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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no subject
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!
no subject
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.
no subject
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.")
no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 12:43 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!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
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.
no subject
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...
no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
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!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 02:27 pm (UTC)The hard parts as far as I can tell would be:
- knowing which stops count as an interchange (eg, along Princes Street). So you'd need a database of collections of stops.
- knowing when a bus leaving stop A arrives at stop B. Either from travel time, or if the API gives that, having an ID for each bus and matching it up in the data from each stop.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 02:32 pm (UTC)After all, the 4 and 34 stop at the same bus stops several times, and then branch off in different directions, then meet up again later for a few stops, and then branch again. Doing matching on that automatically would be...fun.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 02:52 pm (UTC)> After all, the 4 and 34 stop at the same bus stops several times, and then branch off in different directions, then meet up again later for a few stops
Count the number of stops to the last common point and see which is optimal?
no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 03:07 pm (UTC)http://www.richardclegg.org/mon/meeting9/briggs_talk.pdf
You don't need future bus times from the timetable if you scrape from the website a list from previous days including actual arrivals and delays this is better (he got his data from scrapes of the various online train departure boards).
no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 03:10 pm (UTC)There are also "interactive TV" type proposals which use the extra channel space for different things.