Posts by Christoph 3323 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2007
IBM makes some rather large machines for some rather large companies. If something goes wrong it can be extremely expensive and may need someone on site immediately.
"Sorry sir, can you wait a few minutes while the bloke who has to sign off the travel gets out of the toilet?"
"Oh dear, he's now signed it off but it looks like the delay meant that the engineer missed the next flight."
"Stuff it where, sir?"
We saw a computer when I was at school. We went on a school trip to this company that had a very large room filled with machinery, that all eventually ejected a pinched paper tape that was taken into a side room and run through a machine that printed the contents out on paper.
#WhenIWereALad
"Now you can have a thief sitting in the comfort of their own home monitoring tens if not hundreds of houses."
They don't need to monitor it. Just have software monitor the streams for the pattern of someone going on holiday and then send an alert to the local operatives. It can also include the details of the security systems it's identified. If the house has been sold in the last few years it can include the floor plans and internal photographs from Rightmove. (photos will be out of date but still useful for familiarisation).
That video shows the rocket getting itself and the satellite up to orbital speed, and then releasing the satellite and at least four other chunks of junk - at orbital speed.
It's no wonder they need a fast launch capability if they are going to be dumping that much rubbish in orbit to knock out satellites.
So don't do business in Eastern Texas. Boycott the whole area. Don't have stores there, don't sell over the web to anyone living there. The tiny loss of trade would be trivial compared to a patent troll case. If the people there don't like not being able to buy nice things, then that is their problem and the solution is in their hands.
How about reading some actual information about what has been happening? He has not been charged with anything, he was wanted for questioning and the prosecutor deliberately delayed that for many years. That's the second prosecutor, who took over the case at her own insistence after the first one said there was no case to answer.
By 2020 people will be able to identify themselves on all government online services via the Verify ID portal. It hopes to make the platform more widely available, so that people can safely verify their identify to access non-government services such as banking.”
Oh joy. A single point of failure, so that when it (inevitably) gets compromised it's the key to everything.
The Tories promise to reduce duplication personal data held by government in order to follow the “Once-Only” principle for central services by 2022 and wider public services by 2025.
So they can easily tie together everything that each department knows about you (and promptly have it hacked - see above).
To provide full support for all its old systems MS would have to have large numbers of programmers trained up in those systems (no one person can know more than a small part of code that big).
How are you going to persuade that many skilled programmers to take on a dead end job with no future? What are they going to do to keep current when there's no known bugs to fix? What are you going to do with them after the product is finally killed off?
The motor car analogy is not directly equivalent - the engineering skills can still be used on modern cars. Detailed knowledge of ancient code is not transferable in the same way.
Of course the motor manufacturers may run into the same problems as the cars get more computerised, and a car crash can be rather more serious than a computer crash.
"email addresses used during the past five years."
What, every single one-time throw-away email I've used to buy a one-off item from a supplier I'm unlikely to ever use again?
Anyway who want to visit a country where the inhabitants are so terrified that they have to carry an assault rifle to go down to the grocery store?
adding that if Mitchell had “identified himself” to the woman employee, “the matter would have been resolved in minutes.”
All you have to do to avoid being detained by the plod is to grovel subserviently to their slightest whim, and tug your forelock while doing it.
There is no law that you are required to identify yourself to every puffed-up busybody who demands it.
Are they really so incompetent that they seriously think that a terrorist would stand there prominently waving a camera in full visibility?
They could wear a pocket video recorder (over 1,000 hits on an amazon search) and wander past getting a hi resolution stream of pictures from every angle, while showing no suspicious or unusual behaviour whatever.
Then send a drone over for some aerial shots.
Or just look at google maps, or search for existing photos on the web.
What have Sussex plod been smoking?
Saying something to a friend of mine who happens to be called Alexa is hardly malicious. If anyone has done anything wrong it's Amazon for using her (not uncommon) name as a trigger and so causing her and her friends problems. And no, I'm not going to watch carefully anything I say to her just in case some nearby gadget might interpret it as a command.
Apparently it reads the entry from Wikipedia. And Wikipedia can be edited.
I've programmed complex industrial machinery using an 8-bit (Z80) processor with 64KB memory. You could do an awful lot of useful stuff with these as long as you don't want all the flashy features and the complex displays. In fact you could offload the display to your phone or your watch.
How about a separate SHOUTINGINTOYOURPHONE class sound-insulated from the rest of the plane? Like the old smoking sections on transport.
As for people with unexpected emergency calls - just exactly how often does that really happen? (And how is it dealt with at the moment?)
The very low probability of such calls is not sufficient justification for everyone on every flight to be subjected to a non-stop stream of SHOUTED babble.
"Reading brain functions doesn't bother me"
Tell that to the US immigration officer who is demanding your social media accounts, your bank accounts, and access to your brain's workings while he interrogates you about your beliefs.
"The issue is complicated by the fact that most of those corporations are based in the United States and so have a strong belief that removing or even blocking content is tantamount to censorship and breaks the First Amendment."
Except that it does not break the first amendment.
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