akadruid

I did the exact same thing at reusableimages.com a few years back, but gave up due to lack of traffic and a growing sense of being out of my league. The site just uses Yahoo image search now.

Flashing LEDs on bicycles are legal, as of October 2005, providing they are of a sufficent intensity. The actual law (The Road Vehicles Lighting (Amendment) Regulations 2005) can be read online here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2005/2559/contents/made

I suspect this must be a European thing then. I'm in London and I'd assumed that leaf blowers were a universal thing, and I had to google "supermarket bagger" - it seems like a weird gimmick, is this common?

No. It's never reasonable to prevent a record being made of the actions of a police officer.

In the case of undercover officers, it is reasonable in some cases to to hide the fact they are police officers.

I believe there are cases in which police may seek and should probably be granted the ability to obscure their identities, while still acting as uniformed officers, for specific operations. The Mexican police who took down a major drug lord recently all wore balaclavas and helmets in public, for this reason. This needs to be justified on a case by case basis or you will get abuse (like the cop who attacked Ian Tomlinson).

But in every case, their actions should be legal and legitimate. They should having nothing to hide.

It's worth mentioning that there is no point clicking on this link unless you happen to live in the United States.

You're right. I'm normally first in the Facebook-bashing line, but suggesting that Facebook should pay it's users because they provide network effects is like suggesting the phone companies should pay users for hosting terminals. Or the post office should pay you for having a letterbox.

In the long term, ugly, hard to use websites will loose. It can be a very long term in some cases. Just be patient.

You've got the nail on the head. Capatcha publishing sites are already weeding out the idiots who will jump through hoops to join and blog comment argument or whatever it is - now they can sell the idiots to the highest bidder. Even if they get more spam, the idiot just earnt them cold hard cash in exchange for the spam, and you can still go back to solving spam the non-capatcha way.

It's evil, but evil in a kind of clinically beautiful way. I'd say it stands a good chance of working in the short term too - like punch they monkey ads made a lot of money for some people back in the day

Also, the android Market is available in far fewer countries, and sometimes apps don't show up in different regions even when they have a Market there.

This is not considering the potential difference in disposable income between purchasers of £45/month iphones and £15-20/month androids

It's not just a U.S. thing. I'm a UK father of 3 small boys, and it's a given over here that you should be very wary of interation with any child unless you have some kind of relationship with their parent. It's somewhat relaxed where parents feel more comfortable; a zoo might qualify for that.

You're only considering one of the three parties; the spammer.

Party #2 is the spammee: "they can always unsubscribe" shows a callous and naive disregard for the depth of the problem. The spamee has incurred a small cost in time to deal with this particular spam; this may not seem much but soon multiplies; If the spammer is now dealing with tens of crap messages, on their mobile phone, during a ten minute lunch break, the spammers have just suceeded in breaking the spammee's email system. Completely.

Party #3 is the legimate email sender. Sending email is now so complicated that legimate mail users must delegate to ever more technically proficent third parties to deliver legitimate mail, and the deliverability of mail between consenting parties is compromised.

Whether or not they "subscribed" is irrelevant, due the number of ways people get "subscribed". What they actually wanted was the item they purchased online, or the service they are paying for, or whatever; not an inbox full of special offers.

Interestingly, this debate is about to blow up in a different area. The cost of access to the PSTN from disposable numbers is collapsing thanks to competition in the VOIP space, most PSTN terminals have zero filtering, and unlike email, the PSTN started being used for important stuff long before anyone started abusing it. Voice spam will be huge in 2011.

We're running HP-UX on PA-RISC and AIX on RS64. Don't know whether you can buy these architectures still, but these are real production machines in a datacentre.

This article argues seems to be suggesting that Google have a unique responsibility - almost as if they have somehow removed something that already existed.

I disagree with their fundamental premise that Google is "the world's last digital library". Google's demonstration that such a thing is actually possible removes one barrier to entry. They have also set a precedent which reduces the negotiation required for future projects.

The fact that Google has done a poor job (so far) on the metadata is something that's worth highlighting - but it's not a reason to curse the whole project. This is fixable, possibly even a transient issue. GBS is an entirely new resource, which scholars have not had before; if they find it unsuitable for scholarly research, perhaps they could continue to use their existing tools or work to improve it, rather than slam the effort as "A Disaster For Scholars". "A Useful Tool Which Still Needs Improvement" might not be as snappy but the The Chronicle Of Higher Education doesn't look like the Daily Mail either.

Unless you have a distinctive name, and the internet gets a lot better at remembering over the long term, there's still nothing to worry about.

Try finding anything from 10 years ago or for anyone named Smith, Jones, Taylor, or Patel. I'll bet that doesn't improve in the next ten years either.

Does anyone know if this affects Postini?

We've switched once already this month - our new office was assigned an IP by C&W business that is in the same block as thousands of Virgin home cable-modems, so we got blacklisted by Spamhaus and others. Management got quite twitchy so I moved all the outgoing email to go via our Postini account which was previously only filtering incoming. Don't fancy having to find a third option now.

Just noticed the historical chart at the bottom. It seems that practice of releasing updates is definitely increasing - at the beginning of the year, the average version was actually _decreasing_, as already obsolete 1.5 and 1.6 phones were presumably being sold faster than updates were being released. However, it does look like you're still likely to be left in the cold if you've got something other than a HTC or Motorola (particularly an LG - suckers!) or in some cases even if you live outside the US.

Also, that's a survey of the android market, which will be slightly skewed towards newer handsets (i.e. people who've had their android for a year probably have every app they might use already)

That's very interesting - 3 months ago it was just 27%, and Eclair has been out over 9 months.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/only-27-3-of-android-phones...

That's a pretty huge jump. Maybe we're seeing an attitude change for manufacturers already? I suppose some of them are now pushing their third generation of android handset and learning lessons from the second.

There's increasingly mainstream coverage of apps which are incompatible with almost every android phone out there - requiring 2.1 or even 2.2 like this does. I wonder how long it will take for manufacturers to take upgrades seriously? Some of them are still abandoning their handsets as soon as they go out the door.

I suspect many of the early adopters are now including this in their purchasing decision when they upgrade.

The thing that those 3 have something in common with their search engine and Adwords; they all inspired the same initial reaction: "Someone's finally fixed what's wrong with incumbant market players - this is a game changer". Do you remember what it was like in the days when spammed to death AltaVista, "2MB inbox" Hotmail, static image Multimap, clunky WinMobile and popups/animated gif banners were the kings? (Android is not quite the same, since the iPhone had pointed the way).

I've not seen that many software products which were so obviously disruptive; it's no wonder they became giant-killers. Facebook is the only other one I can think of.

On the other hand, some of their other big products have not be a huge success precisely they haven't been game-changers. Google Docs, for example, might be a good example of a web office suite; but it's hardly a game changer as far as office suites go, because it doesn't do some of the core things that people do daily with office suites. It was clear from the beginning that it would be a slow starter. Whereas Maps for example, you knew at the beiginning that nothing else could touch it

It's an ostentatiousness toy; I'm geniunely interested how it could function in any educational environment?

It doesn't seem strange to me that anything unique enough to be described as a hobby will have it's detractors. Even massively mainstream activities frequently attract meaningless dismissives: couch potato, exercise nut, more money than sense, and so on.

Humans are natural pattern matches and subscribe to a set of ideals; anyone that does not fit their pattern and forces them to think differently is going to cause defensiveness in some people; the least of which is simple dismissal.

On the other hand, it's great that society has progressed the stage where people are being rude about your hobby instead of violent because of your skin colour.

"Spend a penny" is British slang for urinate. It started with coin-operated toilets and continues precisely because pennies are no longer spent individually on anything.

actual announcement:

http://www.quakelive.com/#news/site_news/22

The same way you secure your wallet.

I can't imagine why anyone would leave their laptop / phone / other device lying around. I go out and about in London, and I don't see anyone doing this.

I suppose LAN parties are an exception, but properly organised large events have a policy of tagging all equipment coming in and checking it on the way out. I have not been to a small private event where people were allowed in without being known and vouched for by another attendee.

The cost model to this is proven - there are MMOs that operate this way already, with monthly subscriptions but no upfront cost. EVE Online works like this - you start with a free trial for 21 days, then pay for each 30 days of access to the server. There are optional boxsets, but with those you are essentially paying for the included 60 days of access and some physical items, rather than the game.

The "intellectual property" of art is a blip. For thousands of years, people have made art. Currently, we are in the odd situation where the is value in the idea alone, and the artists are not selling art, but selling instructions. It seems we're heading back towards the artists selling actual art again.

Frankly, I'm kind of on the fence about this. It seems like a nice idea, that one can build a business on selling ideas on the internet, and kind of callous that people no longer sufficently value it.

But then I suppose no-one worries how a verbal storyteller is to make a living in this age of cheap newspapers, or war painters in the age of digital photography. Sewing instruction salesmen seem destined to go the same way.

The argument that art will disappear without copyright has been comprehensively disproven. People have been infringing copyright on musical recordings with increasing efficiency for decades. If this argument were correct, the Top 40 would be the Top 5 by now, but it turns out there are currently more people creating more music than any time in history. Equally, by that argument, music would have been a rare oddity prior to copyright (it wasn't). Copyright, it seems, is useful to encourage the development of publishing businesses, but has a negative impact on the creation of art, primarly by muting the influnce of previous artists. The lower cost of distribution, brought on by technological change, is clearly a benefit to both artists and art lovers, but copyright in its current form is a net negative for society.

On the other hand, who cares if the middlemen get paid to distribute frozen copies of art, even if such distribution is to cheap to measure?

I think the debate is about the digital representation of the design. Obviously the art form has existed for far longer than copyright, let alone the internet. The design which is discussed in the linked article is called "Summer Blackwork" - Blackwork is a style popular in the 1500s and was described by Chaucer. Ironically, designs from the 1500s have largely not survived, due to the corrosive effect of the iron-based dye, and designs from today will will not survive 500 years either, due to the corrosive effect of modern laws.

These designs are unusually easy to copy. Unlike, say, a watercolour, it is simple to create an exactly identical copy (lossless copying) with Roman-era technology and limited skill. The "intellectual property" can be represented by an 80x80 bitmap (in the case of the design which is discussed in the linked article), with perhaps a few additional bits to provide some hints on different stitches or sequence.

Only in the past few years have people begun selling simple frozen data representations of these designs (without any physical product) long after the internet, mass production, modern copyright law and discussion - in fact largely after people begun freely sharing other commercial digital representations such as music and film. How someone can invest such a business while being totally oblivious to the fundamentals of it is beyond me. It would be like starting a taxi company before discovering there were private cars on the road or something. In fact, the major of these shops were started by hobbyists, who were previously artists who would create, evolve and freely share their designs - and were probably much happier that way. The creation of this artifical industry by modern copyright law simply adds inefficiency to the system - there is demonstrably no shortage prior to the laws, and with modern technology, there is a greater supply of both copyrighted and free design than at any time in history. The argument for copyright at all seems weak and the argument for our current infinite copyright system weaker still. Ditch the lot, have the artists go back to designing and sewing instead of spending their time scouring the web looking for their "intellectual property", and everyone will be happier and more creative.

What's so frickin surreal about this, is that this new "industry" (selling digital embroidery designs on the internet) didn't exist until long after people were already freely sharing such things online. How it suddenly be a surprise to those involved? Such a surprise that "designers are retiring and shops are closing". Surely if you've invested in a business for this concept, it must be a requirement to to have some basic understanding of your market? Sounds like stupidity is their problem, not a sudden and surprising lack of co-operation by the entire world.

Things might be better post-invasion - they damn well should be - but surely the point is that the US, British and other armies must be held to a higher standard than the Taliban?

No-one expects them to be perfect, but they do expect avoiding the killing of innocent civilians to be a priority. If there is evidence to suggest it is not, it should be given due attention.

A prefectly free and unhindered press helps to prevent atrocities by making armies accountable for their actions. Wikileaks might be a very crude tool, but it's definitely enhancing press freedom