Here's a way that the government could be even less involved: don't DO that. Let people who want to show programs to a large audience find their own way to fund the production and dissemination of that material.

The courts, i.e. the gouvernment still has to enforce copyright in order for that to work. IOW, the government is always involved.

Say, by selling ads or attracting sponsors, etc.

Now you're under much more direct influence from the advertisers and sponsors. I'd argue strongly that under the current system the government has less influence over the BBC than advertisers and sponsors do on commercial channels.

Why should someone who doesn't want to fund a given program be forced to, under penalty of being dragged through court? I have zero interest in watching our many all-sports programming options (ESPN, etc).

Because we as a country thing that's the best trade-off. I've yet to see evidence that we're wrong. As a taxpayer, you have to fund all sorts of things you're not interested in. If you don't want to watch anything live, then you don't have to pay the live broadcast fee. You still get to enjoy the entire back catalogue via iPlayer, and in fact all the other channels offering on demant stuff.

You think the "best system we have" is for the government to be the enforcer in an arrangement where I'm forced to give them money anyway?

Yes.

And (I'm guessing you're American), but American TV does not exactly convince me otherwise. Sure you have some great shows (much better on the whole), but your TV services are woefully uncritical of the government, unless it's along very strictly partisan lines. I have never, ever seen anything like this on American TV:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwlsd8RAoqI

If you don't watch it, that's an interviewer on BBC news in the biggest time slot giving a very senior serving politican a very hard time indeed. The politician keeps weaselling out aswers and the interviewer simply does not accept. After being asked the same question again and again and again, the politician runs out of weasel words and finally admits what he did.

And this is not like the partisan screeching you get on Fox News. That is what a good news service ought to be doing.

The argument "tax is bad" is not enough to convince me of your arguments. Taxes are the price of civilisation, after all.

Ah, so in Britain the government isn't involved in tax collection and enforcement.

What's that got to do with the BBC? You have to buy a licese if you wish to receive live broadcasts.

The BBC gets to collect the fees, which they outsource to Crapita. If crapita find you are doing unlicensed things, and can collect evidence, they can then send that evidence on to the CPS. If you're dumb enough to (a) watch live TV without a license and (b) let the Crapita people in to collect evidence then you'll get prosecuted. If you tell them to eff-off, there's nothing they can do.

or have any say, whatsoever, over how that money is allocated.

Nope. The BBC keeps the money (actually, Crapita keep the money, and they pay the BBC a fixed fee), and get to do whatever they like with it. Of course there's a corporate charter etc. The only lever the government have is to change the license fee which essentially controls how much the BBC gets. The BBC, like the NHS is a rather sensitive topic, so this is not something they do lightly.

TL;DR you are mistaken. The BBC is not allocated funds out of the general budget. The mechanism for collecting of funds is purposefully kept separate from general taxation precisely do the government has little control over the BBC.

That is an interesting system indeed! Who handles all of that, if not the government?

Now you know: the money isn't allocated from taxes, so the government doesn't handle it. And yes it is a good system. It's not perfect but it's the best we have. It's freer from government influence than other funding mechanisms and also free from corporate influences, e.g. Sith Murdoch.

What kind of video editing tools out there support ogg vorbis

Well, given that very many games use ogg/vorbis for audio precisely because it's royalty free, I imagine there's a good commercial tools to deal with it. Fewer games use theora, but it's not nonzero and includes large ones like Diablo III.

But anyway what? Don't people edit in lossless then transcode to a lossy format at the end anyway?

She paid twice as much total for her Macbook as I paid for my Asus Zenbook

I'm curious about that. Last time I (well, my SO actually) bought a Zenbook (UX21 as it happens), it was very similar to the equivalent 11 inch macbook air. It was I think it was slightly cheaper but had a larger drive. The outer dimensions, and critically the weight were pretty much the same.

The main driving factor in spec/price seemed to be driven by who has most recently released a new model, the new models always being slightly better value than the old ones from other manufactuers as they seem to not alter the price over the life.

I know you mentioned training, but that's something of an optional extra. For anyone here buying for themselves, Apple laptops are a similar price to other PCs of a simialar spec. And by spec, I mean the full spec including weight, screen quality and build quality, not just the MHz :)

The UX21 however at the time ran Linux much more smoothly which was what sealed the deal and as a bonus had a superior range of ports, including native VGA which is actually really useful on the conference circuit as most projectors still seem to be VGA---and when there are options the VGA ones seem to be more reliable. Digressing, I think that's because they're wired in and VGA has a much longer cable throw and the projectors are expensive and old, so have worse support for the newer standards.

Back in the day, I had a teacher using spreadsheet software for a grade book that could automatically sum the scores and apply a curve instead of having to do it all by hand.

I've done that too. The system was at a uni for a 3rd year module. The point with that is that everyone did the first two years, so the curve for those years was easy. For the 3rd year there were not enough people to grade on a curve, acurately, so the curve was derived from that cohort's second year results.

I did a spreadsheet, realised I had bugs, then rewrote it in AWK in about 1/4 of the time. But this isn't me being a smug git, so please read on...

To me, personally I don't like spreadsheets. This is not to say that they are bad, but I just do not get on well with them. Clearly many peopl do and so it's reasonable ot help them.

I have a vague sneaking suspicion that people on the whole will put in thousands of hours into using a bad tool to avoid learning a better one. For me, spreadsheets fall into the "bad tool" category. But them I'm rather fond of static strictness. I reailse the irony of that with my comment about AWK but bear with me.

It's like the old static versus dynamic debate. C++ provides rich static typing which is why I prefer it for large programs over a dynamically typed one like AWK. For small programs, it doesn't matter because I can track the types in my head. Likewise, the relational model provides static strictness over a model of data, which is why I prefer it for anything sizable which isn't a trivial list (most of my data is actually trivial lists).

And finally, spreadsheets are a nexus of dynamism: there's not even static checking of the program structure. It's this completely synamic 2D grid. This is not to say it's unusable: it's considerably better than the non grid equivalent of computed gotos because the 2D visual layout gets to make use of one's incredibly powerful visual cortex.

But ultimately, I find spreadsheets to be too dynamic for my taste.

OK, so at this point my thesis is that spreadsheets have dynamic types (they're not stringly typed---like AWK it looks a bit stringly typed but isn't, unlike TCL which explicitly is and takes that ti it's (il)logical conclusion---, I think they are actually properly dynamically typed on the whole even if the model is less powerful than Python)...

That got long. Spreadsheets have dynamic typing and dynamic structure.

Now, one can wade into innumerable debates into static versus dynamic typing on the internet. Mostly these are shouting matches. Even the accurate technical points (which is that static languages are a strict superset of dynamic ones) are more or less meaningless when it comes to practicalities.

Given the cognitive overhead, I don't thing spreadsheets scale well to even moderately sized programs (though a large spreadsheet is often large because it has a lot of data). Personally they don't even scale to small programs for me, but then not everyone thinks like I do and one's preference for staticness versus dynamism is really a function of how one thinks.

I've also ignored macros which allow one to indert statically typed, structured code into a spreasheet.

Ultimately though it doesn't matter what I think. I think people hammering on huge spreasheets are proven capable of reasoning in the type of way needed to write programs and I, personally think they would benefit from learning more structured languages. They won't though for a variety of reasons someof which are in fact perfectly good. So they will keep using vast spreasdsheets and AMD's hacking could prove very useful to them.

Brilliant!

I'm really looking forward to this. Firefox (well, in fairness, stupid websites with "app" envy) are responsible for a lot of CPU usage and shortening of battery life. I lookforward to being able to kill hoggy tabs easily.

It's actually possible to buy a Bofors L/60, which makes the 50 cal look like a pea shooter. They are a bit more tightly regulated though. There's some nice YouTube videos of someone blowing stuff up with his very own anti aircraft auto cannon.

so why has nobody been prosecuted over what is clearly criminal behaviour, that is evidenced and accessible via server logs (if it actually happened as described) and traceable to an individual?,

Because we don't live in a world where the police are super competent especially with relation to tech related crimes?

I call bullshit by a self-entitled radicalist man-hater.

Ahhh well this explains it. If I don't side with the g8rs I'm "anti man".

Dude, you're nuts.

Anyone reading your posts in this thread and any other can see that not only do you ignore any factual information presented,

Your "facts" were completely tangential to the debate, and yet you keep posting them in response to simple, unrelated questions. I'll keep on posing the question because it's hilarious to watch you flap round like a floundered fish.

So again:

How do you define gender?

It's incredible how someone with such rigid views on the matter is unable to tell me what he even has rigid views about! You have no idea what you view are, but by the old gods and the new you hold then firmly!

Wow, arguing with you is like dealing "debating" with creationists and denialists. You are so wrapped up in your religion that you can't even tell that it is your ideology that is guiding your entire thought process and not rational thought.

Nope. You send your little insults my way and, like the way I deal with all theists, I stick to what facts are known.

facts

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Doesn't sound like that at all - there is no ambiguity from LEO's statement - no report was filed.

How would he know? All he really knows is there was nothing on record. Good job police are super compenent and never mess things up!

That's a god-of-the-gaps argument if I ever saw one

Except the news is full of reports of police incompetence.

Where did we claim that?

Try popping on to slashdot whenever a police-in-tech article comes up. It's easy to get an impression of the prevailing feeling.

And "we"?

Ooooh I see it's because you are self-identifying with some grand cause as part of your belief system.

You seem to have malformedyour formatting.

For someone who claims it isn't his ideology or religion, you argue very tirelessly and in great volume. With emotion loaded writing too. Nonetheless, I'll allow you your little self deceptions and ignore that.

Sounds like from the article that something went wrong with the report and it is now in fact with the police.

Are you now going to claim that the police never foul up and "lose" hard to prosecute crimes that take a lot of work and ruin the department statistics?

It's hilarious. Whenever something related to law enforcement comes up, the prevailing opinion is all over their incompetence especially with regard to tech. But now everyone's insisting that she must be lying because law enforcement could never do a bad job.

Wow that breitbart article. It's like Fox news in print.

I like the smooth moving between different views to make it seem like various things are conflated.

I like how you selectively snipped to ignore the bit that the police report is, in fact filed. Sound like she filed it and the police fouled up (something which seems to happen a lot) then did nothing, then got caught on the back foot by a media storm.

IOW you managed to post an incredibly biased article that upon careful reading completely goes against your point.

*high five*

At this point your precious feels will be seeting over. The world doesn't care by the way.

I have no idea or opinion if you or this person can code.

Too late. I've been holding forth on coding here for years, but that's all: holding forth. No one has expressed the slightest doubt I can code. Sure some people have expressed doubt I can code well, but they all assumed I could because I said I could.

Then this person who runs a game dev studiop which she founded and started herself says she can code and suddenly people are concern-trolling all over the place because there's no proof.

It stinks like rotten meat.

You seem to forget that the people on "her" side of the argument also made death and rape threats.

So basically some people allegedly affiliated with some global cause with her received death threats so it's OK to be neutral on her personally receiving them. Basically you're reducing it to partisan shit flinging= and using that to not condemn reprehensible behaviour.

It's not us-versus-them.

This person received actual death and rape threats.

If you are neutral about that, then yes, you are part of the problem.

All you are dodging and weaving and trying to bring in things that other people were involved in to justify not condeming death and rape threats against this one person.

So don't be a coward, if you elieve these death and rape threats against her are OK (i.e. you're neutral) then say so and declare it here and now for all to see.

And the fact that you seem to buy into what a bunch of foul mouthed tinfoil hatters on the internet says is also precisely why we can't have a grown up conversation.

I'd generally take her word over these guys:

http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/...