Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Professor's BEAGLE lost for 10 years FOUND ON MARS

Re: The UK Space Agency ... is refusing to discuss details in advance...

I don' think the UK Space Agency has access to that level of technology.

It will be in MS-Paint

What do UK and Iran have in common? Both want to outlaw encrypted apps

Re: Back to using classified advertisements or the radio then

I think you will find that using foreign languages will also be banned under the new legislation.

How are the police supposed to protect us from communist, file-sharing, pedophile, terrorists if they don't speak English?

Re: No trust, no sense, no government ...

So instead we could have the reasoned sensible humanity of Mr D Blunkett again ?

Dot-word domains 'a shakedown, designed to get money out of people'

Re: Are there any actual web sites?

Wouldn't it be simpler to just add .dotcom as a new domain to ease the current over-crowding ?

Re: Well, what the heck where they expecting...

And everyone gets to memorize the corporate structure so that they know TVs are sony.jp but movies are sony.com.us, music is sony.co.uk and streaming is sony.com.lux

Tax Systems: The good, the bad and the completely toot toot ding-dong loopy

Re: Tobin/Robin Hood Tax

Taxing share dealing is easily worked around.

There is a 15% tax on sales of US shares by non-US tax payers so instead you buy derivatives contracts which bet on the value of the stock market but don't buy or sell shares and don't pay tax

Re: Jaffa cakes

Much better here.

Buy a single donut and it's a takeout snack with sales tax. Buy 6 and it's grocery shopping and tax free.

mmm donuts ....

Re: And

Weren't city traders being paid their bonuses in platinum nodules because they were tax free?

Tim will probably remember which metal.

Mr Cameron goes to Washington for PESKY HACKERS chinwag with Pres Obama

Re: 80%?

So why was GCHQ only hacking 80% ?

Surely more than 20% of firms must be donors to the party / run by Eton chums of Cameron

SpaceX in ROCKET HOVERSHIP PRANG: 'Close – but no cigar,' says Musk

Re: I'm surprised they got as close to an actual landing as they did.

The rocket is fairly light and not going that fast when it drops it reaches terminal velocity (150-200kph?) as any other falling object without using any fuel

The space shuttle's main engines were designed to be reusable from the start.

In practice they needed a rebuild not much shorter than building one from scratch and the average life of a component was somewhere under 2 launches.

They also cost more than the entire SpaceX operation

Sony post-mortem: Obama lobbies for new legal powers to thwart hackers

Re: The Answer is simple

But that's the point - Sony can't be expected to protect itself against the mutant radioactive cyber ninjas of North Korea. So if it was N Korea then they are off the hook, they could only be responsible if it was a regular bunch of script kiddies.

Faster, cheaper broadband connections

Wouldn't the solution be slower more expensive connections?

If they only had 56K dialup then the NSA would have had to time to get an warrant and walk over to Sony before the hackers had finished downloading the data.

The solution, create a General Post Office and give it a monopoly on telecomunications

Re: According to other reports...

So a conspiracy that the US govt ignored advanced reports of an attack by a Japanese corporation as an excuse to go to war and drop a bomb on somebody.

Wasn't there a movie about this ?

Kindle sparks Fire, Clouds emerge from Amazon data center

FBI announces

That North Korea hackers now have the ability to destroy servers before they are installed

Facebook? More like FOGEYBOOK: Zuck's hangout is a cyber-retirement home

An opportunity

For el'reg comments section to become the hip and trendy social media venue ?

ps. How does one post selfies here ?

It's LUNACY, you SWINE! Er, what, security? Moonpig DOT GONE

Re: Water Recycling

I suspect water recycling has been going on since we got water, otherwise we wouldn't have any.

The dinosaurs would have drunk it all

One Sync to rule them all: How Microsoft plans to fix OneDrive

Re: check-out?

The real genius is how office365, office, sharepoint, Onedrive and even lync refuse to play nicely.

Click on a document in Sharepoint, opens in office365, click on edit, opens it then says, "this needs to checkout", click checkout, says this can only be done in word, click to download, get a warning that this might damage your computer, click ok, Click to edit again,

Work on doocument

save, don't even think about saving the document to onedrive

Exit,

It might checkin depending on the phase of the moon and the I-ching.

Check status in sharepoint, it may or may not show it as checked out to you.

Try and send document by lync to somebody else because they can't get the sharepoint "allegedly locked" version.

In the end we have created a wonderful collaboration tool of all sitting in a group around a single laptop reading the document together. We are thinking calling it "reading circle" or "watch with mother"

MI5 boss: We NEED to break securo-tech, get 'assistance' from data-slurp firms

Re: checks and audits

Their surveillance is targeted.

Any students that are a bit lefty - especially those that end up being labour cabinet ministers

Any bishops that suggests Thatcherism isn't completely what Jesus would have done.

Any journalist that writes about anything in government

Anyone who complains about any local or national government activity.

All perfectly targetted at potential threats to MI5

Police radios will be KILLED soon – yet no one dares say 'Huawei'

Re: Push-to-talk latency

The first 1920s police radio technology needed a second or so to start up, so the meaningless number "10" was prefixed to the actual message code number as wasted space

Perhaps all we need is for copies of Smokey and the Bandit to be issued to all police officers?

10-4 good buddy .....

Intel offers big bucks for black women

Re: It is called Economic Contraception

There is also whats known as the "Scandinavian rebound"

When a country first drags itself out of the dark ages and starts educating women there is a massive drop in birth rate as half the population see a future which doesn't involve squeezing out sprogs.

Then a generation later when these women are at the top of political and business organisations they start to introduce policies that allow people to have children and still work - the birth rate goes back up.

You can tell how civilized your country is by it's position on this scale (PIGS <-> Scandinavia)

Re: Quotas are reverse racisim, ageism!

1, Fully qualified because they went to Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard/Yale etc?

Hint - why is the cabinet composed only of people who went to Eton?

2, Proof because they already worked for IBM/Intel/Microsoft etc?

If they happened to work freelance because IBM/Intel/Microsoft don't hire women then you wouldn't consider them.

3, How do you rate candidates without meeting them?

PhD scores 10, a degree scores 5, a MSCE scores -5, C scores 10 knowing Java scores -5 and add up the results ?

Re: surely this is discrimination?

My physics degree at Imperial (many years ago) was 43 men an 1 women.

The 1 women was Japanese and couldn't work in the UK

How were employers supposed to hire 50/50 from that group?

Re: "Positive" discrimination has been proven to fail, time and again

If the problem is that only 5% of suitable candidates are women, because women don't do maths/physics/engineering degrees - then how are you going to make your workforce 50% women without positive discrimination ?

Re: Forget true equality

I hope that this isn't just going to be tokenism and all the women hired will be in marketing or secretaries - it's important that 50% of the chip designers are women.

And don't let them use the old boys club excuse of demanding some elitist IVY league PhD first.

Of course Intel could argue that Intel are an oppressed minority now that they are so far behind ARM .

FBI boss: Sony hack was DEFINITELY North Korea, haters gonna hate

Re: Yeah...

We have top men working on it right now.

Who?

Top men ...

Re: So?

To put in non-cyber terms. Bank robbers have used, VWs, Fords, Toyotas and Jags as getaway cars. But then they slipped up and used a Lada so we know they are really KGB !

Ex-Microsoft Bug Bounty dev forced to decrypt laptop for Paris airport official

Re: Meh

Had that once in his majesty's former colonies.

Turn on the laptop - it boots to a Linux prompt

No turn it - I have to login and "startx"

The world is saved for democracy because a mouse pointer moves

Cunning

With the French government you are never sure if it is incompetence, malice, both or neither

Ladies and trolls: Should we make cyberbullying a crime? – Ireland

Re: The online world is, in effect, now a public place

And similarly if it's legal to do it in public it should be legal online.

If I'm allowed to stand at Hyde park corner and shout "down with the government" it shouldn't be an offense under some technicality telecommunications act to say the same thing on twitter.

Re: Age is an issue, and just how do you measure this?

Why do I have a feeling that the only people prosecuted under this law will be those "bullying" Irish politicians, the church or American corporations with HQs in Ireland

Norks SCOLD Prez Obama over Sony mega hack payback sanctions

Re: Targets

Since they were presumably harming North Koreans shouldn't we have been funding them ?

Healthcare: Look anywhere you like for answers, just not the US

Re: I don't get the mentality of the US healthcare consumers.

That's a bargain - we are paying nearly $2500/month for the family coverage of our single US based salesdroid.

Re: planned?

Same with the police, I have to pay for the police that arrest me for drunk driving - that's government gone mad. Why can't I contract out arresting me to ther cheapest least effective private supplier available ?

Re: If you

>Why would you have no insurance though?

You lost your job, you changed job and the new scheme doesn't kick in for 6months, you started working for yourself, your new employer's insurance won't cover you because you had a cold as a child so everything that involves breathing is a pre-existing condition.

Or just paperwork, you become unemployed and file form xyz123 for free coverage but you have to pay the first month's premium of $N000 dollars and will be refunded - but you pay it late and so have no coverage for that 6month billing period but you don't know this.

Or you just see a doctor that was in your insurance scheme when the list was published but has since dropped out and you get a $20,000 bill - it's your responsibility to check that every medical professional you see during your treatment is a member of your specific insurance plan.

Re: France

Let us know when you have solved that particular computer science problem.

A lot of people in banking, the military, security, etc would like to know how you did it.

ps a password isn't the solution

Re: Competition and choice

There's an app for that .....

Re: Billing

The billing inefficiency and overhead is stunning.

I worked for an IVY league university with a fantastic insurance plan, I went for a medical at the university hospital and for the next two years received bills for $0.00, demands to pay $0.00, refunds of $0.00, statements for $0.00 and so on. A colleague broke a wrist went to the same place and received a bill for $200 because a 2nd doctor not covered by the plan had also looked at the x-ray.

Re: So remind me again

>why don't we also tax those who exercise to cover physio and sports injuries too.

Did BUPA coverage for our small company once.

I mentioned we should be a cheap good risk, all young fit hunks.

On the contrary we were the highest payment band the rep explained rather frankly - we have to cover expensive physio for all your rugby and skiing accidents while we dump middle aged managers with heart attacks on the NHS

Apple's 16GB iPhones are a big fat lie, claims iOS 8 storage hog lawsuit

Re: Absurd

And does the technology require the advert to include the space the technology uses as part of the sale pitch?

Selling a range of products differentiated only on storage space and including space the user can't use is fraudulent. It's like selling a 40" TV with a 32" screen and a 4" bezel then telling customers that if they want a 40" screen they should buy the 56" model.

But Microsoft is worse, my 64Gb Surface tablet includes a hidden 12Gb re-install partition containing windows and office installers and only about 34Gb of usable space.

UK.gov: Sod SIGINT, let's turn GCHQ into a TECH CRECHE

Re: Cut the payroll

But presumably didn't collect his pension

Re: Cut the payroll

I thought most of the people at MI5 worked for the KGB so that should have reduced the wages bill quite a lot

Want to shoot FIREBALLS from your wrists, SPIDER-MAN style?

Re: Not something to wear at the airport then?

Doesn't contain 2oz of fluid and doesn't have a picture of a transformer on it so you should be fine

Prez Obama slaps sanctions on Norks in payback for Sony hack

Re: [Sigh]

>File this one in with Iraq's WMD, I'm afraid.

So we blame 9/11 on North Korea this year

Magic streaming beans? Sure, have my cow - music biz

Buy CDs

I can buy used albums for $5, I can get most of the 60s/70s/80s classic albums for $5 or 3/$20 on sale somewhere.

For this I get an album of songs. I get full quality that I can re-rip on the next device.

I get files that I can keep even if I don't keep up my account at xyz services or if xyz get bought by xyz2 and change the terms.

Of course I am an old fart who doesn't know who won X factor so what do I know

1,000mph ROCKET CAR project dogged by beancounters

Re: The love of money is the root of all evil

And yet the same shit workers operate Europe's most efficient car plant in Sunderland.

All it needed was Japanese designs, Japanese management and Japanese accountants.

SpaceX six days from historic rocket landing attempt

Re: In world where news is mostly Celebs..

>If you compare Elon Musk's goals in life to Nigel Farage,

So you have met a nice South African and that is bloody surprising man .....

Re: Fingers crossed!

> namely aerodynamics.

And the aerodynamics of hypersonic vehicles was well understood in the 1970s ?

El Reg's Giant Mobile Industry Roundup of 2014: Part Deux

Re: So Micrsosoft will not be leveraging Nokia's imaging expertise

The problem is that post Gates there is no Microsoft, there are lots of battling chieftains.

Mobile is under the X-box group so it had better do something for x-box sales this quarter.

It will lose money for a while so it needs subsidy, the only group that makes money is Office so a phone has to convince the Office bosses that it will make money for them in the long run.

Imagine where the iPhone would be if every initial iPhone sale had cost the boss of the iPod division some of his bonus? And that same iPod boss had been in charge of allowing iPhone onto the iTunes store!