Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Non-existent sex robots already burning holes in men’s pockets

Re: Not in the UK ...

In Scotland they would be banned and put you on the sex offenders registry.

I don't know what happens to Scottish women who have a little mechanical assistance ?

Re: Another story here?

No, they have a working sex robot but it is only suitable for people who want to have sex with a cross between a 3D printer and a rack server

Los Angeles to extradite bloke from Nigeria after scores of city workers fall for phish scam

Thwarted is what happens when a little girl claims to have sorted it?

Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable

>I want to know how they make it last 10 minutes and 32 seconds

Slow broadband

Re: Entirely to be expected...

Lucky that all the racial problems of the USA came down to just the symbol of the losing side in the civil war.

Presumably if all the problems of the middle east, India-Pakistan and SE Asia are due to the British empire then banning the Flag of St George will solve all those as well?

Facebook's internet drone crash-landed after wing 'deformed' in flight

Except the rules apply to aircraft which will land and take off regularly, presumably with people on board.

This is (IIRC) intended to fly for very long periods and land rarely, it can't even land normally without damaging itself.

It's like sayign you shoudl apply the rules of ship design to an ocean data buoy because of the Titanic

Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo fit to go: Europe's GPS-like network switches on

"connected services for drivers, including real-time traffic and weather reports and accident or road works warnings"

So definitely not for road pricing then !

Uber to Cali DMV: Back off, pal, our 'self-driving cars' aren't self driving

Re: Uber are such douchebags

In this case quite the opposite.

When the car detects it is going to crash it can, within milliseconds, automatically employ the driver and so the crash is purely the fault of the independent contractor and nothing to do with Uber's self driving car

Re: Fuck You Uber

Sounds disruptive .....innovative,,, and dynamic

And of course relatively the furniture hasn't been removed from the office, so much as the building moved from the furniture

'Public Wi-Fi' gang fail in cunning plan to hide £10m cigarette tax fraud

Re: Oh dear

Or HMRC requests sweeps of all communciations data for anyone they are suspicious of (ie anyone who has any income beyond PAYE) and the security services provide it.

If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear from total surveillance.

Move over HoloLens, $30 homebrew cardboard AR is here

Re: Oooh! Let me get my 90's mixtape, it's time to hack the Gibson!

The good old days, when batteries merely leaked acid

It does require that you put AR tags all over the scene.

So it works for classrooms/gamesbut is a bit limited in the real world

It's like a self driving electric car that needs a metal slot down middle of the road to do the power and guidance

Re: Since we're talking V/A-R here ...

Yes, because you don't need to do the hard part of VR = working out the 3d location in the world.

Juts finding text in a video stream and overlaying laerger/clearer/translated version is trivial.

IIRC there are a bunch of apps that do this for eg foreign (especially Chinese/Japanese) street signs

ESA to try tank-to-tank fuel switch on sat that wasn't designed to do it

Re: Here's hoping it works

Are you one of those conspiracy nuts who think that NASA faked Armageddon on a sound stage somewhere?

So scientists can anayse the data on their phones. (x-ray astronomers aren't cool enough for iPhones)

XMM is an x-ray telescope with a small optical camera (which I briefly worked on nearly 20years ago) so no liquid coolant so generally a very long life.

With x-ray telescopes the life is generally limited by the operating system you wrote the data analysis software packages on. It's cheaper to launch a new spacecraft than to port all the analysis stuff from VMS to Ultrix, to Solaris, to Linux to Windows10

Re: Here's hoping it works

The main difference being that while NASA would make a film sending Bruce Willis up to it, ESA would make a film with Benedict Cumberbatch thinking how to solve it from the ground

Disney sued in race row: Axed IT workers claim jobs went to H-1B hires

Re: Disney is depicable

Disney is probably in a right-to-work state where there are effectively no employment rights.

They can fire everyone for no reason because they can find someone cheaper or they want to give the job to their cousin.

The only defence is that it's illegal to fire somebody on the basis of gender/race/disability or a few other protected classes. So can only bring an unfair dismissal case if you can claim it was due to some such reason

Trump's 140 characters on F-35 wipes $2bn off Lockheed Martin

Re: He doesn't understand

Yes but that is California - who voted the wrong way.

Russian hackers got Trump elected? Yeah, let's take a close look at that, says Obama

Re: Russians or not

Although I am a little concerned that man-of-the-people, cross between Bono and Mother Theresa, kind hearted philanthropist Trump might be troubled by the nastier aspects of the role.

Re: As far I can understand

"one-man one-vote system under Putin"

That one man being Vladimir Vladimirovich.

And (ob Pratchett ref) he has the one vote.

Re: Computerized voting

Being able to vote AGAINST one candidate rather than for another, where they get -1 vote could be interesting.

Especially combined with compulsory voting

Re: As a leftist loon ...

Anyone who regards Ms Clinton as a "leftie" is possibly facing the wrong way

Re: AFAIK, the Putin Doctrine is more or less --

"But it is not Parliament that should rule; it is the people who should rule through Parliament."

Which has been achieved if "the people" means the people in the cabinet office

Re: As far I can understand

The Russian system was also setup to check the influence of any population centers swinging the election.

The one-man one-vote system under Putin shows he was a lot smarter than many give him credit for.

Body cams too fragile for Canadian Mounties – so they won't be used

Re: Hmmm ...

They don't need their own cameras, if they are arresting someone and a bystander happens to film it they simply arrest the bystander and seize their phone as evidence

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/woman-files-complaint-against-whistler-rcmp-over-cellphone-seizure-1.3882355

HBO slaps takedown demand on 13-year-old girl's painting because it used 'Winter is coming'

Re: Fimbulwinter FTW

I interpret the existence of the DMCA and copyright lawyers as a sign of coming Ragnarök

Re: From the HBO legal department

Prior art, "Sumer Is Icumen In" - 13th Century

Latest loon for Trump's cabinet: Young-blood-loving, kidney-market advocate Jim O'Neill

The FDA does kill people

While not wishing to go all Trump the FDA is a problem

Apart from the normal Washington revolving door - the application process is so complex you have to employ specialist Washington law firms to help you, all of which advertise how many former directors of the FDA they employ.

The process is slow and expensive beyond reason. We sell a surgical device around the world treating real patients, but after two years of reviews, including changes of director, re-classifications, transfers to different divisions, the FDA has decided that we need to re-start animal trials from scratch before we can be considered for use in the USA.

They only recently allowed re-use of toxicity data on drugs, so that you didn't have to re-test how many 1000x of times the standard dose killed 50% of rabbits, everytime you changed the name or sold a drug already approved for a different source of pain.

For rare diseases it is becoming technically impossible, not just financially non-viable, to meet the FDA requirements. One recent case would require a clinical trial consisting of >300% of the actual cases.

We want drugs and procedures to be safe. But we also want ambulances and fire engines to be safe. Suppose every ambulance had to be built, maintained and operated to the same safety standards as a Space Shuttle - and each state could only afford to operate one vehicle. Would people be safer?

Going underground: The Royal Mail's great London train squeeze

Re: Side note

Perhaps they could link the London and Birmingham systems.

A railway line between London and Birmingham could be useful, by building it underground you would avoid a lot of local objections

Re: 20%...

But Foxcon are replacing expensive skilled workers with robots.

We are suggesting replacing expensive locomotives with cheap labour, and chains, possibly some whips

It's a return to Victorian values - at least as far as the mining industry

Wannabe Cali governor gives up against beach-blocking billionaire VC

A Trumpian solution

California is essentially America's beach-front (at least the non-hurricane prone part)

It is infested with billionaires

It is too expensive for anyone else to live there

The state wants to be independent of the rest of the country

Just IPO the entire state

BAE Systems' autonomous research aircraft flies itself to Scotland

Re: Some catching up

>Most people in IT wait until V3 before rolling anything out though..

I assume that's why they skipped the V0

Some catching up

I think some other chappies managed to get an aircraft to take off from France and fly unaided to London where it "landed"about 70years ago.

Bloke sold cash register code to restaurants that deliberately hid sales from taxmen

You can't do that ...

Unless you are an accountant or a billionaire real-estate developer.

Then it's just being smart

Cassini tickles Saturn's rings ahead of final death plunge

The Audi option

>Cassini is travelling at thousands of miles per hour so should blast though the ring with minimal time for a collision.

The faster you drive, the less time for a collision and so the safer you are!

US election pollsters weren't (very) wrong – statistically speaking

Re: lol

But how would lib dems have felt if the reformed voting system had given UKIP 14% of the seats?

I suspect they wouldn't have been applauding it as a wonderful sign of democracy

HPE UK preps the redundancy ride as Chrimbo looms

Re: Offshoring is shit

You are aware that HP is a US company?

You are the current cheap offshore workers.

You are being replaced by cheaper offshore workers.

If you object to offshoring then tell HP/Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Apple/IBM to send all their jobs back "home" to America. And then tell Fujitsu and ARM to get back to Japan

VCs to Trump: You know what would really make America great? Tax breaks for VCs

Re: VCs?

Fortunately Hedge fund managers paid for Trump and have been rewarded with all the cabinet posts. And of course Hedge funds, unlike VCs, have a long term worker-centric view of the economy.

Sysadmin figures out dating agency worker lied in his profile

Re: Setting passwords for international users

Can't they just use the $ key? I thought that they were equivalent following Brexit ?

Usually felines displeasure is a little more urinary than that - unless you have a cat that pisses beer.

Although that would explain where several lagers come from.

Soon only Ticketmaster will rip you off: Concert scalper bots face US ban

Re: The definition of pure capitalism - rape the consumer.

Indeed the practice should be extended to stocks. You buy the stock at the IPO if you want it and can never sell it for more than that price.

Perhaps we could extend it to houses and avoid another crash ?

Netflix and fill – our coffers: Canada mulls taxing vid streaming giant 5% of subs cash

Re: Fucking Politicians

So we are going to tax people watching shows on Netflix in order to give Hollywood movies bigger tax breaks to pretend Vancouver is New York?

While blocking the streets and causing traffic chaos

Re: Netflix aren't going to walk

In this case Netflix.

If the customer sees a 20% rise in the price they are going to look elsewhere - they aren't going to consider that the money isn't going to Netflix.

Cheap virtual box hosters – Amazon's Lightsail is out to destroy you (yes, you, Digital Ocean)

Re: What is the point ?

You just got featured on the frontpage of HN/Slashdot - now you need 1000x as much capacity for a couple of days. Better hope that ebay seller does fast delivery of your 1000 laptops

You have a SAAS product that needs a lot of power on a saturday, or the last day of the month or peaks at Christmas. Or you want to roll out a new version without having to build a duplicate data center for the switch-over

UK's new Snoopers' Charter just passed an encryption backdoor law by the backdoor

Re: Bah!

For now - yes,

It takes a while for the foreign take-overs to be processed and we haven't got round to deporting all the foreign engineers yet

Re: Blackmail! (remember Monty Python?)

Because they remember previous Labour governments being brought down by the unions. New Labour had far more reason to control the unions than the Tories ever did.

Re: This boils down to a single thing...

>Basically, pick your poison. The Police State or Anarchy.

That's unfair - there's no reason (with the current government) you can't have both