Posts by drfreak

Woman with 15 IDs gets 7 years for multiple VAT fraud

Wow.

Forget facial recognition. One look at those creepy eyes in all the pictures and a trained monkey could see the connection.

Hunting of incredibly rare two-horned 'unicorns' forbidden

Unicorns

are Magically Delicious.

So, what's the best sci-fi film never made?

Anything by Larry Niven

Would be Awesome. Ditto for Heinlein. Larry Niven's books were kind of out there in a way that special effects might not have handled so well in the past, but are ripe for exploitation now. Ringworld, A Land out of Time, Neutron Star, etc..

I'd love to see someone do Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land or The Man who bought The Moon.

The Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison would be awesome as a series of movies too...

Mexican woman gets litigious on Top Gear's ass

I have no problem with tea drinkers

joking about Obese America. In fact, one of my favourite Top Gear episodes was when they drove through the south with things like "Hillary for President" painted on their vehicle.

Maybe the Mexican woman is offended because she hasn't the humility to understand the British sense of humor.

How do you copy 60m files?

Interesting

I wonder if part of the issue is that most apps will need to get the full directory listing before copying. With millions of files, that can eat up some RAM before copying even starts.

This makes me want to experiment with .NET 4's new System.IO.Directory.EnumeateFiles() method. The new function does not get a full directory listing, rather it gets the *next* listing as you iterate over the collection it returns.

Using Parallel.ForEach to iterate over the collection makes for an easily coded multi-threaded file management app I would venture to guess...

VW to eliminate worst road hazard: drivers

Will the computers get road rage too?

"Asshole, you just cut me off!"

"Asshole does not compute, please respond with course correction data."

Microsoft coughs to Visual Studio 2010 upgrade delay

Me too.

People who have an MSDN subscription were able to download it on the 14th, which was the launch date.

It was slow earlier in the day, but by early afternoon Akamai must have provisioned more bandwidth because I was able to get the full ISO in about an hour.

Google tweaks search results with mystery site speedometer

Jobs would love this quote:

"Web design as currently practiced is hereby DEAD. Flash becomes poison - lots of funny little blank pictures to build up a page's appearance will ensure no one ever sees it."

A-men! Especially the last sentence.

Cybercrime's bulletproof hosting exposed

Explains a lot about why they use IRC

A lot of these command-and-control networks have their own private network of IRC servers established where the bots themselves join the network.

IRC has long been known for its ability to self-heal if enough cross-server links are established. Using the infrastructure IRC provides is cheap and easy.

Microsoft shows Bottom to Young Ones

The Young Ones not available in America?

Bollocks!

Large Hadron Collider in multi-magnet quench hiccup

Other dimensions would be cool, but what about the simpler parallel universe?

Another dimension is difficul to visualize, but for me a parallel universe is not so hard. Image looking at a friend while you draw a spiral with your finger in front of them. In your friend's perception, your spiral is opposite of the way you are drawing it. Kind of like seeing "CENALUBMA" directly on a vehicle, then seeing it in your rear-view mirror, and realizing it is an AMBULANCE.

Parallel universes may manifest to us in different ways than that, but my example is the easiest way O have found to visualize one.

New antimatter atomsmashers 'may destroy themselves'

Compact LInear Transmuter instead?

Seems like the next logical step...