shadowfirebird

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• Commented on Traffic cameras used to harass and limit movement of peaceful protestors
  Yes, obviously the congestion charge cameras capture number plates; that's what they are designed to do. But is there any evidence that they are being used as part of the ANPR system?...
• Commented on Traffic cameras used to harass and limit movement of peaceful protestors
  Can anyone point me to evidence that the congestion charge cameras are actually being used this way? The guardian article just says "number plate recognition camera"....
• Commented on MPAA shuts down entire town's muni WiFi over a single download
  Money....
• Commented on Three-armed baby costume
  Der, I don't have any special knowledge of disabilities, so I'm happy to be proved wrong here, but I think having a baby with three arms is so extremely rare that it's unreasonable to assume it will offend. The thing...
• Commented on Arizona Republic quotes psychics as experts on the future
  I don't have any problem with the idea that no psychic can reliably predict the future. (After all, if such people exist, they must be very rare, or our world would look rather different.) I certainly have a problem, though,...
• Commented on British tabloids endanger lives with bad reporting on cervical cancer vaccine
  What Mr Wednesday said. I can assure you that the word "tabloid" in this country is not often used to explain the format of a newspaper; it's used as a put down to describe the content. The Daily Mail and...
• Commented on Royal Mail uses legal threats to shut down service that provided postcode lookups to charities and nonprofits
  @mathew: Not putting the postcode on an address means that your letters will turn up in three times the time, if at all. Which probably defeats the purpose of sending a letter in the first place. OTOH 10% of my...
• Commented on Woman gives birth in pool with dolphin, internet gives birth to meme.
  It seems to me that a mature female dolphin would be smart enough to recognise childbirth even in another species*. She might even be inclined to try to help, or at least offer support (emotional or floatational) since that's what...
• Commented on Fair use and choreography
  How cool would it be if I could license my movements? Or my own image? Creative Commons will allow me to license a picture I take of myself, but it will not, AFAICS, allow me to license my own face....
• Commented on Business Reply Mail pamphlet encourages office workers to revolt
  I absolutely adore this. Although, call me paranoid, might someone not get into trouble for sending back a comic depicting nudity and sex? Some idiot might decide it was pornography as opposed to satire (or, constructive criticism)......
• Commented on BBC wants to encrypt "free" TV -- talking points debunked
  Our main way of watching TV in this house is via the Open Source app MythTV. Right now it seems unlikely that the BBC would be able to do this (for reasons other commenters have pointed out) but if they...
• Commented on Lily Allen's copyright problem
  Well, I didn't suggest that my thought experiment above was *practical*. Really it's not practical for us to design changes to copyright law, either, unless one of us commenting here happens to be in congress. But I think it's important...
• Commented on Lily Allen's copyright problem
  @MDH: Not sure that helps. Under your thought experiment, the RIAA would have no excuse to prosecute, true, but they would also have no power to do so -- the publishing companies would not be the power centre. A different...
• Commented on Lily Allen's copyright problem
  @Hugh Sansom: If you are right, what do we do about it? I mean, even in an abstract, blue-sky-thinking sense? Do people think that a good model exists for a society that ensures that its laws are enforced without bias?...
• Commented on Lily Allen's copyright problem
  And here in the UK, of course, there isn't even fair use. Oh, under certain very limited circumstances I gather you can argue that copying something is legal -- summarising someone else's work for a critical piece, for example, providing...
• Commented on Jedi says Tesco discriminated against him
  @b33fj3rky: Name me a religion based on verified historical (and therefore definitely not fictional) events, and I'll accept your opinion as a valid one....
• Commented on Jedi says Tesco discriminated against him
  ::Sigh:: Are we better or worse informed than Guardian readers here? Or are we just all the same people? Yes, it's really, really funny that this guy has a silly religion that appears to be based on Star Wars. Gosh...
• Commented on We don't pay for "content," we pay for "form"
  It's true as far as it goes. Seems to me that we're putting the cart before the horse, though. There's a big difference between saying that *publishers* *price* books according to form, and saying that we're happy to buy them...
• Commented on Google's Data Liberation Front commits to making it easy to get your data off of Google's servers
  Hmm. Given their own admissions regarding the origins of their name, they could hardly complain if someone started a "people's front of data-liberation" with the goal of actually deleting the data. The nicest thing they could do would be to...
• Commented on Google's Data Liberation Front commits to making it easy to get your data off of Google's servers
  It rather looks as if they mean remove in the sense of "get a copy out" rather than in the sense of "delete". Disingenuous, to say the least....
• Commented on Treatment of intersexed African athlete appalling
  Latest story from the Guardian quotes the IAAF as saying that it's "highly unlikely" she will be stripped of her medal, even if the story turns out to be true....
• Commented on UK police watchdog finally gets off its butt to investigate terrorism detention-and-search of children, theft of electronics
  Someone on the Guardian site seems to think that plain clothes officers aren't allowed to stop-and-search under those circumstances. Plus, the business about having them stand in front of a CCTV camera seems out of kilter to me, not like...
• Commented on UK police watchdog finally gets off its butt to investigate terrorism detention-and-search of children, theft of electronics
  "What's an 11-year-old doing with a 6-year-old friend?" Seeing the sights in London, apparently. Pretty silly question. My daughter will tell you that one of her best friends is the daughter of my old college friend. They're both fans of...
• Commented on Conservative California legislator gives pornographic account of his multiple affairs (including a lobbyist) into open mic
  Shame we don't have video of this. Not because I want to hear what the idiot said. I want to see the expression on the face(s) of the other guy(s). Did they know the mike was on? Were they frantically...
• Commented on How the UK gov't spun 136 survey respondants into 7m infringers
  @24: Oddly enough, the government rarely tell us the names. You would think that they were trying to keep us in the dark or something ... naaah....
• Commented on Damien Hirst installation owner charges teen art-rival with theft of £500,000 for removing box of pencils from installation
  Do you suppose Hurst would prosecute *me* if I replaced the missing pencils with identical but different ones?...
• Commented on IT restrictions hurt productivity
  I'm an analyst in an IT department of a small UK company, and we're not even allowed to change our wallpaper. Now, I would be the first to say that having some picture on my desktop is not a vital...
• Commented on REAL ID reincarnated with a new name: "PASS ID"
  "Let's see your Magic Rainbow Ticket"....
• Commented on Poor design-choices in the Star Wars universe
  @Bobba Fett Diop: Okay, good points. But you've yet to refute the Big Nazi Thing argument. Look at some of the weird stuff that the Germans were working on in WW2. Some of it did not make a lot of...
• Commented on Poor design-choices in the Star Wars universe
  Think of a camel: it lies down. Or: they rappel from the belly hatch. Or: it cants one leg at an angle, and the stormtroopers use it as a slide. Wheee!...