Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Fukushima fearmongers: It's your fault Japan dumped CO2 targets

Re: Anti-nukers... vs. Pro-Nukers

But that is natural free-range organic radiation which haven't been forcibly bred in some neutron factory.

Re: It is an engeneering problem not a nuclear problem.

>The calculations were made to harden the plant against a massive tsunami

That is precisely what engineering means.

The plants should have been hardened against any conceivable tsunami/earthquake?

What about the schools and homes- 1000s of people died in those.

Surely all primary schools should be proof against a magnitude 10 earth quake?

Here on the other side of the same fault zone we spend only a few million $$ bolting classroom bookcases to walls.

If society had priorities then all the children would be protected by schools built deep underground in bunkers, and all the old peoples homes, and all the hospitals etc etc - in fact nobody would be allowed to live within 100km of the pacific ocean

Re: Remember Bhopal?

But those were brown people - and even worse, poor brown people.

The correct order of concern is:

White Americans

Europeans

Japanese

Black / poor Americans

South Americans/Russians/Chinese

3rd world smiling children

3rd world starving children

Other

So Fukismima/Chernoby are about equal to a 3mile island, only because it may affect sushi or Welsh Lamb, a Bhopal is about equal to a Katrina

DropBox puts locks on doors, hopes biz bods will buy the house

You can send public links to somebody - so that file you need to send to a client that is too large for email or blocked by some firewall policy, just dropbox it and email them a link.

Want free reliable back-up for a few Gb of stuff without needing to run a btsync server?

Have a non-techie that wants to just keep their pictures/docs safe without understanding what backup means?

Re: And still no client-side encryption?

>Ask yourself why they designed the system this way

Deduplication = less diskspace/bandwidth

Dropbox heavily dedupe files. So a million copies of that same cat picture only takes up a few K

If they are all encrypted they can't tell the files (or parts of the file) are the same and so need to store and transmit everything

True fact: Britain is losing its brains

Re: How do they know I emigrated?

I assumed the report meant UK residents who had patents (and so were inventors) who had then left.

How do they know I emigrated?

I am an inventor (at least I wrote a bunch of patents)

I have worked abroad a number of times.

I currently live abroad in the land above the land of the free

But although I always have to fill in a lot of documentation for the place i'm going to - I don't remember ever telling the UK government I left.

Canadian teens cuffed over alleged Snapchat child sex pics ring

Re: Proper charges

Yes they are lucky they are only being tried as child-sex offenders.

If the copyright police got them - they would really be in trouble

Yes if there is one group that should have complete unfettered access to all your communications it's Quebec's police and politicians.

I here they are currently investigating one of the senior officers under suspicions that he had no links to the mafia

The only way to protect the children is to make sure that boys and girls are totally separated upto the age of 18 with no allowed contact between them - then they can safely emerge as adults.

The system has worked very well for the UK ruling classes, and the current government.

GCHQ hijacked LinkedIn profiles to hack Belgian telecoms network – report

Re: Cloaked man-in-the-middle attack

>They can't (yet) ask for LinkedIn to amend their code to include spyware for specific users.

Says who?

Secret national security letter from a secret court tells you what to do - who you going to call?

Isn't that pretty much what they wanted Lavabit to do?

Heads will roll

So now, in companies across Europe, Linkedin is being added to corporate firewall blocked sites, along with facebook.

So GCHQ has damaged the share price of a US dot-net company - surely that's an act of terrorism?

Will Cheltenham now be the subject of a US drone attack?

Norks unlikely to beat the USA in the death-ray race

Re: Sacre, Fear, Money Dare!

I thought it was the Iraqis who had secret invisible weapons of mass destruction that could hit London in 45mins ?

Now the Iranians have them as well !

Whose next on the list - India, Ireland and Israel?

We must invade Italy at once to stop Iceland using it's secret volcano weapons.

Then for the next crisis we can open Bush and Blair's big book of countries to 'H'

If your bosses tell you you're 'in it together', don't ever believe them

Re: Not quite sure I understand the article.

It's the logical disconnect between "employees are our most valuable asset" and firing them to save money.

You don't see Rolls Royce saying "The technology for single crystal Titanium fan blades is our most valuable asset - so we decided to scrap it"

Falkland Islands almost BLITZED from space by plunging European ion-rocket craft

Re: OK, so...

They could if it wasn't for the atmosphere.

In practice it's more like skipping a stone off the beach and expecting the coastguard to tell you how many hops you will get.

RETRO-GASM: The Fuze electronics kit for the Raspberry Pi

Re: Are you sure?

Unless it was a medical device, in which case the device needs to meet ISO 60601 and CE class umpteen. And the supplier of the psu needs to meet a bunch of acronyms, and all their suppliers...

'Hmm, which is more important: connectivity or malaria vaccine?'

Re: Malaria vaccine versus connectivity

The malaria vaccine is a very real possibility - Glaxo are trialing one.

The tricky thing with malaria is that we have been living with it for 1,000,000 years so it has got very good at evolving around most of our immune system.

World's first 3D-printed metal gun 'more accurate' than factory-built cousin

Re: Interesting.

>build such precision in other objects

You can diamond turn surfaces to about 1/20 wavelength which migth be difficult to achieve with 3d printing

Antivirus bods grilled: Do YOU turn a blind eye to government spyware?

Re: Don't bang dinner gong in front of hungry code diggers

However the same argument doesn't apply to putting backdoors in products.

Microsoft / IBM / Cisco / Siemens / etc all have divisions that sell classified systems - staffed with people who can be trusted - they all have valuable government contracts that make them very accommodating and they all have enough zero-day exploits that even if one is discovered who is going to blame the feds? And anyway a replacement can be pushed out next tuesday.

SCIENCE and RELIGION AGREE! LIFE and Man ARE from CLAY

Re: So...

>Bible wasn't originally in English.

You aren't trying to imply that Jesus was a foreigner are you?

>homo sapiens americanus is the very peak of the pyramid.

Unlikely - they don't even play cricket

Child protection group's creep-catcher passes Turing Test

So if somebody put up an app where you can pretend to drive cars unsafely and shoot prostitutes - that would show an inclination to drive cars dangerously and shoot prostitutes and so those people should be prosecuted.

Re: Turing?

And no proof that those that did contact the site weren't themselves Turing machines.

Microsoft in a TIFF over Windows, Office bug that runs code hidden in pics

Re: How? Why? Stack handling

Better than their wmf bug that let you run arbitrary windows commands by just putting "#command" in the file

Thought you didn't need to show ID in the UK? Wrong

On flights back from Belfast people would often be asked for their ID on the jetway by a couple of men in suits with no obvious uniform or ID. Asking them why was met with a "just hand it over sonny"

Tim Cook stands firmly behind pro-LGBT, anti-discrimination law

In the US you can sack people for no reason and no notice in many states, it's called "right to work" (who said Americans don't do irony !)

If the person you are firing is a visible minority there is normally an automatic lawsuit - just from no-fee lawyers. The result is that you never tell anyone the reason they are being fired - because it gives their lawyers ammunition. Which is a shame because quite often it's not their fault, it's just the company's needs change.

This clause just gives the lawyers another class to chase. One side effect is that it would force people to be openly (even flamboyantly) gay in the office in order to show that you knew they were gay when you fired them.

Blighty promises £49m to get more British yoof into engineering careers

So he did hospital administration and accounting?

The figures are normally from university careers services - and they typically only track the first job after graduating and they don't include people who don't work form $MEGACORP$ who return surveys.

It used to be a classic statistic that Chem Eng grads earned more than anyone else. Simply because all Chem Engs immediately got a job with the company the careers service sent them to, and their starting salary was above average.

When you tracked how much they earned over their career - it doesn't make sense to do a technical job.

Re: The status of Engineers.

That happens here - but there are downsides.

To get the "engineer" title new grads have to serve years as an engineers-in-training and so work for a company with an engineering training program. That means new eng grads can be paid peanuts by large companies because if they don't jump through these extra hoops they wasted their degree.

Startups can't hire engineers because they don't have their own chartered engineers to sign off on the training.

Want to employ a maths PhD as a software engineer? You can't.. Want to hire that American CS grad from MIT/Stanford, you can't because they don't qualify.

The result is that all 'engineers' immediately jump to management, because managers (especially in the public service) have to be professionals. You also get a majority of people doing the softest 'engineering' course they can find - usually environmental eng - so that they can become civil servants.

While the actual technical work is outsourced or off-shored.

UK.gov BANS iPads from Cabinet over foreign eavesdropper fears

Re: 'foreign' is defined as 'not American'

No - you are thinking of the last lot, Tory MPs usually spy for the other side.

Google and Samsung bare teeth in battle for LANDFILL ANDROID™

Re: Shrug

>If I can't root it, I won't use it.

Are you Australian ?

Re: Why Android?

You also need to add three extra hardware buttons to use Windows effectively

Fiery bits of Euro satellite to rain down on Earth this weekend

Re: Why didn't they...

Perhaps you would if when the car was done it suddenly fired itself off the road randomly at 25,000 mph

- I think BMWs do

The Colosseum, Hagia Sophia, Tower of London... and, er, Steve Jobs' GARAGE

Re: Cough

I assumed the only person who didn't think this was ironic - would have been Jobs himself

But apparently not !

Cough

Steve Jobs built Apple 1 .......with the help of Steve Wozniak

Dying HealthCare.gov bagged JUST SIX registrations on first day

Re: So something like $400M-$500M has been spent on this website....

Pah amateurs

The UK spent more than that on the acronym for each of the last 'n' abandoned NHS-IT systems

Is this really an IT issue?

Perhaps all Americans have such healthy suyperman-like physiques that they never need to consider health care.

And those that do are so well served by the systems provided by their benevolent employers that they wouldn't need this service.

Cameron pledges public access to list of who REALLY owns firms

Re: Evasion vs. Avoidance

The line isn't as cut and dried - otherwise we wouldn't need courts

If the Inland Revenue decide that you buying your coffee beans from Switzerland at 10x market price is purely to make a tax loss - then it becomes illegal tax evasion.

Dark matter: Good news, everyone! We've found ... NOTHING AT ALL

Even darker matter ;-)

You're more likely to get a job if you study 'social' sciences, say fuzzy-studies profs

Re: Psychology is a nice, easy subject

> the number one area of work for social sciences graduates is Social Work

That doesn't mean that a majority work in social work.

If psychology leads to a wide range of jobs - then 10% might be social workers, 9% in HR, 8% in fast food, 7% in subway music playing etc etc

Crypto protocols mostly crocked says euro infosec think-tank ENISA

For extra security

Make sure you use the closed source versions of these that come with that American made operating system.

Cisco: We'll open-source our H.264 video code AND foot licensing bill

Re: site license

In return for h264 become the new web standard ( as opposed to flash, or some open source codec) I'm sure the MPEG-LA looked favourably on the licensing cost.

Just like MP3 offering free license to open source decoders. How popular would ogg be if the MP3 license holders tracked down every non-Apple user of an MP3 ?

Re: Quite misleading.

The problem is that, with this - Cisco have effectively halted all development on alternate codec and allowed a patent encumbered one to be widely adopted as a standard.

All because it's free - for now, or until they change their mind, or another patent holder objects, or that part of Cisco get sold to somebody else.

Suppose sun had offered free downloads of solaris-x86 in the early 90s. Then we wouldn't have needed linux and today the world would be owned by Larry "blofeld" Ellison

Windows Azure Compute cloud goes TITSUP planet-wide

Re: Blue Sky of Death?

Have they tried turning it off and on again?

RIP Bill Lowe: Father of the IBM PC no longer reading drive C

IBM mistake?

Would an IBM only PC really have benefited IBM?

There wouldn't have been a PC software market, and certainly not Windows if IBM had kept it an IBM only product.

It's like claiming that if Mercedes had been the only one building cars all cars today would be MB - in fact there just wouldn't be cars today.

Re: I hated IRQs

At least when you set an IRQ with a jumper you know it's set.

You don't have all this "can't find port X / can't create port X - already exists " crap you get with 'smart' systems

Want to go to billionaire Sun kingpin's beach? Hope you're a strong swimmer

Doesn't work - those treaties are by the fed, they are allowed to ignore treaties with natives

(Actually the fed can ignore treaties with anyone who doesn't have nukes)

Blighty's telcos set to CHOKE off another fistful of piracy gateways

Re: More power to them...

And since it is now so easy to do we could open this up to anyone - with our own version of the DMCA.

If you see a site that you think violates copyright, just email "[e-mail] and it will be banned in the UK

Digital radio may replace FM altogether - even though nobody wants it

That's next parliaments plan. When everybody has switched to DAB they will sell off those frequencies and everyone can switch to t'internet