Yeah I'm interested to see how that plays out. If Sweden drops it's extradition request, there's every possibility that the British courts may deem that that adds weight to his argument that there was no case to answer, that it was political, and that he shouldn't have had to be on bail in the first place making his fleeing of that effectively irrelevant.

But then if there is a political dimension, it may be that they'll be happy to get him on whatever they can, and they do indeed punish him for skipping bail.

It'd be interesting to see how that plays out, but it really depends what happens after the questioning that is finally going ahead.

It's interesting that Ny cites the impending statute of limitations date as the reason for the change of heart. There have been two other key events in the last 6 months that I suspect were more relevant:

1) Assange's petition to the Swedish courts to have the case dropped failed, but in the ruling the Swedish judiciary was clear that it could not understand why Ny hadn't just questioned him over here, that it was incredibly odd that she hadn't and that she must do this ASAP.

2) There has been growing political pressure to stop guarding the embassy. When £10million has been spent on guarding the embassy whilst police forces have been cut MPs have faced increasing pressure from the public and even policing unions to stop wasting time on it. Recent cuts have meant that some crimes such as car crime have become defacto decriminalised because the police no longer have the resources to pursue them. In that context it's rather galling for the police and public alike to hear we're spending millions just to have officers stood around doing nothing.

So I imagine the weight of these two events have been the key reasons for this shift rather than expiry of statute of limitations for the most minor allegations. If Ny defied the Swedish courts a further appeal to have the case dropped would likely succeed due to Ny refusing to do her job and actually pursue a prosecution. Similarly, the Ecuadorian embassy might stop being watched and Assange could flee anyway.

She's really been left little choice. At least the case is finally moving, and Ny has been forced to do her job properly rather than simply persisting with long discredited excuses not to do it (the most amusing of which is that the Swedish justice system doesn't allow overseas questioning - what a laughing stock the folks that persisted in pushing that myth have now become).

Saying you want to learn when all question posed have clearly been answered multiple times shows a clear disconnect between what you're saying you want to do, and what you actually want to do.

You're still displaying a fundamental lack of understanding about most things here. You're trying to explain MSAA and using that as an obscure argument that in some cases an estimated pixel is blurring, and in others it's not. This makes no sense - blurring occurs when you have an approximation of a set of pixels, rather than the actual pixels. An approximation of 4 pixels downscaled to 1, is still an approximation, as is 1 pixel upscaled into 4 approximated pixels. Have a look at the font example here:

http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats...

What do you think those intermediate pixels between the black and the white when anti-aliased are if not a literal blurring of the lines to make a jagged edge look smoother?

You're reaching for a single very specific algorithm, and using very arbitrary (and hypocritical) definitions to try and argue your point. This tells me that you've already decided what's what, which again shows what a farce your claim to want to learn is- if you've already decided you know best (whilst admitting you're wholly unqualified on the subject) then why are you pretending you care? why are you even discussing? don't say you're doing so because you want to learn whilst simultaneously proving that you do not.

You're arguing as someone whose taken their knowledge from a "my graphics card is better than your graphics card" type website or forum discussion with maybe a bit of Googling thrown in to try and mask the most embarrassing elements of your lack of knowledge. What you're not showing is an understanding of the visual impact these algorithms and techniques have on a finalised scene and it's that that makes it clear that you're out of your depth.

If you want to lecture on discussion etiquette whilst complaining about not getting detailed answers - consider this, don't enter a discussion posting in a manner where it's clear you're looking for a fight, continue on with "I've no idea about any of this but here's a logical fallacy" and then persist with "I want to learn but I can't be arsed to think so you're wrong". I don't owe you anything, much less am I willing to put any effort into providing more detailed an in depth explanations with examples when you act like an ass from the very outset and persist through the duration.

You strike me as someone that could actually get into this in a bit more detail and could, if you wanted to, learn to write your own rendering engine. But before you do that you need to sort your attitude out and actually want to learn rather than pretend to want to learn but actually just be looking for a fight. You're so nearly there, you recognise that learning is important, and that wanting to learn is important, but you've not quite crossed the line yet where you're willing to put self-pride aside to actually do it.

If you're not going to do that and finally cross that line you may want to consider that there's a reason you're the sort of person that ended up working in a fast food joint as you mentioned in another post. It's your choice, but I think you probably do have the potential to actually get into this stuff properly and actually do it, rather than skirt about on the edges with half-arsed third hand knowledge learnt from the second hand knowledge of some bottom of the rung gaming website faux-journalist.

If you want to do that I can tell you exactly what you need to do to get going, and how to avoid or deal with the inevitable roadblocks that learning this stuff creates because whilst being a game developer is easy, being a graphics developer isn't - anyone can chuck something together with Unity, Unreal Engine and so forth, but far fewer people can write those engines in the first place. Don't look upto game developers as rockstars, they're not. The days where every development house is building it's own engine and has it's own engine development team are long gone. Most are little more than glorified mod teams nowadays using pre-built engines- if you want to be a game developer you can be one. If you want to be an engine developer? that's going to take a lot more work, but either way you sound like your worship the profession and what it does, and if so then why aren't you aspiring to it? it's within your reach.

Ultimately it depends how much you really care. But don't pretend you want to learn if you actually just want to always be right, even when you're not. I'm not asking you to listen to me, if you're still skeptical of the idea that an upscale can still create a sharper scene than a lower resolution non-upscaled scene, that blurring is sometimes a good thing and so on and so forth then that's your prerogative, but rather than telling me I haven't explained something when I have and just assuming I'm wrong, or bad at teaching just accept that maybe you've got a bit more learning to do first and go learn or experiment, or figure it out yourself from another source.

"The upshot is that enforcement is now in the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system, rather than the civil system."

No it's not. License fee evasion is still dealt with entirely in the civil justice system. I doubt the BBC would even want it reclassified because it'd require a higher standard of evidence for a criminal trial than for a civil trial and that'd massively increase the cost to them of enforcement. Right now they can win trials by knocking up shoddy, and frankly unacceptably poor standards of evidence, if it went criminal they'd probably never win a case again.

"by abolishing the TV Licence and reintroducing it as an all-households tax (call it an "Air tax"?), so you have to pay it whether you have a TV or not, to also remove the requirement and burden of proof that a TV is in fact present."

Right but that actually makes an awful lot of sense. The license fee doesn't just pay for the BBC, it helps fund ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5. It pays for all our broadcast infrastructure including for both TV and radio. It pays for iPlayer and the BBC website.

I doubt there's a person in the UK that can't honestly say they haven't consumed a service at least in part paid for by the license fee. If you've ever read an article on the BBC website, or using their numerous apps you've done it. If you've watched iPlayer you've done it, if you've watched any of the hundred odd Terrestrial freeview channels you've done it, if you've ever listened to the radio you've done it.

The license fee isn't even close to fit for purpose anymore, because the range of things it covers is necessarily expanding as technology improves and habits change. It makes sense to keep our tax system uptodate to represent reality, rather than have it outdated and nonsensical.

Why should people who own TVs subsidise everyone else? It makes far more sense to spread the cost and have everyone pay for something that everyone uses. We can finally get rid of free TV licenses for elderly millionaires and other such idiocy at the same time.

Yeah, we'd never have held onto the Falklands if it weren't for old Attenborough telling those Argies all about their parrots.

And yet the UK technology industry still manages to piss it all away and be an also-ran.

Seriously. How the fuck do we do it?

Er, just realised my tablet changed shotguns to just Guns for some reason. First sentence should be:

Yes we are. Shotguns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal in the UK.

"The problem is that it's so damn difficult to get an easy suicide: Guns, sure.. In the UK, we're not allowed them"

Yes we are. Guns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal in the UK.

What you can't have is something like a submachine gun, an assault rifle or a hand gun unless you can get an exemption from the Home Secretary because you have a need for one (for example, if you're part of a foreign dignitary's personal security detail like those Obama and the Pope can't leave home without).

When you talk about sharpness in photography as opposed to bluriness, you're talking about a picture that more accurately represents the scene as you see it. When you defocus, you lose detail, the scene is not as you expect, and you call it less sharp.

In computer graphics it's not as straightforward, there is no real scene to capture directly, instead we try and make up something that looks like a real scene with a variety of algorithms.

Your view seems to be that a computer image is more sharp if there is always greater contrast between pixels, and that all upscaling algorithms create a decrease in contrast by using estimates of additional pixels on upscale.

These assumptions are incorrect, because they neither represent how modern upscaling algorithms used in games work, nor do they take into account that greater contrast is sometimes detrimental in creating a more realistic picture. Your view would imply that a non-anti-aliased scene is better than an anti-aliased scene for say, an FPS where you're looking down a straight road. This is nonsense, because without that blur you're actually going to end up with a scene that looks less real - it fits your definition of sharper. Similarly increased pixelation makes a scene less real, even though you seem to be suggesting a more pixelated scene is a sharper scene.

So you've got this differentiation with the computer graphics world where there are additional criteria that reduce the accuracy of a scene to what you might hope it to be that go beyond simple focus. You're using a definition of sharpness that suggests that a less realistic looking scene (i.e. more pixelated, and with nonsense distance rendering) is sharper. You're saying that if we had a simple game like Minecraft running at a low incredibly pixelated resolution, that the image is somehow sharper than that same scene upscaled with an algorithm that can recognise the typically well defined edges in Minecraft's relatively simple graphics and grow them to a resolution that loses visible pixelation whilst not losing any actual practical detail. Fundamentally you're equating sharpness to increased pixelation, and increased contrast between neighbouring pixels. Neither of which are actually really desirable in many parts of scenes in games gunning for photorealism.

Just like being out of focus can kill the sharpness and realism of a scene with a camera, higher pixelation and lack of decent blending can kill the sharpness and realism of a scene in computer graphics. You can't make a scene sharper by simply increasing contrast, and increasing pixelation all you're doing is creating a digital kind of blur that messes up the scene as much as being out of focus with an analog camera would.

Of course there are other factors, if you can have more polygons at 720p upscaled to 1080p than you can afford if you just go for native 1080p then you can make curves look more like curves, rather than a bunch of triangles desperately trying to represent curves. Or you can simply make the scene look more real in general by having more realistic clutter in it like litter on the ground, rather than a pristine swept street in the middle of a ghetto that makes zero sense and gives zero immersion.

Upscaling is done for a reason - when used with specific intention in a planned manner like this it creates a better, more realistic image than not upscaling. Again yes, if you can afford to render the scene natively at 1080p with full AA and so forth it's bound to look better because there's no guesswork going on, but that guesswork is typically good enough that upscaled to 1080p is going to look way sharper than native 720p because the curves are better defined, distance rendering can be more accurately done and so on and so forth.

Saying you want to learn is meaningless, you have to actually want to learn and be willing to learn. Refusing to read what's in front of you and arguing about something you openly admit you don't have a clue about guarantees you a life of ignorance. This is the last time I'm going to try to explain it to you because beyond this it simply means that you don't want to learn, that you're intentionally ignorant- that you're ignorant by choice.

Um no, I replied to you because you replied to me asking a question which I answered. I've no idea who "the game developer" is but even then what do you mean by game developer? are we talking about an expert in rendering technology? I don't think many if any of those post here anymore, people like Carmack left a long time ago and mostly when people rave on about being a game developer on Slashdot what they really mean is they're a bottom of the rung lacky that implements a few game mechanics- that's a far cry from being one of the handful of developers who actually deal with rendering tech in the industry - there's a reason why most companies just reuse existing engines like Frostbite, Unreal, or id Tech.

You seem to be upset that you asked a question and got an answer you didn't want and are now pushing a classic appeal to authority fallacy. I'm happy to answer questions as I have done, but if you just want to argue for the sake of it by throwing in logical fallacies whilst admitting that you don't really know enough to provide an actual counter-point or correction then I've got better things to do.

If your knowledge of computer graphics and upscaling is limited to resize in paint programs you really are too dumb to be having this conversation.

Even if we stick to your photography oriented view of out of focus blur which is really what you're talking about when you say sharpness when talking about loss of explicit per-pixel detail it's not as if upscaling algorithms are so dumb that a similar blur is a given. Worse, some blurring is even desirable, that's the whole point of spatial anti-aliasing after all.

Of course yes, having AA on a 1080p precisely rendered scene is always going to look best, but an upscaled 720p image to 1080p is always going to look better than a precisely rendered 720p image with modern upscaling algorithms and also nearly always look better than a 1080p precisely rendered scene without AA even.

I think it's important to separate reality and practice. I think in practice it would be nice if all consoles had indie development support, but that's ultimately a personal preference, most consumers of said consoles are wholly uninterested in that so I think in reality whilst I personally think that should be nice, we should not have an expectation of it from console manufacturers - I do not think it's fair to put that obligation on them, as they cannot be expected to be all things to all people.

I think if there was a market for a viable open console platform then that would come about naturally, or those existing manufacturers would tend towards that themselves, but so far attempts have been weak or failed, XNA didn't do a good job of producing great games, it was almost always crap, and for Microsoft it wasn't really therefore commercially beneficial either - the cost of maintaining the tools, libraries, and publishing platform almost certainly exceeded the profits gained from the program. Similarly platforms like Ouya just haven't worked out.

So that's where I stand on what I'd like to see happen, but why I believe it hasn't in practice and might not. Now on to what one can do if they wish to develop a console oriented game.

I would tend towards having some agreement towards your stated option b), but I would sell the game no matter how poorly it did and I do not see having a day job as a hardship. I say this because I've studied a degree full time whilst working full time, and I've done game development myself whilst working full time. To me time management is not an issue, and I do these things because I want to, not because I'm forced to or have an entitlement attitude that the world owes me a living from game development.

I think you should develop indie games because you want to and because you enjoy it. I think if your idea is good it will stand on it's own two feet just as games like Minecraft did- Notch didn't need a massive marketing machine or large publisher support, he built something unique and interesting, and blogged about it and people came to him, and eventually the publishers come to him.

I think many of the problems you're hinting at stem from those developers who cannot accept that maybe their game is not as good as they think it is and/or believe they deserve a living from their game no matter how unpopular it may be. These are false premises and are guaranteed to result in disappointment.

What OAP benefits have they slashed exactly? Winter fuel payments, free bus passes, free TV licenses are all intact regrdless of whether you're a pauper or a billionaire. The state pension has been increased in value, and ever more money has been poured into social care and the NHS to try and resolve the crisis that their failure to pay a fair share through their working life that covers the costs of what they expect to receive from the state now has caused.

All in all they've got it pretty good - the stats show that they're the only demographic whose wealth has increased on average throughout the recession and the failure to start taxing pension withdrawls or the wealthy pensioners or cut their benefits means that everyone younger is now having to pay for services for these folks that the state will never be able to afford to give the folks paying when they get older and that the folks receiving them refuse to pay for for themselves.

It's hard to see how they could reasonably have it any better given that things are currently massively in their favour due to being subsidised by everyone else and at everyone elses expense and to everyone else's long term detriment much less see how they've had any real kind of slashing of benefits.

The figures don't lie, it's a fact that those folks have profited through the recession whilst everyone else has suffered:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

Yes, I'll clarify because it is a little ambiguous, I'm well aware not all baby boomers read it, and I'm referring specifically to those that do, or those that at least have the same mindset of believing the world still owes them everything ever and everyone else can go screw themselves.

I absolutely agree that yes, there are at least some good baby boomers :)

Well it can, if all you want is something that lets you read books, in fact, if all you want is to read books then a kindle is a far superior device because you don't have to charge it as much and it's easier on the eyes.

Just like a Pebble smartwatch might happily replace an iWatch if all you want it to do is tell you the time and let you know if you've received an e-mail or text or something and be able to do so for more than just over 2/3rds of a single day without a recharge.

Not all use cases are equal. It's possible, that for the general population, a Pebble smartwatch can in fact quite easily replace an iWatch, because it's possible that people don't give a shit about fancy apps on their wrist when they have something superior for that in their pocket, it's possible they want a watch to be something they only have to charge once a week and that simply tells the time and gives them the odd useful notification.

Whether that's true or not is something only the market can tell us, we simply have to wait and see. My personal guess? I think we'll see convergence of the two, we'll see smartwatches that have superior power management to that available now and that drop to an extremely simple low power state most the time that looks an awful lot like the Pebble coupled with better batteries such that you end up with a hybrid approach and get maybe 3 days usage between charges in practice.

To me it's not the long day that's the problem, it's that I've not had a single device ever that's hit it's advertised battery life in practice. Doesn't matter if it's Samsung, Apple, Dell, Microsoft or whoever else, I've never seen a battery last as long as it should and that's because such timings are given based on perfect situations - if you're in perfect isolation where there's no wireless noise, and the temperature is exact then you can hit it, but in the real world where there's wireless signals everywhere and where devices have to constantly decipher signals to see if it's meant for them the batteries just end up failing well before they should. This coupled with the fact such timings are based on "average useage" which is normally an arbitrary figure that doens't represent real useage and advertised battery life is normally a fairly useless metric.

So even if an 18 hour day was as much as I do, I'm skeptical that it'll last that long in practice - if past battery experience is anything to go by you'll probably get like 14 hours out the box, and then after a year or two be lucky to get more than 10 hours out of it.

Nowadays when I buy phones and such I try and get something that offers near enough double the battery life I actually need in practice or buy a spare battery if I can and need to.

I wont buy a smart watch until they can advertise something around the 32 - 48 hours battery life mark. I suspect I'll be waiting a while, but I'm sure I'll live.