Posts by JC 2

FCC ferrets around for spare spectrum

@ All You Can Eat?

20MB an hour may not seem like much, but you're only looking at the client side, not the spectrum saturation level if *everyone* is generating this much data simultaneously, over fair distances.

Dot Hill starts Software RAID

Weasel Words

"core logic chipset-based RAID solutions, which provide fewer features and are unable to meet the stringent demands of 24/7 server-class RAID technology."

Nevermind if anyone buying a low end server needs more than the "few" features, nor what they impose as the stringent demands those customers /must/ want.

I"m all for more features at lower cost, if implemented well and without introducing new bugs but this is putting the cart before the horse. Many would already want those low end $400 servers if they put LESS money into idle CPU cores and a little more into a beefy enough PSU to handle more drives, and a few more SATA ports onboard.

@ Well, that's just great!

AMD's primary interest is bound to be selling their processors, and ever faster versions to leave an idle core available for sw RAID. That AMD is interested could be a divergence from their former failed attempts.

Women spending more time at work - but less time working

All Nonsense

... and I will issue a report that people with their toes dyed green get more done every day regardless of all other factors. Report comes free with each bottle of green foot dye and this month we're offering free shipping and handling!!

Warning: Showers can seriously damage your health

Not Relevant

If you stand with your face under the shower head when you turn it on, the heart attack comes from that sudden blast of cold water not what's in it.

Intel to EU watchdogs: 'It's AMD's fault'

So Being The Enforcers Of Justice That They Are...

Certainly they're about to turn over the proceeds of this fine to AMD any day now.

Microsoft purges AutoRun from older Windows

Only A Matter Of Time Then,

... till malware starts to exploit XP's built-in disc burning engine so a virus writes itself to CD/DVD thus enabling it to continue Autorun(ning).

Now when I ran this patch on an XP box, why the heck did it need to spin up the half dozen sleeping hard drives instead of just writing the bloody files to the windows partition on the already awake drive? They really don't know how to do anything conservatively I suppose.

On a related note, I suppose we can forecast that they'll finally iron out all the major Win7 issues within the same period we waited for this fix *from them*, around 2016?

AMD Eyefinity promises 'six panel, one GPU' gaming

But howsit work?

Given a game doesn't generally have infinitely large textures we'll expect some sort of scaling, so it's reasonable to assume the video card doesn't need an equivalent performance improvement that it has historically moving from 800x600 to 1280x1024 and so on, but how much better is the visual quality going to be simply making something with a finite amount of detail ever-larger?

Hopefully it at least dithers but that only works for a certain magnification zoom beyond which everything starts looking disturbingly blurry. Will this mean game developers start scaling games to these huge pixel counts and ultimately that we all need Blu-Ray drives just to read a disc of sufficient capacity to store all this data?

Otherwise, I don't see all that much of an improvement in gaming unless you like to sit on the couch and have the screen several feet away. Today you can just scoot the monitor closer to you if you want a more immersive field of vision even though the aspect ratio is wrong in the corners but so it would be with several monitors on any traditional game not set up for tilted angle screens.

At least it's progress for the multi-window power users, and like anything else you have to have the feature for it to be reasonable for game developers to put work into supporting such a thing and since websites these days seem intent on taking up only the middle 10% of our wide screen monitors we can just stack monitors one on top of the other and see the whole webpage using binoculars.

Japanese CE firms partner on 'standard' CPU project

Smart CE

Thank goodness, finally a ray of hope our Blu-ray players, tvs and blenders won't one day all be running windows.

Bank of America demands thumbprint from armless bloke

Me too!

I'd have given them the finger too.

(I'll get my coat)

Music industry cooks UK government's piracy stats

That's Not The Worst Of It!

The worst part is not these cooked numbers, it's that they use the quantum leap in assuming that each person downloads "X" amount and every time it is a profit loss.

I'm all for new study, one that asks three simple questions:

1) Do you pirate anything the music industry holds copyright over?

Only those that answer yes become the new survey panel.

Of this panel the following question is asked:

2) Are you aware the music industry sells music?

Any that answer yes, we can conclude have chosen not to pay for the music and so there is $0.00 loss to the music industry.

3) If you were unaware that the music industry sells music, do you have the disposable income to be able to afford your share, as a fraction of the total losses the music industry claims, so that once you become aware of music for sale, you could buy enough to support their claimed losses?

Any that answer no, we can conclude are also removed from the potential pool of pirates causing losses.

What would you guess the remaining % of all citizens is, that is unaware they could buy music AND has the billions of pounds of money to spend on it? Rounding _UP_, I'd guess 1%.

Microsoft cuts down Chinese 'Tomato Garden'

@ So wheres the $$

The disparity in piracy in China vs elsewhere wouldn't begin to put a dent in the portion of the nat'l debt that the US owes China. Nor would it come close to the trade deficit because the US makes very little the rest of the world is eager to import (software aside and let's face it the last thing we in the US or EU want is for China to start doing all their software domestically.

If they can made a widget cheaper, soon enough they'll be able to make quality software cheaper. Not that it would need to be any particular level of quality remembering we're talking about windows, but in the grand scheme of things the few years head start MS gained a foothold in the PC market could easily be erased with successive decades.

US women protest for the right to bare

No no NO!

I for one agree women should have equal rights to go bare-chested in public IF men are allowed to, but on public property I feel neither should be allowed to, and on private property it should be up to the owner to make the call to the extent those not complying with owner's demands to vacate the premises without pause, should be subject to a fine.

What's the real issue here? No it's not religion, it's that men are horn-dogs. Half nude women are fairly seen as disruptive and men the far more aggressive pursuers. Law is not only meant to be "fair" in principle it is also meant to maintain order.

Have you seen the breasts on the women in typical 3rd world countries where they're typically topless? No wonder that breasts aren't seen as sexual, the state of health and physical beauty in most such places pales to the evoluntionary wonders that we have in the 1st and 2nd world. Part of that is also thanks to that old evil the bra. Let gravity have it's way with a pair of breasts and it'll cause sagging also associated with aging, making those women less sexually desirable in a primitive sense that through evidence of online pron, seems to be transcendent into an intellectual one as well.

I can't compel a woman to wear a bra nor would I want to, but I sure would like it if we kept a few boundaries for societal sexual conduct so there's none of that silliness with interpreting flirting, normal social interactions, and harassment.

Is it harassment to merely glance at a clothed woman a bit longer than usual, whether you find her attractive or not? How about if she is nude but for a bikini bottom? How much freedom of speech do you have when you feel like speaking about something innocent enough like the woman having a body akin to a work of art, expecting nothing to come of it? How will she know you really expect nothing to come of it?

In more primative societies there are also more primitive and severe punishments to keep people within social boundaries, these help foster an environment where being topless isn't so much of a problem. As for the rest of the world I see no clear answer except the easy and obvious one, topless only in designated areas or private property, though no inherent need to seclude that property from other public or private property, just a geographical rather than visual boundary.

However in the end I have to suspect these women *fighting* for the right to be topless don't care nearly as much about social injustice as would make you believe, they're just another group of people in the modern world with nothing better to do with their time so they picked up a cross and carry it where they can on their crusade... unfortunately a bit like the greeenie environmentalists so far as finding something to occupy otherwise boring lives.

Now to open another can of worms why is the issue toplessness? Must men and women wear pants of some sort? Is it really the genitals that provoke sexual behavior? I say no and can't remember walking up to a woman I had no interest in but after asking to see the genitals suddenly became enamored.

Sexuality can't be hidden away with a shirt or pants so let's try to move onward to other good reasons to be wearing a shirt. Anyone ever had a sunburn on their nipples? OUCH!

Blighty customers see some Windows 7 prices halved

@ fanboi

Indeed, it's always interesting what people will pay to feel *modern*, when in the end their technical prowess basically does little but cause more money spent on hardware and software to do the same things they've been doing for years.

Once we were rid of the win9x bluescreens, paying tribute to Redmond gets a little long in the tooth. Fair enough if it doesn't add much if anything to the cost of an OEM box to have it come with the current OS, but all the talk of buying new licenses for existing hardware is madness. Either you can get XP and Vista to work, or the OS isn't the problem.

US magazine to display Harry Potter-style moving images

Not Cost Effective - Except To Get The Word Out

Americhip's advertising dept must be throwing a lot of money into this campaign, don't expect to see embedded video players in your typical dirt-cheap publications any year soon.

Windows XP customers positive but split on Windows 7

Silly Survey

We all know how it goes... They'll keep running XP till they buy a new box that comes with Win7 on it. Positive reaction or not, if they were the type to jump onto the pay-money-to-upgrade-current-box-OS, they'd have already done so.

Isn't it funny the polls only try to answer one narrowly constructed question? Given the stats, if you threw in a couple questions about cheeseburgers and fries you could probably draw a conclusion about whether XP or Win7 users are more likely overweight.

NASA: Extraterrestrial sample holds ingredient for alien life

Maybe, OR...

Sure, maybe there's life out there. 10 trillion years ago or 10 trillion years in the future. The odds of anyone close enough to make contact within the same evolutionary lifecycle as us (intelligent enough to communicate beyond their own planet but not intelligent enough to survive or leave it yet) are quite low.

If 200 years from now someone out there hears a transmission from us and replies in kind, what would we do with the info anyway, send another 400 year round-trip message asking them to send us plans for a spaceship or just how the weather is, what do they look like, etc?

We could never go for such a thing, these days people get antzy if they order something over the 'net and it doesn't arrive in a week, or if they send a text message and don't get a reply by that evening. No way 800 years is going to be useful unless a miracle in lifespan occurs.

Woman charged with cyberbullying teen on Craigslist

Nip it in the bud

I'm all for these being felony cases. 40 year old women that can't leave teenage minors well enough alone ought to be put into prison. If she hasn't learned how to act by age 40, a STRONG message needs to be presented to her.

Think of it another way, people who would do this kind of thing don't just wake up one day from being social butterflies, they tend to have a long history of treating others like dirt, this is learned behavior that starts early and keeps up until someone puts a stop to it. Pity all those she came across before being caught this time.

This is what prisons are for, people who feel they have to elevate an attack on others for mere exchange of negatively slanted words. "Grow up" was right on target. Some people just don't like the truth and will fight until the end. Prison can be that end.

Police, Cameras, Pixellation

A Terrible Waste Of Time

If they'd just make it law that we're all required to wear bags over our heads at all times, none of this nonsense would be necessary!

Pirate Bay sinks under electric storm

@ AC 16:42

Let he who is innocent cast the first stone.

I'm fully in support of pirates being fined for the legal infraction, about $100 and restitution of the value of the work stolen (about $1 USD per MP3), so long as everyone else is held accountable for each instance (not just when caught as it is now but EVERY time) of speeding, jaywalking, and the myriad ways you can blow you nose and break some IP law at the same time.

Who without an agenda whines about teenagers sharing MP3s when you can go on any major road and see people arguably risking others' lives by the simple act of speeding, let alone the more serious ills in this world.

To focus on trivial things is to deliberately ignore the worst evils in this world, which when you get down to it is part of the problem in the first place. Musicians used to play captive for a private audience or what the public chose to pay after hearing them, there was always the option for that musician to find another line of work and the same is true today if they don't accept the pay for the job. Same with anyone else in the entertainment or content industry, we are not holding a gun to their heads and forcing their method of income.

World's first electric Chopper parks up

World's First?

Highly doubtful, though it might be the most technologically advanced (till the next thing comes along).

Microsoft gets personal on Windows 7 "show stopper" bug

Wait A Minute,

WHAT testing process?

The really funny part is when the MS shills claim that's not a flaw it's a feature.

Sure, it's a feature that your PC run out of memory. Didn't MS ever think to put limits on how much memory it's using? Seems like one of the first critical design parameters when they decided to *fix* the formerly working chkdsk.

Seems like Vista had a similarly incredible flaw where you couldn't even copy a few thousand small files without it taking days. Seems like Home Server wouldn't let you use one of the only real reasons to that can't be so easily bolted onto vanilla XP, the virtualized filesystem.

Wasn't there a statement that MS hadn't reproduced the problem on their 40 PCs? They have a mere 40 PCs, and yet none with the Intel chipset they try to blame? Oh wait, it's not even likely that it's isolated to one chipset, just one manufacturer's chipset that happens to be the most popular world-wide manufacturer of PC chipsets?

MS you really are lost. The average PC owner is not exposed to your PR damage control, they are not impressed when something is fundamentally broken right out of the box regardless of where the finger of blame is pointed. If this were an obscure bug or you were a poor startup, 2 guys working out of their garage I could see it. Someone is bound to write something like blah blah blah googlezillions of lines of code and every OS has bugs. To that I answer, if you can't bugcheck the new code then leave it alone, but this was not a flaw in programming, it was a design flaw in the way the revised chkdsk works.

Driver or no driver there should never be an unbounded limit on how much memory it can consume.

Alleged games console modder faces DMCA charges

@ Student? He's 27!

Nothing wrong with being a student at 27, 47, or even 77. Many people change careers over their lifetime and need or want proper training. The designation of student is merely one of either one's aspirations or how they spend the majority of their time.

Would it be better if everyone just thought to themselves that they are only "allowed" formal courses of study till 22 yo? Most 22 year olds are hardly finished learning, at that point they are merely better educated but not properly job trained at a uni vs a technical school.

Mozilla squashes critical bugs in Firefox

@ Same Old Same Old

There's no muddying of the waters at all.

Face the facts! Whether FF has as many bugs is irrelevant, the reason IE is less secure is that it is far and away the most widely TARGETED browser.

Which is less secure, a car with both doors unlocked while sitting in an unlocked barn in your back yard, or a car with only one door unlocked sitting in a shopping center parking lot?

IE users have always been, and for the next few years of MS OS dominance will continue to be, far far less secure and we haven't even considered the extra configurability, limitations in features that add to security from FF add-ons.

If you're used to using IE or forced to, good luck to you because it and the associated Outhouse Express are both still the most prevalent way that malware spreads. It could be claimed that it's because more people use this software but once again we're back to that being the reason why these softwares' flaws are targeted, and actually, exploited.

Being open and quick with fixes instead of sitting on them for over a year like MS has done till something is propagating the web and forcing their hand is the right way to minimize vulnerability.

Ever heard of "Patch Tuesday"? Note to Microsoft: If I wanted you to sit on patches, I'd bloody well ask you to. Let's apply that to other areas of life. How about "Bathing Saturday" or "Eating Wednesday"?

I'll get my coat, I've a lot more to write on Text Tuesday.

GGF says plenty of treasure for Pirate Bay purchase

Hunt Pirates Agreement

This whole mess smells a little foul. Why am I thinking special interest groups have been duped into shelling out a lot of money so 3rd parties can feign victory over nomadic P2P groupies?

Did GGF buy exclusive rights to TPB code? Even if they did what is to stop http://tpb2.com from popping up on the net tomorrow except for a squatter that makes them choose a more creative URL?

What has GGF really said? Little to nothing about "plenty of treasure". They're following the same ghost that content holders did all along, guessing that people who weren't willing to pay for content will suddenly start paying for it if it's not *free*.

It won't work. Inserting a middleman won't increase content owner profit, they're already a few million in the hole and can't even expect to keep a site up against DDOS attacks. or a constant barrage of lawsuits when they find they can't effectively police the content, but with them declaring a for-profit business they open their pocketbooks to more lawsuits.

This has all been written before, but again we're reminded of the impossible claims by GGF.

Bill Gates: Tough US immigration stance a 'huge mistake'

Double Faced

Gates thinks we should import the technically savvy yet simultaneously thinks other countries should elevate their own tech.

If we in the US don't allow these immigrants in doesn't that more likely keep them in their own country to further that region's technology?

Personally I feel we shouldn't make exceptions. Let the immigrants in whether they be shoeshine boys or 2nd cousin to Einstein, or don't let them in. Apply the same standard to all.

MoD sticks with 'most decrepit browser in the world'

Spoiled

While I use Firefox, I support users on IE6 and it's simply NOT A PROBLEM.

IE6 can be secure, you want a firewall either way. Who is it that whines about IE6? Clueless people who didn't know how to run security so they kept getting stung. Others long ago developed in-house strategy and solutions during the IE6 era so by now switching to a more modern browser is just more time spent. Time = money.

I do feel the workers should be given a choice in an ideal world, but if we want to talk ideals then ideally I'd rather be at the pub than working so what would I care?

Metallica sticksman gloats over Napster downfall

The REAL Question

... is why is anyone giving him the time of day? Who gives a hoot what Lars thinks, when listening to the music nobody was under the impression it was full of deep thoughts, nor at any point later.

Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD

Benchmarks Don't Back Conclusion

Besides low latency, the testing showed them performing fairly poorly. The BEST result for the 2GB file transfers, a fairly undemanding linear process, was 30.3 seconds. That's 68MB/s.

Today's 500GB per platter, _5200RPM(even!)_ mechanical HDDs can achieve that (for more than the first 128GB of their outer platter capacity) or come pretty close to this average for the rest of the platter(s), and give it to you at about $90/TB.

As first mentioned, this does not consider latency so it's an apples:oranges comparison but I have to agree with the article that there is little reason to buy this late entry into the SSD market, at least it uses the Indilinx controller but SSD prices should be going down not staying the same with more market competition, let alone the doubling of flash density.

I suspect price fixing in the flash market. We saw DDR2 for under $1 a chip, even practically free when on a finished product with a rebate, when capacity was focused on DDR2 production. Now that more capacity switched to flash production the cost of flash should have similarly decreased.

Steve Jobs snubs LSD daddy

Jobs May Have No Interest In Quack Study

That Jobs took LSD does not in itself make him apt to pay for research into psychotherapeutic uses if he does not believe that is an appropriate use of LSD.

LSD is considered mind-expanding, and recreational, but it is also known that those who are in a fragile state of mind should not take LSD (even if it's arguable that anyone else might have the choice to do so ethically or not).

Merely having in common the fact that he and someone else advocated use of LSD for a different purpose, this doesn't create a life-long brotherhood of obligation when it's felt the money could be better spent on something else.

Suggesting it's of benefit in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy would be a bit like suggesting that alcohol is of benefit to your toddler when s/he is trying to learn to walk.

Teen cuffed for bomb threat webcam pay-per-view

@Psymon

They'll refer to a university campus like that because some unis have multiple campuses. The general format is university name + "in" or "at", etc, then the geographical location or landmark name for the campus.

HTML5's Flash and Silverlight 'killer' potential chopped

Dumb To Ask

The problem was asking these companies what they want instead of telling them what they get. While that might cause some of them to not support the standard, it's better to have a full standard that someone refuses to support rather than an incomplete standard that nobody can support because the feature is missing!

Since H.264 is far too expensive, Ogg Theora is the obvious choice if it must be one or the other. Is it too late to write this back into the spec?

Paris, because things go right over her head too.

Google laying off more 'second class citizens'?

@ It's all bing.com

Don't be silly, only prontards wanted a gander at the animated movie clip hits, now it's back to usual for the rest of the netizens, searching with Google.

What we're seeing with Google is simply the natural, normal result of any company growing quite rapidly. They cast several lines into the water and pull back those that don't bear fish.

That doesn't mean Google does no evil by any stretch, but who really believed this marketing blurb in the first place? For now their services are still worth the price paid, which is almost free if you're savvy enough to block most advertisements.

Jammie Thomas calls for file-sharing trial #3

The Amazing Part...

... is that the courts need babysitters so bad that the ludicrousness of this award amount didn't occur to them at the time.

On the other hand, if the damages are actually incalculable as claimed then we have no option but to fall back on the current market value which was supposed as $1.29 each, or in the face of a staggering $1.92m alternative, round it off to $0 per song.

What the content holders still sorely lack is not just evidence they suffer any losses from filesharing, but the balls to suggest that if filesharers didn't get these tracks from Ms. Thomas, that they'd have just said "oh well" and given up.

It's high time we face that fact that no one individual filesharer who is sharing things already released to the wild (even if by illegal sharing), is actually causing damages so long as other sources remain present. You can't punish one person for what others do and pretend you are upholding justice for very long.

Ten of the best... Core i7 CPU coolers

Who Really Cares?

Many decent motherboards have fan throttling circuits to reduce noise, and many of us may overclock but don't care about squeezing the last 3% performance out of a system so ultimately there are three main factors against which the rest are trivia:

1) Wussit cost?

2) Decent long-life fan or cheap sleeve bearing crap?

3) How long's it take to clean the dust out? Some of these sinks are designed by idiots who never bothered to run them long enough to realize you have to pull the entire heatsink out and tediously pick at the dust to clean it, AND that they build up dust faster as well. You can opt for a filtered case to cut down on this maintenance issue, but then you have to clean the filters out all the more often or else replace room-air filters.

I have to agree about the northbridge heatsink issue one person mentioned, in that the ideal heatsink will blow some air towards the heatsink, but I'd have to disagree with another poster that it's necessarily a tradeoff of a quiet fan and needing a 2nd fan, or a louder fan which isn't necessarily true.

Also, most of them cannot have a large case fan effectively pointed at them but they dont need one, if your board and CPU 'sink don't allow for quiet cooling all you have to do is use your preferred method of fan speed reduction for a 2nd fan you strap on.

That fan does not need to be large, there are no motherboards that start out with passive chipset sinks which won't be cooled effectively enough with a sub-1500 RPM, 40 x 20mm fan which is a nearly inaudible if not totally inaudible (once the case panel is put back on) noise level. They simply don't produce enough heat to need anything more unless you're running in a quite inhospitably high ambient temperature, in which case you have to address entire system cooling as merely pointing another fan at the chipset won't cut it.

Sony preps hi-res Atom N netbook

Fail

Never wanted to watch HD video on a low spec system, don't see that changing any time soon. This'll be used for web surfing which it fails at with the screen dimensions it has, either make it a swivel screen so you can use it or put in a blu-ray drive and powerful enough CPU so it'll decode when formats the integrated video won't handle are tried, so you can make proper use of the thing as a movie viewer since there's little else the screen is good for at present.

Amazon affiliates nixed in two more states

@ California

Amazon is not aiding and abetting, the affiliates are not the ones actually selling the merchandise.

If you live in a state where Amazon has a physical presence, you will be charged sales tax if you purchase something from Amazon, period.

The only wrinkle is if an affiliate is in a state Amazon does not have a physical presence in, by normal state laws Amazon was not required to collect taxes but now some of the states are getting greedy so consumers in these states simply bear in mind that tax and buy elsewhere to avoid it when it results in a lower total price.

Pirate Bay users go overboard as new owners dangle cash

Two Sides To It

I totally agree that it's pointless for them now to try and coddle users abandoning ship and sugar-coat the reality of the situation trying to preserve the dubious market value of the 'site, but on the other hand it's a bit senseless for the users to be calling them sellouts.

What did they expect, that if the users wanted TPB to go on forever that somehow obligated people who donated their time to be a slave to these users?

The site was going down and they took advantage of an excessive offer. I can't fault them for that as they could have just passed on it and never seen any other offer remotely close to the selling price. What I would take issue with is them keeping the majority of the money.

IMO they should pay off their legal obligations, have a bit of pocket money so they don't go away empty handed, and either use the rest to pay legal fees for those the RIAA/MPAA pursues via trust fund or give it to charity.

One thing that does seem certain is that TPB couldn't go on like this forever. Whether it was next month or next year there is just too much political pressure mounting for any 1st world nation to allow such a spotlighted website to continue operating as they have.

Rogue Atlantis knob removed by hand

@ American Car Bashers

The thing to remember is cost versus size. You can pay too much for a tiny car and get good fuel economy, can get something more mechanically complex that is more difficult to repair yourself. Mentioning exotic cars misses the point since they are a quite small % of the cars on the roads.

Not all areas in the US are even close to flat, but for those that are there is little point in buying car with harsher handling. US automakers targeted the market including the roads, the buyer preferences, gasoline costs, and the desired level of interior quality versus price. They apparently did fairly well as corps like GM and Ford have been quite popular globally. By the same token several European cars sell well in the States, that's just how a global market works.

The often ignored factor in car reliability is that someone with more disposable income, enough they will pay more for a smaller car, has more income to put towards maintenance so of course the car will last longer if treated properly. Same can be said for American cars treated well, they'll last over 20 years which is longer than most people want to own the same car.

As for a large car being a problem to park, it's all a matter of what you're used to and/or the parking situation. Where there are more large cars people leave larger areas for parking. With all the trucks and SUVs in the US, parking the largest sedans is not a problem at all as there is more than enough space.

As for US cars being automatics, most Americans consider someone driving a manual to be either childish in trying to act like they have a sports car when they don't, or too poor to afford an automatic. It's considered rather crude to have to constantly, manually shift gears and truth be told manuals today do not get much better fuel efficiency because the testing is using a far more conservative shift pattern than the typical driver uses, and with more recent efficiency mandates the auto manufacturers have tweaked automatics to shift nearer the most fuel efficient point possible. As with the other areas of our lives computers can do things as well as a human.

For a sports car on the other hand a good manual transmission is useful to handle the higher torque, but since most people aren't driving sports cars they should be considered an aside.

Unbelievable

"Use hand pressure"... LOL! What'll those boffins think of next?

As for the American car joke, it's a few decades too late for that misinformed stereotype. Americans cars are now BETTER than the average European car, by being equal quality for the same price but in a size large enough you can actually fit more than two midgets inside.

Firefox 3.5 - it's not a 'web upgrade'

It is exactly right!

Those who think in terms of minimal new features or say "oh but such and such browser had them" are totally missing the point.

This is genius development work, unlike most other developers Firefox's team has finally grasped that they should fix and refine what is there before bolting on more bugs and half-finished beta features.

If only MS would take that hint with their entire software market but what do they care so long as they're getting paid?

Europe won't pay more for Windows 7. Really!

@ Thanks A Lot

Surely there's no problem. Get an upgrade version compatible with the key given for the full version then snag an alternate installation disc or make your own. Not quite rocket science though it's rather redundant taking an existing Vista PC and "upgrading" it to Win7, as if it'll really matter much. You're better off just leaving the OS on it that it started out with, with one past exception being the late adopters of WinME after Win2k or XP had arrived.

As for having IE non-integral consider it the blessing we've always wanted. If all they wanted was to prevent IE from running they'd simply get rid of the executable and disassociate the otherwise associated file extensions, but if it takes this long to do it we can hope the entire HTML engine is gone so also the large mountain of vulnerabilities that result from it are gone as well.

Now that the EU has things sorted out, how about a full version at upgrade price for the rest of the world MS? Seems only the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Rolling Stone allegedly DDoSed for negative story

@ Why?

Some people don't understand that you can't so easily get rid of files off a flash drive.

If you delete them, they can still be recovered as was already known about many kinds of media but with flash memory even if you try to overwrite the file you have no reasonable expectation that typical overwriting software will circumvent the wear-leveling of the flash controller. It'll do what appears to be overwriting then simply re-reading all sectors later the data may be retrieved unless the flash drive is either destroyed or filled with enough data to be sure the old was overwritten.

Even then someone will come along and say there are ways to detect what was previously written but in the real world such measures are more of a theory based on simple principles, not a working viable method if the data was actually overwritten on flash.

The better question is why was the bot ever stored on any media the perpetrator had at all without strong encryption. There was no assurance that days or weeks, letalone several months later would be a period available to dispose of the evidence. Feds don't generally give advanced warning before the knock on the door in the wee morning hours.

Pirate Bay website sinks as 'sell out' accusations fly

@ @Damn!

Nope, walking into a brick 'n mortar store and taking a CD or DVD is not at all the same thing. You are then depriving the store of that physical product, it is then gone, not available for sale to someone else.

On the internet on the other hand you are only reproducing a copy of data. Have you ever loaded a website that was copyrighted in your browser? BEFORE you went there with your browser did you have a way to know if they specifically granted an allowance for the COPYING of the files and displaying them in your browser?

You might say we can assume it is implied we can since it's a website, but so we can say we assume it's ok to copy an MP3 to put it on an MP3 player because that's what it's for, the assumed purpose of an MP3.

This does not mean I am trying to justify file-sharing of copyrighted content. As with downloading a website in your browser you cannot expect to recreate, to UPLOAD that website to someone else and equivalently those being pursued by the MPAA, RIAA, etc, are those uploading the content for the most part.

Samsung ML-1640

@ Power Consumption

Good grief Chris, no we don't add up all power consumption of everything into the TCO because you can TURN IT OFF any, and I mean ANY time you like.

It's pointless to mention the power consumption when for it's class it is among the least power hungry. I suppose we'd all go back to using mechanical typewriters because it's less power consumption?

What uses more power is surfing the internet to inject comments about power consumption. Net power loss in pausing to consider it.

Microsoft's Bing in travel trouble

What's the fuss?

MS does this all the time, aren't we numb to it by now?

Electric plane takes to the skies

Fairly Limited Capacity

On the Yuneec website we can see some figures showing a fairly limited capacity.

Max Takeoff Weight - 946 lbs

Smaller 6 pack battery - 159 lbs

Empty Weight (w/o battery) - 392 lbs

Since it's a two seater, calculating out the max average weight of each person with no cargo at all it comes to a mere 198 lbs.

If it has the 10 pack battery instead of 6 pack that drops to 145 lbs /person. Granted it's a niche product but they should've never put a 2nd seat in with so little margin, IMO, and I haven't even factored for the weight of a parachute or two, flotation device, etc, and a few pints of ale onboard.

Ecopocalypse causes giant fish ears

Smart Fish

... all the better to hear Obama coming my pretty...

Rogue knob could ground space shuttle Atlantis

Some Engineers

There are two obvious options. Slap a piece of duct-tape onto the windshield and call it fixed, or use a larger hammer to beat the windshield off, rip the knob out and install new windshield.

6 months is simply outrageous, at worst I could see it taking 1/3rd that to fab a new windshield (if they really don't have another lying about which would be surprising) , then another day to install and a week to test.

Coincidence? I think not.

AFAIK, this problem never happened until Windows Vista came along.