Hear hear. From Kickstarter's own FAQ (oddly, no-one's quoted this yet):

Who is responsible for fulfilling the promises of a project?

It is the responsibility of the project creator to fulfill the promises of their project. Kickstarter reviews projects to ensure they do not violate the Project Guidelines, however Kickstarter does not investigate a creator's ability to complete their project.

Creators are encouraged to share links to any websites that show work related to the project, or past projects. It's up to them to make the case for their project and their ability to complete it. Because projects are usually funded by the friends, fans, and communities around its creator, there are powerful social forces that keep creators accountable.

The web is an excellent resource for learning about someone’s prior experience. If someone has no demonstrable prior history of doing something like their project, or is unwilling to share information, backers should consider that when weighing a pledge. If something sounds too good to be true, it very well may be.

So there you have it - caveat emptor. If you throw money at a stranger, based on a promise, it's down to you. Most of the Kickstarter projects I've seen have been 'hey fans, you love our website, help us make a book' kind of things, which would certainly bite the owner in the ass if they let you down.

It's a good book (as you stated) and I bought it off the back of that review...

And he probably therefore has a different one on every site...

Of course, his email's still out there for all to see, which is embarrassing. But at least he won't be frantically scouring Facebook to get rid of all the stuff 'he' posted :)

I know you're being funny, but a 'home user' probably won't know why they need to do that (or even if they do need to do that), let alone go looking for it.

A name that has some connection to what it does is useful, but since you're never going to guess it from nowhere (I need a video editing application, let's google for 'videdit'? no...) it's not required.

That said, a dumb-sounding name won't help you - until you're already popular, then it doesn't matter any more. Think about Linux, it's just a weak pun on the creator's name, and happily a near-anagram of Unix... hardly a 'meaningful' name like FreeBSD (with all due respect to Linus of course) and yet the name is never even talked about these days, everyone just knows what it is. Same with GIMP, how you can name a free 'clone' of photoshop after what Wikipedia calls "a type of sexual submissive in BDSM who may wear a bondage suit" and expect to be taken seriously I don't know (although I used the early versions and it did feel like I was being treated like one). But it's big enough now that people don't care.

I just did a search for 'PCB linux' and it's the top hit on Google... If I search for 'PCB program' I get a few others first, but it's still on the front page. Obviously if you just search for an acronym you'll get results relevant to that first...

If I look for 'video editing linux' however, the top hit is a list of 5 apps from 2009 (which does mention kdenlive 0.7 to be fair), and the second dates back to 2007, so I suspect neither is that useful if you're looking for advice on the best one today. (Searching for 'video linux' just gives you loads of hits for playing, as you might expect.

I have the same problem - remembering the passage from 'Hitchhikers' talking about how buttons on equipment gave way to touch controls, then to gestures... Meaning you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same station.

So either you have to accept that someone will change the channel every time they stretch (or throw their hands up in exasperation at a missed goal) or introduce a 'get the TV's attention' gesture. Yoo-hoo, I'm waving at you....

I see they're talking about using voice too - so I guess it's that, but how are you going to turn the volume down when it can't hear you over the sound of the movie? Or when someone happens to speak the keyword in a show you're watching? (Which reminds me, if anyone had that 'clapper' thing, did it turn your lights off whenever the ad for it came on?)

If someone gets it right, I'm all for it - but I just don't see it. 'Who wants a beer?' *hand goes up* *tv changes to Lifetime* *thirsty guy gets beaten*. I'll stick with my Harmony remote, to replace all the others - and I don't even need a webcam on 24/7 in my living room, with all the privacy implications that has.

Mark

PS We once had a TV at school which was had an ultrasonic remote (this was something that came out either before or in competition with IR). One of my classmates discovered that their sneezes were perfectly pitched to the 'change channel up' signal. Sadly it was hay-fever season, so they had to sit outside while we watched something about Henry VIII and chuckled uncontrollably whenever we remembered it.

Actually the channel 4 item doesn't mention botched redactions - they're talking about the parts of the document you can read.

They even say:
"UK submarines compare poorly with these benchmarks, with the ability to tolerate only a structural failure equivalent to a..." Unfortunately the rest of the sentence, along with most of the following two pages, are blacked out in the released document.

So it was the Daily Star who tried the old trick of copy-paste and got lucky.

Probably because they're the ones who broke the story - it's been picked up by slightly more high-brow outlets too, but it's a tradition that you link to the source of a story. Even the BBC point to them: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13107413

Unless you have a blog to pimp, and need the ad revenue... then you post your link on the front page and wait for the Slashdot effect to make you rich ;)

It wouldn't buy us long, to be honest.

And if I had a huge network using a lot of 'real' IPv4 addresses, and was asked to hand them back, it'd cost me a lot to re-tool my network to use NAT, or consolidate subnets, or whatever I had to do to free up IPs. Now you can argue that I might need to do that anyway to roll out IPv6 (which is debatable) or that I should have planned better in the beginning (which is probably true, although likely I'm not the guy who did it, just the guy who maintains the legacy mess) but you can be damn sure that if it's going to cost time & money, my management won't just say 'sure, let's be decent netizens and hand it back, screw the cost' - they're going to ask you to pay for the transition.

Better to keep hyping the running out of addresses and get IPv6 moving at last. It solves other problems too, after all.

What do you want to bet the Duke Nukem developers are sitting around right now saying 'so who's going to tell the boss we need a little longer to add IPv6 to the multiplayer code?'

I'm not sure how true that is, but they're definitely required to get you to fill in a form for anything over £10,000 - to avoid money laundering (which this would come under).

I had an inheritance last year, and it couldn't be paid electronically in one go, for this reason, so they transferred £5,000 a day until it was all paid in.

The bank wrote to me on day 3, to offer their advice on how to invest it (while stating that if I already had plans for it, not to worry) and when I called them on an unrelated matter even advised me that leaving it in the current account was 'not the best place'...

So maybe they're looking out for me, maybe they're looking out for trouble coming their way, but my bank at least did a decent job of it.

Mark

I think it was a Tuesday...

It can be done, but it's not being done - that's why this happens.

The worst thing you can do is use a one-time-pad twice, hence the name... If you show them it decrypts one file (innocent.bin) then they're going to try it on every other file in the system.

OTP are unbreakable if used correctly - if used incorrectly they're worse than just marking the file as 'hidden' and hoping no-one knows where the 'show all' option is ;)

Mark

You used to be able to buy glasses with frames made from this, especially for kids - the idea being you could sit on them, scrunch them up in a bag and they'd just straighten out with body heat, when you put them on. Obviously you got scratch resist lenses too.

They seem to do them for adults now too http://www.framesdirect.com/flexon/

Mark