Posts by Stuart

Boeing: Raygun dreadnoughts will rule the oceans by 2019

Pointless

Another pointless peice of kit, only useful for fighting the kind of opposition that the US isn't planning on fighting (i.e. people who can actually shoot back).

Carbon Trust: Rooftop windmills are eco own-goal

Stupid idea anyway

Micro-generation with wind is an idiotic idea anyway. rather than pay $10k for a small, inefficient turbine that sits on my roof, I'd much rather pay my money, and have it lumped with another few hundred people's money, to pay for a much more efficient bloody great turbine that sits in the middle of a field, on the top of a hill, somewhere where I don't have to look at it. As long as I get my share of the money/power it generates, what does it matter?

MS takes Windows 3.11 out of embed to put to bed

You think that's bad....

One major mobile phone manufacturer still uses HP Basic interpreted code, running on MS DOS, for its mobile phone test equipment - including anything new. We were shipping them 1Ghz Celerons with 512Mb of ram, to run this on. Nice.

Maven and Eclipse strive for Visual Studio 'power'

Nonsense

JBuilder was better for GUI development than Visual studio, almost ten years ago, and still is better. Netbeans is better, and has been steadily improving.

The fact is, Visual Studio's dominance owes more to corporate inertia and risk aversion than it does to any failing of alternatives. It'd be a cold day in hell before most companies would switch from using a product that they understand, and all the staff have years of experience using, to anything else, no matter how good it is.

UK game-development degrees not up to snuff, claims industry

Not just the games industry

University software engineering degrees certainly don't produce good software engineers; indeed, many people manage to obtain a 2:1 or better degree in software engineering without knowing the basics of object oriented design, and with no real experience of programming. I recently interviewed three people with 1sts in software engineering from leading universities, none of whom could tell me how to extract a byte of data from a 32 bit integer.

Having said that, by all accounts the games industry is badly paid, has long hours, and treats its staff like turd, so it's probably for the best if naive graduates don't get suckered into it.

UK developer trio accused of game plagiarism

In fairness...

It is debatable whether images of computer generated scenes generated by 3d engines are protected by copyright, when the viewpoint is free to move, since the creator of the 3d engine is clearly not artistically involved (though, the model itself is protected). Of course, you'd need to go to court to argue this, and there's a fair chance you'd lose :P

Climate profs 'can't recommend' enormo-space-parasol

Why would we want to build a space parasol?

A space sun shield is a stupid way of cooling the Earth. It would be far far cheaper to just paint a large section of the planet white.

Id Dooms gamers to new shoot-'em-up sequel

wii version

John Carmack has been complaining about the PS3 only having 256 Megs of main memory, so I don't think they're gonna much like the wii's 88 megs - not so good for the "Mega texture" technology they've devloped :P Having said that, if anyone can make a 3d shooter that runs smooth and looks pretty on the wii, it would be ID.

Boffin says Astronomical Unit should be binned

What a load of tosh

Complete garbage.

AU are never used for serious scientific measurement, and anybody who does should be sacked.

They exist for illustrative/comparitive purposes, i.e. Mars is aprox 1.5 AU means it orbits 50% further form the sun than the Earth. Mars orbitting at 220 billion meters from the Sun doesn't mean anything to anybody.

Intel wins at Monopoly, grabs $60bn unfairly - says...

Intel isn't a monopoly

Intel doesn't have the monopoly power to set the price of it's CPU's above the market level, because it does competition, and the products are more or less undifferentiated, as far as most consumers are concerned.

US cracks down on mod-chippers

'Fraid so...

The digital millenium copyright act in the US makes it an offence to make or possess a device which can render inoperative copy protection mechanisms.

Stealth bombers to get bunker-nobbling weapons

No...

Iran is a relatively democratic and westernized nation, with an educated urban population.

The US wants to attack them, because they still bear a grudge for having their puppet dictatorship overthrown, and replaced by a popular regime that is prepared to stand up for itself against continuing US/Israeli economic and military imperialism in the region.

It would be perfectly reasonable and understandable for Iran to want to possess a nuclear capability - it will garauntee it's security and lift the ever-looming threat of attack or invasion posed by Israel and the US.

It would be very surprising if Iran was not building as heavily fotified a position as possible, since an attack by Israel is almost certain should they get near a position of possesing a nuclear capability.

Physics GCSE: 'insultingly easy, non scientific, and vague'

The problem is...

...that in the past, only a priviliged and talented few went on to study A levels and go on to university. Many people left school without any, or with very few, qualifications.

Since then, the general populace hasn't gotten any smarter, but now the majority of children go on to study A levels, and most expect to attend university.

As a result, A levels and GCSE's have had to get 'easier', so that they remain aimed at the level of the average student who takes them.

If, as these people are suggesting, the qualifications were set-back to the difficulty level of the past, consider what the result would be - 80% of students failing, with only a small elite of children achieving passing grades.

The truth is that the majority of children find today's GCSE's reasonably challenging - even if they are not particularly taxing for the brightest students. The only way to fix this would be to move over to a two-tier system, with more challenging courses for brighter pupils; exactly what the comprehensive system was meant to eliminate!

No charges for webcam suicide audience

re: Er 'and on

The crime that would have been considered is aiding and abbeting/incitement. It is a crime to encourage someone to do something illegal, in the UK (even if they don't actually go ahead and do it).Suicide is illegal - hence encouraging someone to commit suicide is illegal.

However, criminal intent would have had to be shown, which is probably why the CPS would probably have given up on securing a conviction; generally one wouldn't expect a prosecution to be succesful unless someone actually profitted (i.e. there would have had to be a motive, other than chatroom boredom).

Armed cops in Lara Croft bust action

He should be glad

At least he wasn't carrying a table leg...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Stanley

'Gay or straight?' ruling looks bad for all US social networking sites

Right decision in my opinion

It seems to me that the site was blatently breaking the relevant law, by assisting/allowing/encouraging illegal discrimination. Rather than acting as a 'billboard' owner, the site was prompting users for information which could then be used to discriminate automatically - hardly an activity deserving legal protection.

The site should have removed the requirement to enter gender/sexual preference/race information, and the ability to filter based on it, to meet the standards set by the law.

Chemical weapons are not WMDs

MRLS

A single MRLS firing cluster munitions can destroy _everything within one square kilometer in one salvo. That _is a weapon of mass destruction.