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Comment Re:While the point could be valid (Score 1) 355

The reason that "hate crimes" exist in law is because they have a worse effect on society.

If someone kills a white guy *because he is white*, then not ONLY have they broken the ordinary murder law, but they have ALSO terrorised all the other white people. Now ALL the white people worry that they might be killed "just because they are white".

It's this extra terrorising effect that attracts the extra punishment for hate crimes.

Comment Re:I'm not even a fan, but (Score 1) 1174

This is sheer sophistry. You're conflating two separate rights - the right to marry a man, and the right to marry a woman. In the same way, you could reintroduce public transport segregation with the argument "All citizens have the legal right to sit in that part of the bus that's assigned to them." Separate but equal.

Comment audio fingerprinting (Score 1) 375

From the article: "I also doubt that there is going to be any process that is going to ‘listen to’ the music to see if it sounds like a recognized song."

Why not? This technology exists and is available in projects like MusicBrainz Picard, used for a very similar purpose. There's every chance that iCloud could work this way.

Comment Re:MythTV + Freeview DVB-T Tuners (Score 1) 286

My understanding is that what's been reported as "encryption" is in fact compression, obfuscated by withholding the Huffman tables. The BBC can then say to STB manufacturers "You must restrict copying of HD content, or we will not give you the Huffman decoding table". The BBC need this so that they can say to (American) studios "Give us your HD content to broadcast, it will be protected".

In the mean time, Linux devs have reverse-engineered the Huffman tables anyway.

Comment Re:MythTV rant (Score 1) 214

Well, an awful lot of work by a great many people went into MythTV. I didn't do any of that work, but I still get to use MythTV for free. So, it has a lot of credit with me, just to start with!

Comment Re:MythTV rant (Score 2, Insightful) 214

I agree that it's hard to set up. I don't agree that it's hard to keep it running.

You talk about problems when you rebuild the machine, or switch distributions, or upgrade to a new version of MythTV. It's true, those are troublesome. Try to avoid doing those things!

If you want a MythTV system that works reliably, then build a Myth box, get it into a working state, and then *stop tinkering with it*.

Obviously as geeks this is hard for us to do - the temptation to upgrade everything to the latest version is great! But, if you want it to behave like an appliance, I think you need to treat it like an appliance, and leave it alone.

Of course, it would be nice if all the upgrades worked perfectly, but my main point is that I don't think it's fair to say "the overhead of keeping it running is high", if you want to include regular software, OS, and hardware upgrades as part of "keeping it running".

Comment Re:MythTV rant (Score 3, Interesting) 214

It's a shame that you had a bad experience with MythTV. For the record, to provide some balance:

I have been using MythTV continually since 0.14, back in 2004. It's always been hard to get it set up in the first place, but this has improved over the years. Anyway, once it *is* set up, it's just fantastic, and I'd never settle for a lesser system (e.g. retail set-top-box) now that I'm used to the power of MythTV.

With power, comes complexity, but I think it's worth it. I love that I can tell it, e.g. "Record this show at any time, on any channel, as long as it's not an episode I've recorded before, and try to prioritise the shows that do NOT have a sign-language interpreter (but record those if it's absolutely necessary due to conflicts with other things I want to record)".

Games

Games Workshop Goes After Fan Site 174

mark.leaman writes "BoingBoing has a recent post regarding Games Workshop's aggressive posturing against fan sites featuring derivative work of their game products. 'Game publisher and miniature manufacturer Games Workshop just sent a cease and desist letter to boardgamegeek.com, telling them to remove all fan-made players' aids. This includes scenarios, rules summaries, inventory manifests, scans to help replace worn pieces — many of these created for long out of print, well-loved games...' As a lifelong hobby gamer of table, board, card and miniature games, I view this as pure heresy. It made me reject the idea of buying any Games Workshop (read Warhammer) products for my son this Christmas. Their fate was sealed, in terms of my wallet, after I Googled their shenanigans. In 2007 they forbid Warhammer fan films, this year they shut down Vassal Modules, and a while back they went after retailers as well. What ever happened to fair use?"

Comment Re:OKCupid (Score 1) 372

You matched "over 60%"? My top OKCupid matches were in the high eighties to low nineties, and I got on scarily well with the ones that I met... didn't get too far through the list though, I'm marrying the second lady I went out with.

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