Posts by Christoph

US Congress proposal: National Park will be FOUND ON MOON

WTF?

Since when is the moon part of the territory of the USA?

Since when do they have any legal authority whatsoever over its surface?

US gov SMASHES UP TVs and MICE to nuke tiny malware outbreak

When in danger or in doubt

Run in circles, scream and shout

Universal Credit? Universal DISCREDIT, more like, say insiders

CYA

The Universal Credit IT has been working well during the Pathfinder

They may actually believe this. Because each layer of civil servants is polishing up the report from the previous layer before it goes up to the next layer, to make themselves look good.

By the time it gets to the top the report is that everything is working fine, and it's only much later when the problems can't be disguised that the people at the top find out what's really been happening.

France's 'three strikes' anti-piracy law shot down

a new "culture tax" on content consumption devices

And a new "transport tax" on motor vehicles to make up for the declining sales of horses and carts.

Radar gremlins GROUND FLIGHTS across southern Blighty

Re: Good

So now can they reduce the noise of the Met's helicopter when it circles somewhere above my house for half-an-hour at three in the morning?

Emergency alert system easily pwnable after epic ZOMBIE attack prank

Where is Orson Welles when we need him?

The Martians are invading! The Martians are invading!

Snowden: US and Israel did create Stuxnet attack code

Re: Stuxnet

" wonder how long it will be before Mr Snowden meets with an untimely death"

Or is accused of various sexual offences to discredit him, as has been done to many whistleblowers.

Germans brew up a right Sh*tstorm

Re: Ah, Mr Nicoll. An old correspondent...

Well, he is ever so slightly accident-prone. But he could have easily retaliated against the butterfly - what else did he invent the Nicoll-Dyson Laser for?

Am I really the first with the James Nicoll quote?

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Not scientific words!

"We believe that linguists should make more effort to develop German alternatives to new English words, particularly in the scientific and technological arena."

No! Particularly NOT in those areas. There is a reason that science uses Latin and Greek words, and names units after the names of people. It is so that they are the same in all languages, and do not need to be translated. So that science is universally available to everyone regardless of their native language.

US Navy coughs $34.5m for hyper-kill railgun that DOESN'T self-destruct

Re: Revolutionise what?

We don't need submersible carriers. We already have the solution.

Pykrete!

Re: Revolutionise what?

Back to the good old days of "Natives restless. Send Gunboat."

Anyone living within 200 miles of the sea had better get ready to bend over for Uncle Sam.

Love in an elevator.... testing mast: The National Lift Tower

Not Orthanc

Looks more like the Tower of Art

Report: IPCom gets rich off Deutsche Telekom patent payment

Not a problem

Bosch signed up to FRAND and agreed that those patents would be available under those terms.

Bosch took actions which meant that the patents were no longer available under FRAND.

Therefore Bosch must compensate in full all costs including legal costs, loss of sales, administration etc. to the firms which are being sued.

El Reg encounters mObi: R2-D2 for retailers

I hope they will test these for how they interact with guide dogs before they start putting them in all the supermarkets.

Brit fantasy artist sues James Cameron over Avatar world

Re: The last Airbender

Remote controlled artificial lifeforms to explore an alien planet - Call Me Joe, Poul Anderson. 1957.

Schwarzenegger says 'I'll be back' for Terminator 5 reboot

That's odd

I thought he'd given up being a Terminator and become a Dalek.

An Ex-terminator.

UK sitting on top of at least 50 years of shale gas – report

Sinking houses

Large areas around there have already sunk several feet from coal being mined from underneath them. What will happen to them when the gas gets taken out?

Ex-inmate at Chinese prison: We made airline headsets

Prison labour is a problem because the prison can undercut other suppliers by paying low or no wages and not bothering to provide decent (or safe?) working conditions.

So it tends to lead to fewer jobs and poorer pay and conditions in the area round the prison.

And that's without adding in the extended hours and forced intensive work described here.

Snowden dodges US agents in Moscow, skips out on flight

Re: It's just a matter of time

What puzzles me is why he didn't pick his refuge country first and go there before releasing his statement. Why make himself a target first?

The Rule of Law

The US talks about upholding the rule of law?

UN Convention Against Torture: Article 2

Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Tesla unveils battery-swapping tech for fast car charging

Re: They had better hope this doesn't get too popular

"You are assuming that they will not charge any of the batteries they have swapped out and will simply stock up until re-collected or sent to another station for collection by their owner."

I'm understanding from the story as written by El Reg that they will charge all of the batteries they have swapped out. But that these will then have to be held in stock or sent to another station because they will have to be returned to the original owner.

If that's wrong, please explain in the context of what the story is stating:

"The batteries that are swapped in are just loaners. Each swapping station will stock about 50 batteries, which drivers are expected eventually to return in exchange for their own, original batteries. Their batteries will be fully charged, but they'll have to pay for a second swap to get them back."

Re: They had better hope this doesn't get too popular

Those swapped out batteries are as I understand the story being held for a re-swap to their original owners. So can't be used for other customers. So they can service a maximum of 50 Tesla owners having swap-out batteries at any one time.

It might work if Tesla owners are extremely rare. As I said in the title, it had better not get too popular. Look at the numbers of cars through a busy filling station, and work out what proportion could be Tesla owners if the maximum is 50.

They had better hope this doesn't get too popular

"The batteries that are swapped in are just loaners. Each swapping station will stock about 50 batteries, which drivers are expected eventually to return in exchange for their own, original batteries."

That implies that once they have swapped out their 50 loaner batteries they have to wait for one of them to come back before they can serve their 51st customer.

At the average supermarket filling station on a reasonably busy day, how long would it take for them to get through 50 customers?

Leaked docs: GCHQ spooks secretly haul in more data than NSA

Re: Sadly, i suspected this was coming.....

It's standard practice for the US and UK to swap intelligence

I, for one, welcome our GIANT TITANIUM INSECT OVERLORDS

Mmm, Tasty Bogz!

(There doesn't seem to be a Jaeger icon)

NASA probe will ease through Saturn's ring to grab Earth snapshot

Re: Being a proud Aussie

No, the Earth will obstruct the view of Venus

House bill: 'Hey NASA, that asteroid retrieval plan? Fuggedaboutit'

Hey look we can prove climate change is rubbish - you haven't produced any more research to support it, ever since we cut all your funding to do the research!

UK telcos chuck another £1m at online child abuse watchdog

The Internet Witch Hunt Foundation have already cost me considerable time trying to find out why I couldn't get through to Wikipedia, when they decided that the entire site should be censored due to a single image they didn't like.

Now they have lots more funding to save us from ourselves.

Still I suppose it cuts down on the spare time they have to peer through their neighbours' windows to try to find something they can complain about having to see.

Anyone want to lay bets on how long before the mission creep starts and we get blocked from anything the government thinks it's better that we don't know?

Hubble spies unlikely planet being born in hostile neighborhood

Caused by a nearby sister star?

Possibly another star forming nearby at the same time could have caused enough of an instability to get part of the cloud to collapse? Especially as it's very far from the star so more vulnerable to interference from stellar neighbours.

I told you I'd be back: Arnie set for another career revival

He may have played Conan ...

But he must be about ready to play Cohen the Barbarian and the Silver Horde

Boffins fire up old dish to send interstellar SMS

But don't reverse the polarity!

You've seen the Large Hadron Collider. Now comes the HUGE Hadron Collider

Is that the best site?

"likely to be sited in Japan"

This thing is going to be huge, and need extremely accurate alignment. Isn't Japan rather too prone to earthquakes to be a suitable site for it?

US chief spook: Look, we only want to spy on 6.66 billion of you

Re: Carefully worded non-denial.

They can be ordered not to tell the truth, they can not be ordered to lie.

Re: International Outrage

The CIA and the NSA are indeed forbidden to spy on US citizens.

MI6 and GCHQ are forbidden to spy on UK citizens.

They just happen to share intelligence information with each other

Obama faces off China's prez: We can't be pals with all this cyber-theft

So is he claiming that the gigantic US intelligence apparatus is *not* spying on China? In that case what are they wasting all that money on?

Reseller Computacenter LITERALLY smokes out squatters from offices

Re: That trick could be dangerous

Quite. So if you deliberately persuade someone else that an alarm is fake, and it will be to their great disadvantage to leave the building, what do you deserve to get?

That trick could be dangerous

Driving them out by setting off the fire alarm is terribly funny - until someone assumes because of this that an alarm is fake, and gets caught in a real fire.

Copyright troll Prenda Law accused of seeding own torrents

Carrying on the best traditions of American lawyers

In the finest traditions of Canter and Siegel. Is there anything low enough that some American lawyer somewhere won't sink to it?

Spooks nicking your tech? What you need is THE CLOUD - NSA boss

Re: "Theft of intellectual property has resulted in the greatest transfer of wealth in history"

Greater than when William the Bastard stole the entire country of England?

Or when his descendants stole a couple of continents and large chunks of another, plus a sub-continent?

Space boffins, oil giants, nuke plants 'raided' by mystery code nasty

Only one of those is a known rogue state.

Who should play the next Doctor? Nominations needed!

John Cleese

See title

Signatures no good at protecting databases, says Juniper

So with this recognition and super-cookie technology you can definitely recognise one of the hundreds of zombie machines that the attacker is using?

Cameron eyes 'non legislative options' for more spook snoop powers

The government have decided that the best memorial to Lee Rigby is to take advantage of his death to destroy the freedom he was told he would be protecting.

Look out, fanbois! EVIL charger will inject FILTH into your iPHONE

Re: Physical access is always the problem

You don't need to get physical access to the device, or to make the user go somewhere. Just make the charger available and the users will do the job of connecting it up themselves.

Twitter, Facebook are 'a MENACE to society', says Turkey's PM

Re: "the worst menace to society"

The situation in Turkey is apparently rather more complicated

'Syrian Electronic Army' fails to crack Israeli water system

Major news

Some web sites were attacked. The attack failed.

Hey, that's a major news story. It can't be happening more often than, say, every few milliseconds.

Salesforce.com to reveal 'Company Communities'

Let me fix that for you

"put a business process into a worker's hands wherever they may roam and they'll be more likely to use it."

Put a business process into a worker's hands wherever they may roam and they'll never be able to get away from work and have time of their own.

IBM puts supercomputer Watson to work in ROBOT CALL CENTRE

Not difficult

It's very easy for a computer to be cleverer than a human being - when the human being is forced to mindlessly follow a script no matter how ridiculous it is or how inappropriate to the actual problem.

A backdoor into Skype for the Feds? You're joking...

Watch out for foreign governments

"any backdoor would be open to abuse by hackers, including foreign governments"

The government of the USA *is* a foreign government. Why should they have backdoors into software used in other countries, which judging by their past performance they are guaranteed to massively abuse?