Posts by bob

Britain leads world in police state survey

Quick

Can we get surveillance added as an olympic event in time for 2012? Would be nice for GBR to get a gold on the home turf.

Debbie Gibson battles Mega Shark and Giant Octopus

awesome

A frickin jet gets eaten by a frickin shark. IN MID AIR!!! How did no-one think of this before now? Spielberg must be sick as a dog for missing this one.

@Bassey - you're banned from this section for trying to make a serious comment about a film like this.

BBC botnet 'public interest' defence rubbished by top IT lawyer

its been said before

"..unethical in much the same way that breaking into homes to dramatise the risks of burglary is also a non-starter"

No its not. What lazy journalism. (As some have commented above.)

No one has complained. No harm was done to anyone. All that happened is a few thousand people who thought their computers were secure now realised they weren't. Hopefully most will be doing something about that now.

And "how dare they spend my license fee on funding russian hackers..." Should the BBC run every decision past every license payer? Its a fact that most people in this country who own a computer are unaware how vulnerable it is. The beeb spent a few thousand pounds opening millions of people's eyes - money well spent.

World's first proper flying car makes debut flight

fantastic

You're a bunch of negative gits. Its a flying car! You can drive it like a car, and fly it like a plane! Which bit of that doesn't sound like a bucket full of awesome to you?

Mathematica man brews 'AI' Google Killer™

personal vendetta

Wow, Ted, did Wolfram sleep with your GF or something? Your article reads like a personal attack rather than serious journalism.

What the guy is proposing would be the biggest change in how computers are used since the internet. Have you even considered what the implications of this are? Steve Jones (above) mentions some good uses of expert systems, but on a more everyday level, imagine you're re-naming files and your computer could see what you're doing, analyse the criteria you're using and offer to complete the task for you. Or you're sorting photos into folders, or a hundred other tedious tasks that an AI of even very limited intelligence could do for you. Imagine being able to tell your computer "I heard a new tune on the radio this morning - find out what it was and download it to my phone." You know - the kind of computer 80s sci fi thought we'd all have by now. The kind of work Wolfram is doing is moving us closer to that.

Whether he achieves his goal or not, the fact that he is thinking about these questions at all (rather than just flailing at anything he doesn't understand) automatically puts his intelligence an order of magnitude beyond yours. The fact that he created mathematica is an indication that he may have a shot at actually achieving it. But whether he does or not, I bet every morning he thanks his lucks stars that he didn't turn out to be a sour and embittered hack.

Have a nice day :-)

National Safety Council seeks total* cell-phone driving ban

The common sense approach

I have a long commute and I regularly use a hands free. To make a call, I either connect before I set off, or wait for a long, clear stretch of road before taking my eye off the road for the second it takes to glance at the phone to press the right quickdial key. I don't make or receive calls in built up areas, and when on the motorway or dual carriage way I pull into the slow lane before taking a call. But hey, according to some of the knee-jerk, bandwagon jumping muppets here I'm a lethal killer.

Sometimes, if conditions are favourable, I also exceed the speed limit. On dry motorways in light traffic and good visibility I might even drive at 90mph. And thats another situation where the same old arguments come out. I suppose its a wonder no one has died. Think of the children. And so on (I have also been known to have a drink from a cup of coffee or a bite from a sandwich, adjust my radio or eat chewing gum, all without endangering anyone at all, ever)

We need more common sense, not more laws. More laws give people an excuse for not thinking for themselves, when they should be assessing each situation on its merits and acting accordingly. We have all seen people driving incredibly dangerously but within the law, and a lot of you will have recieved fines and points for doing something against the law that endangered no one.

Lets have more well trained coppers making judgement calls based on observation, experience and common sense, and less automatic systems collecting stealth taxes from people safely and sensibly going about their business.

S60 knows where you're at

good product - doesn't need gps

I have installed the trial version, and I notice you can set times as well as locations, so for instance I can set it to change my profile to silent only at home, at the weekend, between midnight and 9:00 am, for an uninterupted lie-in.

@ Jimmy Floyd: It seems to be able to work from Cell tower info only, so I think the effect on battery life should be minimal

The tone of this article is a little cynical, but this is potentially a very useful ap.

ps. I have nothing to do with whoever developed this, just thought the reporting was a little unfair!

UK ISPs agree to menace their filesharing users

Fair Share

One of the strongest arguments the music industry puts forward is that piracy stops the artist being paid for their work. This argument only holds water if the artist is getting a fair cut - does anyone know roughly what percent of the price of a legal download goes to the artist? Is it the same from iTunes, Tesco, Play etc? How does it compare to CD? Anyone know?