Interesting Links for 20-10-2011
Oct. 20th, 2011 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Wikipedia is a wild success and an utter failure
- Standards now progressing on Ultra-HD TV. Don't expect it for a while.
- London buses to get mobile tracking app (I love the Edinburgh one. So useful)
- Libel reform bill aims to end anonymous internet culture.
- Suggestion: Users should be able to buy licences to allow copying of copyright-protected material
- Why colonising space is not the answer to humanity's problems.
- The hierarchy of arguments
- Here's the real way to play Battlefield 3. Oh. My. God. I want this so badly
- Puppies The Size Of Soda Cans
- The tribesman who Facebook friended me
- Words that are used differently by scientists and the general public
- France bans online videos of misbehaving police
- As the adolescent brain Changes, So can IQ
- Bolognese Machiavelli. Revenge has never tasted so good!
- Fish,chips, VAT and the EU.
- Fifteen People You'll See At Every Videogame/Comic/Nerd Convention
- How Siri Really Works
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Date: 2011-10-20 12:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 12:17 pm (UTC)Best first comment ever :-)
Users should be able to buy licences to allow copying of copyright-protected material
I've often thought this, particularly in the context of "copyright taxes" like the one on blank tapes (wherever and whenever that happened). If the government punishes or inconveniences or taxes me in case I do a thing that's illegal, that's an intolerable presumption of guilt; if they think I've been doing such a thing they should take me to court and try to prove it, and if they can't prove it they shouldn't punish me. But if what I get for my money is to make it legal for me, that's entirely different!
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Date: 2011-10-20 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 12:30 pm (UTC)"Wikipedia has accumulated its fair share of self-righteous, power-hungry people with too much time on their hands." Nope. It's accumulated far more than its fair share of these people. It's a fucking magnet for them.
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Date: 2011-10-20 12:39 pm (UTC)I saw a blog post once which extended that one by adding an extra item at the top. The original post seems to be suffering from web server misconfiguration at the moment, but I just found this page which lists the extended Graham's Hierarchy and quotes the salient point from the original post.
(I'm not necessarily convinced that the extra level is the right thing in all cases, but it's hard to dislike a comment that ends in the memorable sound-bite analogy "To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.")
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Date: 2011-10-20 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 01:01 pm (UTC)Reed and Rylander said that, in contrast to this, TfL's approach was a gradual layering of clearly targeted investments, with each project building on the previous one, rather than: "Here's a wad of public cash, achieve great things and call me when you're done."
Sounds like good iterative development practices to me - one can only hope that they will learn from that!
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Date: 2011-10-20 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 03:16 pm (UTC)If you are going to make you're project robust there has to be value at every failure point.
If you're the one doing the developing wise words to remember before you start planning.
If you're trying to understand why a large complex system appears to be so much less efficient that if had been built from scratch worth finding out what each of the incremental steps were and how they worked as an improvement to the preceding step.
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Date: 2011-10-20 01:48 pm (UTC)It's surprisingly difficult to find a picture of a chihuahua puppy next to something which gives exact scale, but this one is probably smaller than a soda can.
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Date: 2011-10-20 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 02:13 pm (UTC)For journeys that involve several buses, I often want to know, 'when should I leave to catch bus 1 so it dovetails with bus 2?' I wonder if the API would be capable of providing the information to answer that...
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Date: 2011-10-20 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 02:23 pm (UTC)(From the colonizing space article.)
How apt a metaphor!
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Date: 2011-10-20 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 03:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-20 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 05:05 pm (UTC)The tribesman thing overeggs the noble savage thing a bit, but is otherwise really cool.
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Date: 2011-10-20 05:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-25 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-25 06:10 pm (UTC)