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Comment Re:DVI is HDMI without sound and video cards (Score 4, Insightful) 704

DVI is HDMI without sound and video cards are not the best for sound and PC displays do not have more then 2 speakers any ways.

Does any PC display with HDMI have some kind of DD pass though or 5.1 or more analog out?

Video cards are as good for digital sound as anything. All they do is take the digital signal from your applications and send them digitally over HDMI. Barring driver bugs, it's just the same as any digital output on anything.

I think for DD pass-through a device has to support DD. I have my 360 connected to my TV and my TV connected to my surround sound and DD5.1 works fine. My TV doesn't support DTS though, so I have to connect my PS3 directly to my surround sound in order for that to work.

Comment Re:30 Years of VGA (Score 3, Informative) 704

All the three you listed are electrically compatible. You can buy cables with a different one of those three sized connectors on either end.

The reason there are three different size USB connectors is for devices with different form factors. A mouse is fine for full size USB, a mobile phone will want micro-USB and something like a PS3 controller uses mini-USB.

Comment Re:Raspberry Pi (Score 5, Insightful) 439

Doctorow is making the argument that stuff like that is being proposed and fought for in the current copyright war. Desire for it may spread to other developed sectors of the economy.

If it's Intel v everyone else and they do it on an international basis as part of a treaty, it could happen. The argument being made is that we should be aware of and prepared for this kind of thing because if other sectors of the economy start to get as annoyed by general purpose computers as the *AA have then there would be a serious fight.

Comment Re:Stupid headline (Score 3, Insightful) 213

Oh, so this is on a users phone? (Yea I didn't read FTA).

If so, this is right up there with the previous scandal about Android keeping passwords in plaintext. In that case you had to be root to gain access them, meaning whether or not they were stored as plaintext would be a moot point. If you're root, then surely you can do anything including invoke any methods used for decryption. Same goes for this.

Comment Surprised politicians would go for this... (Score 3, Interesting) 235

I'm from Blackpool and, back in the day, both main parties used to have their conferences here every other year. My parents operated a taxi so they always overheard lots of gossip from the MPs they were ferrying around.

Having the goings on in the back of a taxi being recorded by default would be staggering. No politician or business person could so much as have a phone conversation under those circumstances! I bet every pissant local government hack in Oxford will be trying to justify having a private driver, paid for by the council, when this comes into force.

Comment Re:This (Score 1) 574

Chrome devs have been quite vocal that if you don't like the design choices they're making with Chrome then you should go and use something else.

Google doesn't lock in our data and offers services for free (our eyeballs being the product, obviously, as they make money from advertising). If you don't like Google, don't use them.

I generally refrain from posting in Apple threads because, as much as what they do annoys me, nobody forces me to use their stuff and so I don't. I appreciate that this entire story is about the location bar, but that's just the editors trolling.

Comment Re:Videos I've seen (Score 1) 961

I've seen individual officers act out on demonstrations here in the UK. The one incident that always sticks in my mind is when, on an anti-Iraq war protest about 7 years ago, I saw a copper lunge into a crowd to grab a young teenage girl who was in tears and was swearing at him. As far as I could make out, she was upset that a friend of hers had been arrested. She was surrounded by several other individuals who were taking her away from the police and she actually had her back to him as she called him a "fucking bastard". The copper lost his cool and dived into the crowd to grab her; the other coppers on the line with him went in after to subdue everyone.

Unfortunately when one copper goes too far, instinct seems to kick in and the rest of them pile in to save their colleague. I guess their attitude must be "calm this down now, sort the mess out later".

The police really need to be open and honest about when they screw up public order policing and the need to keep the dicks away from demonstrations.

Comment Re:Don't let Reality hit your ass on the way out (Score 1) 961

We get the same behaviour from our police here in the UK.

There's something fundamentally wrong with our model of policing. It seems even in liberal, western democracies police forces regularly use violence - even unjustified deadly force - against peaceful protesters. To people who are aware of results in psychology like the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments this isn't entirely surprising. It's also understandable how the powers that be - whoever they might be at any particular point in time - don't feel the need to change things. Even the most ardent reformist generally loses the will to change things when they have the levers of power.

Something must be done, I'm sure you agree.
