforward them to a collector address at my 'mydomain' email address, with similar filtering techniques.
"...you can make your software speak English like a butch German woman."
Whatever appeals to you AC :) For the child-user market, I'd think that the parents (and the children) would prefer a synthesised voice that sounded like a child. It may be possible to do this with clever signal processing or existing library modification. Otherwise you'll need some volunteer children to get speech samples from, to produce a 'better' sounding output from the speech library.
Apple are simply protecting themselves, as you'd expect them to do. I have sympathy for the developers of this marvellous application and cannot understand why the patent defense of 'obvious to anyone with a bit of knowledge and imagination' cannot be used. I would think that the target market is not very visible, well known or profitable; hence the dearth of affordable 'solutions'.
Enter FOSS..... A small group of developers should be able to turn out a very nice application along these lines, running on Android or Windows (for general accessibility) and make it available as a free download. (The only 'tricky' bit I can think of is the speech library - but that can be produced by volunteers if a free one isn't available.)
Structurally, 'laptop' may have the same number of syllables as 'lappie', but the double consonant 'pt' is more difficult to say since it requires a more complex lip and tongue movement at the transition. For casual speech (and casual writing), this is the reason I prefer to use 'lappie', 'deskie', 'tabbie' and 'mobbie'.
(Note: 'mobbie' may have one more syllable than the 'mobe' alternative but the longer 'ie' sound at the end allows relaxed vocalisation as part of a more natural breath pattern.)
Language changes and we should take advantage of increased efficiencies and comfort afforded by these advances.
"here is your blood - it's a good idea to keep it inside"
In 'O'-level biology (early '70s), we used to prick our thumbs with lancets to get blood samples for microscopic examination and demonstrations of blood typing. I still have the scars at the base of my left thumbnail. As a result of this early exposure to blood and pain, I can perform minor operations on my own body when it gets penetrated by wood splinters and metal fragments, with no bother at all apart from the ocassional swearword.
Kids nowadays eh?
I can't see why FOOBAR is recursive like GNU (but in a better way??). If I've missed something obvious then do laugh at me by all means, but please try to explain it in a way that is clear.
(I'm aware of the use of Foo and Bar as nonce words in programming examples.)
((I'm also aware that I may have jumped into a hole.))
"... and have little to do with science, and in which science is powerless.. "
But 'science' never claimed to have 'power' in dealing with moral and existential questions; wheras religion claimed to have ultimate power to answer questions such as whether the sun revolved around the earth, or vice versa. The religious method of 'proving' assertions involved harassment, torture and execution of dissenters. While they were busy advancing these religious theories of astronomy (and the vitally important theory about eating meat on Fridays), did they consider the moral or existential aspects of what they were doing? Or, is it the case that morality has changed as far as religion is concerned and so the religious people have changed their methods?
I suggest that the 'religious method' changes the fundemental principles of its own beliefs in order to make itself appear valid within whatever society it exists. This would be the equivalent of scientists changing the speed of light, or the mass of the proton, to make science more relevant to society. As we know, this is impossible, because scientists don't create their own fairytale world.
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