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Tobacco giants don't get to decide who does research on smoking. Why does Facebook get to dictate studies?

Re: Oh Really?

"Facebook isn't "The Media" or "The Press"."

Does Facebook emulate the press, or does the press emulate Facebook?

"At least in the times before Facebook, we had to actively seek out these people's personal websites or individual blogs in order to read their dribble"

As against opening a newspaper or switching on the television? Either you didn't understand that the original poster was comparing Facebook and the media as purveyors of misinformation and pointing out that, functionally, the end result is the same regardless of who carries the information, or you deliberately tried to suggest there was no similarity, nothing to see, please move along...

Either way, large parts of the UK media are proving that, once again, they consider their own agenda more important than their job of reporting facts and not just their own opinions.

Scientists took cues from helicopter seeds to invent tiny microchips that float on wind

rEvolution

Anyone else remember the slightly dodgy post-apocalyptic "drama" about the world without electricity? Well, obviously by "the world" I do mean it was all about America, the US in particular - who it turned out had caused the whole sorry mess in the first place. And then had a chance to fix it but decided they liked nobody ever being able to generate electricity again...

Hmm, using pseudoscience and moral blackmail to force the world back to the Stone Age - now that I think about it, I wonder if the show was the inspiration for Extinction Rebellion ??

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

You have gotta be SWATting me.

"but he's age being under the responsibility threshold should count towards some mitigation"

Why? In a world where 3- and 4-year olds are apparently self-aware and intelligent enough to decide they want gender reassignment surgery, how old do you need to be to realise that sending SWAT teams to somebody's address - especially if you have explicitly told them the person is armed and will resist - is likely to end in a very bad way?

If he's smart enough to work out which Twitter handles are the most valuable for his purposes, and he can work out how to get a group of like-minded thugs to go along with his plan, and he can work out where to get addresses, telephone numbers etc, then how do you figure his age has any relevance on how guilty the little piece of human excrement is? If it had been the first and only thig he did, and it had been to a "random stranger", then maybe - just maybe - he could claim to have not fully understood the potential consequences of his actions. But as it was part of an ongoing campaign - which only ended prematurely as it did because the victim DIED - there is absolutely no room for doubt that Sonderman knew exactly what he was doing. Five years is nowhere near long enough, especially if you remember Herring wasn't his only target.

Still think his age is any sort of defence?

United, Mesa airlines order 200 electric 19-seater planes for short-hop flights

What's that, London to Manchester?

"up to" 250 miles sounds good but it won't all be in the air - don't forget all that trundling along taxiways and aprons, I assume the engines won't consume power unless actually moving, like for cars? Although I wouldn't be too impressed to see the props keep stopping and starting as we move from terminal to runway...

Any idea how much power will be available for in-flight entertainment? Or even lighting/heating the cabin... Self-loading cargo tends to demand both.

Mines the one with the "I was a Fitter before Pontius was a Pilot" and "We never forget you have a choice" patches...

Leaked Apple memo tells employees that they'll be coming into the office at least 3 days a week from September

Re: Tough Call

A git is an awkward or obtuse person - it looks like Apple has a lot of gits. The word has been around a lot longer than some dodgy* data repository ;-).

*poetic licence - if it was dodgy, people would not use it and it would not be as successful as it is.

Hmmmmm, how to cool that overheating CPU, if only there was a solution...

no such thing as a stupid question?

I always tell anyone unlucky enough to have me train/tutor/mentor them, "The only really stupid question is the one you don't know the answer to but don't ask because someone said "everybody knows that!" - you don't know so there is a good possibility other people don't know either.

Asking questions is never stupid if you do not know or are not sure - not asking them can be very stupid indeed.

Hubble Space Telescope may now depend on a computer that hasn't booted since 2009

Re: The mirror replacement spacewalk was streamed.

Maybe they hoped it might be superseded by a bigger, more capable model before that became an issue?

FIJAGH.

MI5 still risks breaking the law on surveillance data through poor controls – years after it was first warned

Re: Get a grip....the authorities are breaking the law.....and not keeping us safe either.....

AC, "EVERY RECENT OUTRAGE" was also committed by someone who claimed to be committing their crimes because of their religion. Are you suggesting that the people who say the authorities should not be allowed to monitor people who follow certain religions might be wrong? (Note: yesterday, literally billions of Muslims did NOT commit atrocities. What does that say about those who use their religion as an excuse?)

And which is why I said "...TRYING to keep the streets safe..." - the Security Services don't have access to 'Minority Report'-style precognitives so have to rely on the limited resources they have available. Diverting more people and (taxpayer, as you pointed out) money to box-ticking and away from the reason they exist in the first place (protecting us) doesn't seem a fair trade to me. It's hard enough to keep the training records for a department of 150 people in an office building up-to-date, how hard do you think it is for an organisation the size of MI5 to keep everybody and their records up to date - especially when some of those people are not exactly in a position to attend the latest Equality and Diversity training on why it is a Hate Crime to "mis-gender" someone - do you have evidence of exactly which training has or has not been signed off because there is a huge difference between the ins and outs of GDPR and the evacuation procedures for the specific building you work in - except both are only a checkbox on the Training Record... and either counts as a "fail" in the report.

As for terrorists being out of prison "under licence", do you really know what that means? The UK is both fortunate and unfortunate to have a legal system where convicted criminals in prison can be granted parole *if they promise to obey the law in the future*. Fortunate because people who have genuinely seen the error of their ways and will be law-abiding citizens from now on can be released early as a gesture of good faith - if they break the law again before their original sentence would have been served, back they go. Unfortunate because people can - and do - promise to behave but then go straight back to their life of crime. What do you suggest, punish those who have reformed simply because there will always be people who cannot "play well with others"?

Is that it?

If that list of "Recommendations MI5 hasn't complied with" is it, then what the problem? Unless I'm missing something, that little lot boils down to "MI5 can't prove everyone has had all the most recent legal training" (points 2 and 3), "MI5 haven't thrown a bucketload of money at the lawyers" (point 4) and "MI5 haven't handed information to the civil service that could be used to identify sources when (not if) someone flaps their gums because they disagree with something Box or the Government did and want to embarrass them without giving a damn about giving away secrets" (point 11).

If that really is the sum of the things that have got the pencil-pushers at the Home Office in such a tailspin then they should be ashamed of themselves - which is more important, trying to keep the streets safe for everyone or proving that James Bond can quote Section 3, Subsection 4, Paragraph 5, points 3-17 of the Terrorist Protection Bill and knows not to copy-and-paste from one warrant request to another (and just how many ways are there to say "We know this person is up to no good but we need to prove it before the do-gooders set them free on a technicality - and the blighter goes off and does something a tad unpleasant")?

Besides, since when did completing the paperwork prove anything? Last I heard, civil servants were supposed to be bound by all sorts of confidentiality and secrecy legislation but that doesn't stop them gobbing off when someone says something they don't like...

No digital equivalent to the impulse aisle found as online grocery shoppers buy fewer sweet treats than in real life

Treats? I never ordered these "advisors" or whatever they call themselves either.

Instead of trying to improve my lifestyle by making my life as miserable as theirs seem to be, maybe these so-called "experts" could just Foxtrot Oscar and let me enjoy getting fat and old in my own way? If I want some overpaid self-important mouthpiece like Jamie Oliver telling me what I can and cannot eat then I will ask them. Until then, they can take their nutritional expertise and stick it where the sun don't shine.

Now that Trump is useless to Zuckerberg, ex-president is exiled from Facebook for two years, possibly indefinitely

I welcome our new Social Media Overlords

and eagerly look forwards to them telling me who to vote for. Anyone they recommend will immediately be removed from my list of people to vote for, and anyone with a large amount of Upvotes or Likes (or whatever their equivalent system is) will go on the "think very carefully" list.

I find it rather amusing that so many commentards remark on the (alleged) stupidity of Social Media users then go on and say almost the exact same things as those Social Media users they have just been nasty about.

European Parliament's data adequacy objection: Doubts cast on UK's commitment to privacy protection

EU Commision <> EU Parliament

The Commission is - or is allegedly - composed of decision makers with subject matter experts as advisors. The Parliament is a bunch of self-elected, self-serving politicians with an axe to grind and a vested interest in "persuading" organisations - especially financial service institutions - to leave the UK and set up business in EU nations (normally but not always France and Germany).

The Commission says what the UK have is adequate (not perfect). The politicians disagree.

Quelle surprise.

Facial recog firm Clearview hit with complaints in France, Austria, Italy, Greece and the UK

Re: Copyright as well as data protection

"I would think about $100 per infringement would be fair compensation to the copyright holders? "

Unfortunately those "copyright holders" would be the apps Clearview acquired the images from, not the people who took the pics in the first place. So all that money would be split between the lawyers and the Social Media companies who suffered such a great loss of their private data.

Damn, where's that Sarcasm tag gone.

Re: Clearview provides search services to law enforcement agencies

Upvoted for pointing out the idiocy of removing ALL images from their database, but the problem is that most of those images will be of people who have not and do not intend to go out and commit crime. Clearview should not be allowed to profit off sharing MY image with law enforcement groups on the off-chance I might, one day, break the law.

It is not just "leftist crap", it is a valid concern for the law-abiding amongst us and on top of which it's a a damn liberty - why should they get all the money?

Whoop! Robot/human high-fives all round! Oh, my fingers have disintegrated

You want the Syrius Cybernetics Corp?

Because *this* is how you get the Sirius Cybernetics Corp.

Or the Frogstar Robots, and I'm not too sure which would be worse.

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

The request for the new staircase

Is in the filing cabinet. In the Basement. Behind the sign saying "Beware of the Leopard". Beside the request for the new Basement lights.

And the request for a new staircase down to the basement...

Mine's a pan-galactic gargle-blaster, thank you.

Be careful, 007. It’s just had a new coat of paint: Today is D-day for would-be Qs to apply to MI6

They could tell you, but then they would have to "terminate you with extreme prejudice" as they used to say.

Mine's the one with "The Bluffers Guide to Espionage" in the lining...

Big red buttons and very bad language: A primer for life in the IT world

Re: Flashing leds on PDP-11

I think they were "grain-of-wheat" incandescent lamps not LEDs - and bulbs are what you plant to grow vegetables! (or that's one of my training officers repeatedly told us whenever anyone called a lamp a 'bulb'...)

Re: Replacement hardware?

In the UK, records are supposed to be kept for something like [(useful life of airframe)+50 years] in case of any questions arising. Which is fine, you can keep that room full of 2400ft mag tapes from your ICL systems for quite a while. Of course, finding a tape drive and a computer that can still read them might be a bit more problematic...

(not to mention problems like bleed-through, heat/moisture damage, the effects of an air traffic control radar just over the road, and all those million-and-one "minor" issues the beancounters conveniently ignored...)

All that Lego has a purpose: Researchers find that spatial memory improves kids' mathematical powers

Education for the masses?

If you can work out how long it will take you to get to a destination, you are doing maths. If you can get from where you started to where you wanted to end up without hitting anything then you are doing maths (someone/something hitting you doesn't necessarily mean *you* failed). Hacks me off no end when someone thinks that, because they can't write down the "correct" sequence of operations to do "real maths" that they cannot *do* maths.

Schools should spend less time pretending they can teach children everything they need to know and concentrate on giving them the tools to learn for themselves and the curiosity to want to learn.

Any society that allows itself to fall into the trap that schools can (or should) teach everything you will ever need to know is setting themselves up for trouble - it's how you end up with Cancel Culture and statues of Sir Isaac Newton being torn down and his name erased from the history books because he didn't do enough to fight racism and slavery.

New IETF draft reveals Egyptians invented pyramids to sharpen razor blades

Re: Reiki

If you have ever had a Reiki 'practitioner' squeeze your foot and felt something go all weird* in your back, you wouldn't be so quick to mock. It might not solve world hunger or stop missiles unexpectedly turning into bowls of petunias but it can be very relaxing...

* a sort of 'crunch' followed by a pleasant warmth that spread slowly. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in *your* philosophies...

Preliminary report on Texas Tesla crash finds Autosteer was 'not available' along road where both passengers died

Re: Into the rear seat?

"But getting into the back seat from the driver's seat in most modern vehicles requires quite a bit of acrobatics. Not impossible for a sixty year old. I did the reverse (back seat to front) a few times when my front door locks froze. But it wasn't especially easy."

When there are flames licking around the outside of your vehicle, many seemingly impossible feats of agility become surprisingly easy. Opening twisted/deformed doors, not so much.

Many people seem to be assuming the driver was deliberately responsible for the high speed and collision but drive-by-wire throttle control has previous when it comes to causing accidents - I would like to think that, at 59 and 69, the occupants had gotten past the "boy racer" stage and either the autothrottle went wrong or the driver accidentally hit the wrong pedal (preferably the latter!) Other than a suicide pact or murder/suicide plot, there are not that many reasons for people to try to do 60 on a residential road.

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Re: Fun with fonts

He's not at this end and he wasn't at the other end... I guess he must be somewhere else?

Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens

Re: Free school meals

"Because there is an idea going around that nobody should ever get anything without paying for it."

Everything has to be paid for, or nothing at all can be paid for. If I work 40 hours a week and you do nothing, should I get anything as a reward for working? Or what if it was the other way around - you worked for 40 hours a week and I did nothing - should I have the same as you even though I have made no effort at all?

"To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities" sounds very good in theory but it relies on people behaving in an 'honourable' way.

Not all leeches are invertebrates.

Does the boss want those 2 hours of your free time back? A study says fighting through crowds to office each day hurts productivity

Re: "... expecting minions to re-embrace the daily commute"

"Some of out Ex-Pat British executives brought over an attitude of treating employees terribly. "

We had the same problem - but the other way around; our new American bosses couldn't understand why we had nearly a month's worth of Annual Leave that we could take whenever we wanted (within reason) and wanted to halve it, along with a load of other ideas that seem reasonable when you have "free" "limitless" Internet (at home they had 'unlimited' packages, in the UK the company paid for their internet service) but were not so great on the very limited services available to us minions, or when they were used to paying well under a buck a gallon for fuel at home and got it all on expenses over here, and lots of other such "minor" differences. They wanted to change everything to how it worked in the States with no regard for any effect on the staff.

It took a lot of work from a couple of valiant and patient Personnel staff to persuade them that maybe what works well State-side might not quite work so well this side of the Atlantic. It also probably led to the entire Personnel department being "onsourced" to an (American) Human Resources company and moved off to other clients shortly after...

Apple faces another suit over its allegedly misleading water resistance claims

Re: Apple only needs to show...

"they meet this IP68 test (whatever that is). It is probably ok for rain and bathwater."

...but if they promise "waterproof to depth x for y minutes" then it should be waterproof to depth x for y minutes. Your comparison with crumple zones and airbags on a car is worthy of Apple themselves - are you saying the airbags and crumple zones don't need to work as advertised if you hit a tree - as against what, the tree jumping out and attacking *you*? You smash the car up, they have a good reason to refuse to replace the bumper/fender under warranty since it's not "defective bodywork". But those airbags and crumple zones still have to work as warrented.

Maybe she would have kept her old iPhone rather than splashing out(!) on a new one that promised to be much more likely to survive an accidental dunking if Apple hadn't promised an improvement they completely failed to deliver?

MI5 wants to shed its cocktail-guzzling posho image – so it's opened an Instagram account

Re: Has it been long enough?

Methinks you doth protest too much - go on, you did get the job and are realy working for Box aren't you? :-D

Mine's the one with the well-thumbed copy of "The Bluffer's Guide to Espionage" in the lining... (pockets are for Amateurs!)

We admire your MOXIE, Earthlings: Perseverance rover gizmo produces oxygen for first time on Mars

Re: However, carbon dioxide breathing space aliens

So in case we haven't messed up earth's atmosphere enough, now we go and start changing the martians' air too. And people wonder why we never get invited to off-world parties...

Apple stung for $308m in battle over patent used in FairPlay DRM software

"Anything created 40 years ago should be free for humanity to build on and innovate with[...]"

Good luck with Disney's lawyers on that one. Will you be supplying popcorn?

'No' does not mean 'yes'... unless you are a scriptwriter for software user interfaces

Listening to '1984' on audiobook

Newspeak is becoming a reality. And with the latest attempt to add misogyny as a Hate Crime to be punished by law, we move another step closer to Thoughtcrime too. And if the Scottish Parliament make good their intention to make hate speech illegal *in your own home*, will they be able to demand Alexa, Ciri, Cortana and any other current or future digital "assistant" be used to spy on their inmates... sorry, "citizens"?

It's wild the lengths Facebook engineers will go to find new ways to show you inane ads about tat: This time, AR...

Holographic interfaces

The Traveller role-playing game has had various types of holographic and holo-dynamic control interfaces since the days before Star Wars got renamed "A New Hope"...

Can Marc Miller and friends claim prior art and offer to licence it to Facebook for some eye-watering sum?

NASA shows Mars that humans can drive a remote control space tank at .01 km/h

"The name's Wells, Dry Martian Wells..."

"No-one would have believed, in the last years of the Brobnith Century, that Martian affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No-one would have believe that, across the gulfs of space, minds immeasurably inferior to ours would be trying to find the life that mimes and mimsies beneath the red dust of out homeworld.

Then those daft buggers on the third planet started chucking their robot probes at us, and started making rude drawings in the sand.

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

Who can I complain to?

I am extremely offended that these people assume they have the right to recreate the English language to fit in with what they think it should be - and to conform to rules that they deem important today but could be completely overturned/changed/ignored in 50 years time...

How many people have to be offended before something gets stopped? Because if half-a-dozen people can get a television advert banned for (possibly) causing offence (to other people), what about all the people offended that some self-righteous nobody thinks they have the right to dictate to everybody else?

Re: Master and slave

Is it just me, or doesn't Primary and Secondary also confer superiority of one over another? Even "First" and "Second" imply one is subordinate to the other...

Hold on, if one thing is dependent on another then it *is* subordinate, isn't it? Good luck trying to come up with a way of working that doesn't have some sort of hierarchical order - and language to describe it without putting one thing "above" another.

Retro Microlympics concludes with possible reopening dates for UK computer museums

Re: Elite

I think you might be confusing two different games - Elite didn't have Sol (or Earth), although I think Frontier may have(?).

But if you want to revisit the Good Olde Days but with a bit of extra excitement and variety thrown in, I recommend Oolite - although it's been around a few years, there's been a lot of updates and there are plenty of add-ons/add-ins to keep you going... plus you're no longer restricted to just the Cobra 3, there are a variety of Starts ranging from the original Cobra 3 with 100Cr at Lave to an upgraded Cobra 3 with 1000Cr at a TL12 Industrial world or even the "Broke Adder" start with a stripped-down Adder (Pulse Laser, 2 tons cargo capacity) and 0Cr at Lave...

Palantir and UK policy: Public health, public IT, and – say it with me – open public contracts

Re: Once again, Yes Minister is a documentary

And those mandarins and Quango bosses are not elected by us at all, they are elected by each other via The Old School Tie method of campaigning.

Funny how people forget this when blaming government ministers for "messing up".

Rookie's code couldn't have been so terrible that it made a supermarket spontaneously combust... right?

Re: Back in the 90's...

"...but we do at least know whose access cards were used..."

I know the names of senior people in my organisation so I could code keycard with their names. That doesn't mean they were involved in any misbehaviour that resulted from the use of those cards. If someone is smart enough to steal the keys and access cards to get in, it is not too much of a leap to assume they won't use their own names or the name(s) of their inside man (or men)(*) - unless they are going to deliberately sacrifice those people - which does not bode well for the rest of their names being kept secret for long.

(*) or "inside woman (or women)". Or whatever else the thieves might want to identify as...

Choose your fighter! March Mammal Madness pits poor, innocent critters against each other in mortal combat

Re: Sabre Toothed Tiger vs Chihuahua

Yappyrat jumps in sabre-toothed tiger's mouth and lays there on its side for a few minutes, sabre-toothed tiger suffocates and yappyrat jumps out, the winner.

A word to the Wyse: Smoking cigars in the office is very bad for you... and your monitor

Those who don't learn from history...

One place I worked, each floor had a kitchen area that for some reason had been installed at the opposite side of the building to where the water came in, so they had pipes across the entire width of the building. One weekend, a pipe on the 4th floor sprung a leak. On the Monday, one of the engineers on the 3rd floor said "why is there water on my desk?" and looked up. Although they later denied it, one of them prodded the suspicious-looking bulge in the ceiling tiles and they discovered why there was water on his desk... and several other desks, when about a dozen tiles came down. Luckily we had enough spare PCs to replace theirs while theirs were drying out, after we'd cleared the soggy cardboard goo that had been ceiling tiles off...

Re: Don't think there's anything worse than the motherboard of a smoker's laptop...yuk

"Black coffee was not so bad, with sugar and cream..."

So, a white coffee then?

We have laptop/hybrid things that we use in the office in case we need to get sent home (keyworkers, y'know...) and we all have these nice shiny USB keyboards cos the ones on the laptops are too fricking small to use properly. One of my co-workers recently spilt diet coke on her keyboard and tipped it up to try to get the fizzy gloop out... only where most people would tip the top towards them, she tipped the bottom away - and straight onto the laptop behind it.

We need a 20MW 20,000-GPU-strong machine-learning supercomputer to build EU's planned digital twin of Earth

Re: We all do...

I'm with Jimmy2cows on this - "computer says no" is not good enough.

If you want me to change my lifestyle for a valid reason then I have no problem, but if you want me to give up all the comforts of modern life on the grounds that some dodgy computer simulation tells you to tell me to, you can think again. Just because your computer is more expensive and more powerful (and far more damaging to the environment than anything I own!) does not make it right.

When they can take the readings from "Day One" and load them into the model, then run their simulation and get *exactly the same* results as The Real World experienced a week later, the results might be considered valid. But unless the two results match exactly, the model is not sufficiently accurate to predict the future. And no fudging for the accuracy of the detectors either - according to the models being bandied around in the late 70s and early 80s, the ice caps should be gone and we should all be swimming right about... ten years ago.

Planespotters’ weekends turn traumatic as engine pieces fall from the sky in the Netherlands and the US

"It didn't explode - the front fell off"

If reports are accurate, two or more fan blades separated from the fan disc and tore a hole (or holes) in the casing and possibly ripping away one or more panels; presumably the passing air then tore away the rest of the casing and then, without anything to hold it on, the front fairing fell off. It does not appear to have gone first - if part of the fairing had failed and had gone through the engine, I would expect more than just two blades to fail, and it would have caused damage to a lot more parts as it went through the rest of the engine.

From the pictures of the one in the Netherlands, it appears to be the front compressor fan which failed - although that is just behind the fairing and the blades would go out and/or backwards, not forwards unless it was a very strange failure indeed.

And most definitely not typical.

Re: RE: engine failure

"This is slightly simplistic: engine (and indeed aircraft) maintenance is entirely predictable,"

Umm, no. SCHEDULED maintenance is entirely predictable. But that is not why the airlines have teams of licenced engineers with the training and experience to fault-find and repair the things that don't go wrong according to the manufacturer's schedule. Even if the Management do seem to consider them an obstacle to making money when they insist on making sure an aircraft is fixed properly rather than being rushed back into service.

Microsoft staffers restive as annual employee poll lands – without questions about compensation

Re: re: Maybe repeating a lie often enough can make it sounds true.

Amazing how many people believed the Democrats when they said "Trump only won because the Russians and Facebook interfered in the election!" and also believe the Democrats when they say "Of course we won, NOBODY can possibly interfere in the election!"

I am not suggesting that the outrageous claims by the ex-President are true, just pointing out the discrepancy between their stories when the opposition wins and when they win... if anyone can explain how both their statements can be true then I look forward to hearing from you... (unless your name is Schroedinger).

Microsoft sides with media groups, together they urge Europe to follow Australia's lead, make Google, Facebook pay for news article links

missing the point?

It seems people are so wrapped up congratulating Facebook for attempting to "hit Murdoch where it hurts" that they are missing the most important point; if social media "summarises" the news collected by reporters paid by the news agencies and doesn't pay for it, who will pay the wages of the reporters? Sooner or later, the news agencies will run out of money for paying staff and will lay them all off, so who will social media get their "summaries" from then?

And, more importantly, what will the reporters and other staff laid off by the news agencies do to earn a living? It's a pretty safe bet Murdoch has enough to live on for quite some time so he might be mildly inconvenienced, but how many of the staff his corporations employ are in the same position?

Wells Fargo patent troll case has finance world all aquiver so Barclays, TD Bank sign up to Open Invention Network

Re: The greed of banks

But it won't be the Executives who feed the patent troll, and the shareholders will be shielded as much as possible - it is the customers who have to rely on the banks but cannot afford to be shareholders themselves who will suffer.

Low to non-existent interest rates, "local" branches in big cities only, charges to use cash machines or conduct online transactions, excessive charges for automated communications (£25+ for the Accounts software to tell the letter-writing software to send a letter to the automated printing-and-envelope-stuffing machine, really?) and exorbitant overdraft rates (should be the same as the interest they pay when THEY have OUR money!) are where any such payments would come from, not the executives or shareholders.

We know it's hard to get your kicks at work – just do it away from a wall switch powering anything important

Re: Uses of Radar

I had it on good authority that the Top Gear play track in Surrey may have experienced the odd meal or two cooked in a similar manner during the time messyBeAst and their forebears used to build fighters there... and allegedly the same result can be obtained at over half-a-mile using the air-search radar modes of the MiG-29.

I cannot possibly comment on the veracity of these stories...

Salesforce likes to play the diversity nice guy in public – Black ex-employee claims the reality is quite different

Equality? We've heard of that...

"The company has set itself the target of half of its US workforce being made up of underrepresented groups including women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, veterans, and people with disabilities by 2023."

I always thought the best way for a company to succeed was to hire the best person for the job, but apparently not. Also, if they hire a white male Veteran, are they required to count him in both "White Male" and "Veteran" quotas or do they simply ignore the "Veteran" flag and file him as "White Male"?

Mike Lynch extradition: Uncle Sam offered Autonomy founder $10m bail if he stood trial in the US

Re: They didn't mention his autism

You do realise you are going to draw the ire of all the apologists who claim that as a defence for practically everything, don't you?

It pi**es me off no end that the people who really have autism are now being lumped in with dritseks who have no real issues but use that - or imaginary "mental health issues" - to try to escape justice. There are more than enough people who genuinely have issues that need the help, but can't get it because it all goes to people whose only real "mental health issue" is a complete inability to behave properly in a civilised society.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Re: This is why they should be banned.

"...no danger to the intended victim."

And the intended victim would know this how, exactly? I see someone coming at me with a knife, I don't think "Oh, he's making a youTube video, how nice", I think "How can I stop this criminal threatening me with a deadly weapon before kills me?"

Or is it legal to go around waving lethal weapons at random strangers in public places where you live?