I honestly can't see how having my car searched would ever tarnish the surrounding countryside.

Well, unless they start unpacking my luggage and begin hanging my underwear on the trees or something. That might do it. Is this what they're doing?

No, that's just paranoia. If you haven't been paying attention Microsoft spend a LOT of money on dealing with malware and so forth, they help the authorities take down bot nets and have a genuine commercial interest in stopping the spread of malware.

This is just another step in that quest, all they're doing is saying "Download your unlicensed copy of Windows from us, rather than some dodgy site where it's riddled with malware from the outset".

They've figured out that giving people a clean copy rather than a virus laden copy is cheaper for them than it is to deal with constantly having to spend a fortune dealing with DDOS attacks and spam hitting Outlook.com and that sort of thing.

There's nothing sinister here, it's just way easier and cheaper for them to offer an official Windows 10 download, that it is to have people download it anyway, but riddled with malware that feeds into botnets that cost them money.

They're not giving you a license key, they're not luring you into a trap, they're not tricking you, they're just giving you a clean download that saves them money with the added benefit that it means people might convert to buying the odd copy here and there with less risk of people leaving for other OS' like Linux. It just makes good business sense, there's nothing more to it than that.

It's not like the police even entertain breaking down doors for civil piracy cases anyway, it's not their job, it's not their jurisdiction, and it's not something they get involved in so it's nonsense either way. The worst they could do is haul you into a civil court where they'd then have to a) prove to the judge that you are individually and uniquely tied to the IP address and that no one else could ever have used that connection and b) explain to the judge how you've cost them money when they were the ones that offered the download in the first place. So even if your conspiracy theory did have any merit, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on anyway - it would be the very definition of civil entrapment offering a product download without any payment requirement and then trying to sue people over it to extra payment for it afterwards. That's an entirely illegal practice in itself stemming from an old scam where people used to ship items to people entirely unsolicited, and then sending a demand for payment or even filing a debt claim against them for the cost of the product if the person who received it never sent it back. Nowadays if you receive a wholly unsolicited parcel you're entirely within your rights to keep it with no real recourse for the company who sent it- the same is true here, Microsoft can't demand payment after they offered the download for free.

Well at least you have the courage to admit you were wrong in a roundabout way involving trying to pretend someone else was wrong. I guess it was the old BDUK point that was the killer right? I mean it's kind of hard to argue that the license fee isn't used for infrastructure when, er, it clearly and indisputably is.

I know what you really mean is "I wont argue with you because you've proven me wrong, but I'm too much of a child to admit it so fuck you!".

It's okay, you don't have to pretend with me - I'm smart enough to see what people like you really mean, the old idiot insult is usually the first giveaway, but at least if nothing else you were man enough to know when it's time to shut up and stop making a bigger fool of yourself, so well done on that.

Energy can also be death. If you don't believe me then go get hit by lightning or stand in a furnace then turn it on.

Sure it's great for me, I mean, the UK will get a really nice climate, I'm not much a fan of the cold.

Meanwhile everyone in Africa and Australia will have died from drought.

I don't think your simplistic understanding of energy has done anything to prove your case that warming is inherently better, only that it's inherently better for you personally, a wealthy westerner.

Just because people are going to make money from something doesn't inherently make it bad, or a scam. Only whether it's actually bad or a scam can define that, and you've done nothing to prove your case.

If Al Gore is cashing in on green technology that doesn't mean green technology is a scam, it just means he's a competent investor in spotting markets to invest in that the human race are simply going to have to move towards to reduce the impacts of climate change, and similarly to reduce the impacts on non-renewable sources (like having to depend on middle-eastern dictatorships and Russia for fuel). You don't make money and become a billionaire by investing in shit that has no prospect for growth and that the world sees no value in.

It's possible to care about the environment, still make money, and have whatever you're investing in be a good idea all at once.

Carbon tax makes a lot of sense, because right now everyone else is paying the externalities of fossil fuel burning. Coal is a cheap power source because you and I have to pick up the bill for the health costs via your health insurance or my country's NHS. Moving that cost onto the people who make the profits from burning and causing those billions of pounds of health problems is eminently sensible, and it makes cleaner technologies like nuclear that already have to foot the bill for cleaning up their harmful chemicals (nuclear waste) more competitive.

I'm continuously amazed at how people fail to grasp what a good idea it is to tax polluters for polluting because they have absolutely no idea how much it's costing them personally to pay for the cleanup. Go Google fossil fuel externalities, even with the most conservative estimates you're currently paying a hell of a lot personally for the fact that such pollution has largely been untaxed such that you pick up the bill. There's no such thing as a free ride, burning all that shit and letting them pollute has a cost, why not make the people who profit from it pay for it? Why is that such a terrible idea? Or is yours just a kneejerk libertarian "OMG GOVERNMENT, TAX, IT MUST BE BAD!" response?

It's not even that, I'm very much inclined to no longer vote in the UK's general elections because I voted against the FPTP system and it would seem utterly hypocritical of me to participate in a system that is fundamentally broken and I am staunchly against, especially when there are no parties that even reasonably represent my views (there's no centrist parties in the UK, they're all various flavours running from very much left to far left or very much right to far right and I like a bit of both and hate a lot of each - I want the right wing economic policies and the left wing environmental policies for example).

It should equally be in my power to not vote as it is to vote for any party so as to let the turn out figures tell their own story about the legitimacy of the whole system. If voter turnout drops beneath 50% then the whole system becomes illegitimate and no one winning an election under such circumstances can dare to claim legitimacy.

Not voting is a vote, it's a vote against the current electoral system, and it's not surprising that under two-party favouring systems like we see in the UK that there is always talk of making voting mandatory - they both know the current system has no real legitimacy, but it benefits them, so they both want to protect it.

Mandatory voting is never the answer, fixing political systems so that people have reason to vote is the only fair and reasonable solution, but it does not benefit the people who gain from the status quo so the only way to make them change is to force their hand by defying their attempts to fake legitimacy in the system by forcing voting and spreading myths like "Your grandad fought for the vote!" (no he fucking didn't, he fought to stop the nazis and their intention to have their minority rule over the majority, which is exactly what FPTP encourages). Mandatory voting should not exist because it denies people the opportunity to show their distaste for the electoral system as a whole and any country that has it is just propping up a broken system rather than fixing it.

Mandatory voting is like mandatory proprietary OS installations on all computer sales, some are happy with Windows, some are happy with OSX, but others want neither, they want Linux and if that isn't an option at time of sale they want no OS with their computer until a vendor decides to start giving them what they actually want.

Oh don't even try. Rei is the most aggressive Assange hater Slashdot has ever seen because she was a victim herself once and so has decided that a man accused is a man automatically guilty, and that it's her quest to ensure all accused many are treated as such.

She was pushing the lie that the Swedish prosecutor couldn't question him over here because Swedish law wouldn't allow it even after the Swedish courts said in response to Assange appeal that they could and that it was odd that they hadn't.

I'm amazed she can show her face here now that this lie she pushed so zealously and so vehemently has been shredded by the very prosecutor she was defending, yet here she is, and worse, she's still pushing the anglakad lie, pretending these Swedish terms don't translate to English, even though they translate EXACTLY.

I can't tell if there's a lot of gullible people here or if she has her own team of mod-bot accounts, but if a story says Assange in the title you can guarantee she'll show up flooding it with +5 lies, many of which have been obliterated with the passage of time and the emergence of the truth, just like in this story in fact.

Erm, why are you even having this discussion if you believe that ITV has it's own private terrestrial broadcast infrastructure? You're completely out of your depth here. ITV, Channel 5, and Channel 4 are broadcast on the public service multiplexes, along with a bunch of radio stations, the funding for which is provided from the license fee under the transmission costs.

If the license fee has nothing to do with public infrastructure costs, why do you think hundreds of millions of pounds of license fee money have been diverted to the BDUK broadband rollout? The license fee has always been about funding more than just the BBC itself. That's why it's called the TV license, not the BBC license, and that's why it's a license you must pay if you use the UK's broadcast infrastructure even if you never watch BBC channels or use BBC content. That's also why there is now an argument to make it a tax that's simply paid by everyone given that everyone uses it - you could get FTTC in your home because of license fee money and never ever watch or have anything to do with the BBC but you're still benefiting from license fee money.

Sky has it's own satellite infrastructure, but we haven't been talking about satellite channels, we've been talking about terrestrial. That's why I said terrestrial from the outset.

That doesn't even make any sense, all BBC funded content is funded under the TV break down (~£2.2bn) because there's next to no iPlayer only content, it's just content already shown on TV. The online break down of ~£170m is for the BBC websites. Also, not all iPlayer content is fee funded, a number of iPlayer programs are supplied by BBC Worldwide and produced for foreign commercial sale, sometimes alongside other foreign organisations like America's Discovery Channel.

I'm also still not entirely sure how you think the UK's broadcast infrastructure is funded by ads. The people manning the infrastructure have no process for displaying ads themselves or gaining money from it. The BBC Trust has in the past stated that around 6% (~£200m) of the license fee goes on transmission costs which is the lion's share of the costs. Why do you think that has changed? how do you proclaim the companies running the transmitters are injecting ads into things and gaining revenue from it when as far as the broadcasters are aware they greenlight the ads and pocket the profits with the commercial channels simply paying a token amount for access and usage?

I'm not sure that's really true, cloning the best horse at the time doesn't preclude the possibility of a breeder breeding an even better horse for racing and so forth.

Then of course there's disease vulnerability, there's every possibility a disease could wipe out all the clones, whilst allowing many of the bred ones to survive.

Once you've discovered a horse is awesome in a race or whatever, it's already an adult, so sure you can clone it at that point you know it's awesome, but you still have to wait for the clones to grow up. In the meantime it's possible an even more awesome horse has already had time to grow up and enter the game and all those who bought their close are going to be embarrassed by being uncompetitive.

I don't see this harming breeding and horse racing, at best it's going to give more people access to a very good horse, but you're still going to need to try and breed even better horses if you want to give yourself the edge and more chance of winning.

In car racing you could all already build an identical car to the competition and have every car be exactly equal, but no one does that, everyone still tries to build a better car to give them the edge. It's really no different.

These guys in the summary would have an argument if we were talking about genetic manipulation, because then you could argue both an unfair advantage and that the manipulation means the horse is no longer of the correct breed, it's a custom breed, but that's not what's happening so their argument is basically wholly based on ignorance, they're talking like the type of folks who believe the world is 6,000 years old and flat - they're completely clueless about the science of genetics (which is disturbing for an organisation whose job is purportedly to deal with ensuring exactly that) and are arguing wholly on the basis of superstition.

If I wanted one of these horses their argument would put me off completely so they're probably doing more harm than good for themselves. If they don't have a basic grasp of genetics how can I even begin to trust their ability to ensure I'm getting what I'm paying for? They're supposedly guaranteeing me a breed, but they've no idea what a breed even is.

So why are the BBC listing online in their license fee expenditure?

http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/c...

Stop making shit up.

The problem is you're focussing on one or two fringe cases and letting that dictate policy rather than considering the bigger picture.

You're effectively arguing that someone so blatantly craving for attention and power should be given the power to dictate the outcome of an entire issue with his mindgames.

That doesn't sound an awful lot like punishment, it sounds an awful lot like you're giving this individual you're referring too power beyond his wildest dreams, power to individually bend an entire wide ranging political issue based simply on his individual actions.

Politics should be bigger than one person, if you're using these one or two fringe cases to dictate policy then you've let them win, you've let them manipulate a system far bigger than they are. You've fallen hook, line, and sinker in giving them the very attention and power they've been craving all this time. They've been caught, they don't care if they're going to be executed or not, all they care is that people are paying attention to them, and if they can twist entire political debates with their individual words? they're in heaven.

If punishment is what you're after and aren't interested in rehabilitation, then a better solution would be to tell them to shut up, stick them in solitary, and not let their voice be heard ever again. Now THAT would really kill them.

"Unfortunately, I can't find the Nyquist paper online anywhere (I originally read it off microfilm a couple decades back) so the Wikipedia article (not the one you quoted, the other one I linked) is the best I can do for references."

What you really mean is: "My attempt to try and argue myself out of this massive hole I've dug by using a combination of Google and Wikipedia rather than actually understanding of the topic has failed, but I'm still too insecure to admit I was wrong explicitly.". You can't argue your way out of this hole by simply quoting the names of papers and algorithms you've found on Google and Wikipedia in a desperate attempt to try and sound smart all the whilst showing a complete lack of clue about what any of it actually means in practice.

"I have to ask you though, why is it okay for you to insist that "sharp" has different definitions between digital imaging and photography"

It's not about difference in defintion, it's about difference in factors that can cause loss of sharpness. In photography loss of focus is the key thing that causes loss of detail, but in computer graphics there are other things - pixelation by reduced resolution for example.

If you think having read the defintion of blur that it backs up your position, then you're still just desperately clutching at straws to avoid just admitting you were wrong. Have a look at an aliased vs. an anti-aliased screenshot, zoom in to see what anti-aliasing does. The definition of anti-aliasing you linked states:

"make or become unclear or less distinct."

This is EXACTLY what anti-aliasing does, the whole point in it is to make strikingly pixelated areas look less pixelated, this is why I provided you the simple nVidia link, because it shows with a basic example the effects of anti-aliasing - it reduces jagged pixelated edges by blurring them into surrounding edges - it reduces the distinct pixelation by making it less distinct so that to the human eye in intended viewing conditions the edge looks more like a sharp diagonal line than a jagged pixelated mess.

Oh, and by the way, the way you make multiple posts in reply to me and yourself? It's like a desperation meter, the more desperate your argument gets the more desperately you flood the discussion. It's quite amusing.

Oh fuck me, I was wrong, you really are just too dumb to cope with any of this. You're now trying to say that whether something is a blurring effect is defined entirely on whether an article on an AA algorithm explicitly uses the word "blur".

You really didn't think before making even more of a tit of yourself it might be prudent to actually understand what a blur is? You realise the no matter what dictionary you check the term blur and it's synonyms describe the effect of AA exactly?

I can't believe you've reached the point where you're trying to argue a blurring effect isn't in a desperate attempt to save face. You really are a lost cause, a perfect example of someone who just wants to be right even when they're oh so wrong and will jump to extraordinary extremes like arguing that something that is the very definition of a blur isn't. You always know that someone is hopeless when they drop to the point of trying to redefine the dictionary to suit their argument and that's exactly where you're at. It's pathetic.

There's no point in going any further, I can't help you, I've explained multiple times, I've given you everything you need, but you're just beyond it, you're just far too retarded to be able to rationally take part in this topic.

Yeah it's still a crime, that's not in dispute, but we do have the concepts of extenuating circumstances and public interest in British law.

I can't see what the public interest would be if it turns out there are no charges to answer, it's not like anyone and everyone can just get an embassy to put them up in order to skip bail, even Ecuador very nearly didn't take him. It's not like people are going to start running to embassies left and right under the assumption they'll get given protection- Assange was an extreme exception because of the politics of his case.