Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

New .london domains touted tomorrow amid usual tech hypegasm

London leads the world in technology

Like Birmingham leads the world in shipbuilding

FTC: State laws blocking Tesla's direct sales are 'protectionist'

Re: Not just protectionist

Sorry typo - should have been can't

Re: Not just protectionist

Ironically not - you can buy a Tesla in another state over the web, register it in that state and bring it to NJ, you just can buy it from a showroom in the state

Brain surgery? Would sir care for a CHOC-ICE with that?

Re: Wot IT shortage?

Or you are paying crap / offering crap work - and the people who are currently working at Google / Apple / Microsoft or doing high frequency trading systems at banks didn't queue up to apply ?

Awkward? Elop now answers to ex-junior Nadella as Microsoft closes Nokia buyout

Re: You missed one big bit

You also missed the bit where Elop got to keep, and forgot to declare, a bunch of share and bonus options at Microsoft - which were dependant on MSFT getting sales of its Windows Mobile product to some handset maker.

UK bank heist-by-KVM gang sent down for 24 years after nicking £1.2m

Re: £10 - really?

You can probably pick them up quite cheaply at your local bank, in fact they might pay you to take them away

DeSENSORtised: Why the 'Internet of Things' will FAIL without IPv6

Re: Hex codes are a good thing

I don't think it's that they are in hex that is the problem - it's that they are a million digits long. Which is a bit annoying if you have to manually configure lots of machines and remember if the printer is 2001:0db8:3c4d:0015:1234:4321:abcd:ef12 or 2001:0db8:3c4d:0015:1234:4321:abcd:ef12

I understand DNA bases and hold technical opinions about them - but I find it a lot easier to call my wife by her first name than shout out 3Billion base pairs to identify her.

Vladimir Putin says internet is a 'CIA project'

Re: Doesn't matter who "invented" it

And communism was invented by the British Library.

It doesn't mean it was a secret British plot to destabilise Russia, split Germany in two and keep all Britain's other enemies in Africa busy fighting each other - that would be a ridiculous conspiracy.

Reg probe bombshell: How we HACKED mobile voicemail without a PIN

re: CLI being spoofed

>I'm entirely against CLI being spoofed

If you aren't going to allow it to be "spoofed" - then you will need a government agency to issue official CLIs and enforce their use. A phone version of the DVLC

And it's going to have to have international agreements so foreign calls are also correctly id-ed.

And it's going to have to deal with Skype, VOIP, conference calls web-sms gateways etc.

It's a little like having a law saying your reply-to email can't be "spoofed"

Space station astronauts pop outside to replace crippled computer

Delivery time

So does it take longer to get a replacement delivered than it takes the INS to get spares from its office 7miles away?

Systems meltdown plunges US immigration courts into pen-and-paper stone age

Re: Really?

Couldn't they just go down to HomeDepot and hire a couple of Mexicans with a van?

Rejoice, Russians! The annexation of Crimea is complete and legitimate – Google Maps proves it

Re: Which cliche works here....

So exactly the same as organisations like the BBC do when showing India/Pakistan maps in India/Pakistan or middle-east maps outside Israel

Github cofounder resigns after clearance in sex-harass probe

Re: PWOAAARR!

Those are selected incidents of the story, you can follow all the sordid details on reddit or ycombinator. Including the more worrying detail that the wife of the founder who allegedly did the bullying but wasn't employed by the company - claimed to have access to all the customer records and private chat logs

Most Americans doubt Big Bang, not too sure about evolution, climate change – survey

Re: Breaking News!!

>Most Americans are stupid.

Compared to a country that chooses it's leaders from the same heriditory class that went to a couple of boys-only schools and then studied politics at one university. Where not a single minister has any technical background and who fire science advisors if they fail to agree with the Daily Mail.

A country with a monarchy that is more of a meritocracy than the governing party !

Judge halts spread of zombie Nortel patents to Texas in Google trial

Re: IP Deathmatch

Story in NYT today.

The Wright brothers spent the decade after inventing the airplane suing every other maker of aircraft - claiming that their patents covered not only their solution to the problem but all others.

So flaps (which they didn't invent) were covered by their wing warping method (which nobody now uses)

They spent so much time in court and neglecting their business that they and their backers went bust and by the entry into WWI the US declared it had no usable aircraft designs and had to buy French ones.

Record labels sue Pandora over vintage song royalties

Re: Who Is Ripping Whom, RIAA?

The RIAA are in court at the moment with lots of 50/60s artists who they haven't been paying.

Their claim was that any change in lineup invalidates the original deal with the band and all the musicians had to renegotiate/reregister their royalties - meanwhile the RIAA banked the money.

One famous musicians was having to license his old recordings for ads to raise the money to sue the IRAA to get the royalties for the same recording being played on the radio.

IRS boss on XP migration: 'Classic fix the airplane while you're flying it attempt'

Re: Fixing an airborne aircraft

But they are in a much better situation than you. They just have to go to the taxpayer/government and say that they need $M extra this year to plan for a change in operating system in 10years time.

Any reasonable elected official would agree to closing a few hospitals so that the taxman could have an easy transition - everybody loves the IRS afteral.

Sorry London, Europe's top tech city is Munich

Re: Would their govt's migration to Linux

Yes it does make you wonder how anybody managed to run a city before the ribbon(tm)

If only they had the cell update animation of Excel in the 90 then Germany could have managed to build a decent infrastructure and manufacturing base

Re: Would their govt's migration to Linux

But it was long term cost. A govt thinking beyond the next quarter was what was so amazing.

The guy in charge said at the time, (IIRC they were skipping migrating off W2K?) - it will cost more than this upgrade, you would be amazed how cheap the quote fro MSFT gets when you have an alternative, but having control over the upgrades 10-20 years in the future will save us more.

Now how many countries are spending $100M on extending XP support?

Re: If you want Poles of excellence ....

Thats unfair - so many of our MPs are prepared to get up off the backsides to discover why people want to be on the boards of Tobacco companies, defence companies and lots of other companies recieving contracts from their departments

Some are so dilligent in their undercover research that you almost never see them in westminster

MIT boffins moot tsunami-proof floating nuke power plants

Re: @TRT

>, there's about 4.5 billion tons of uranium in seawater already.

But that's natural organic free-range uranium

Re: MIT boffins moot tsunami-proof floating nuke power plants

>That's because floating power nuke plants are a daft idea

For every reason except planning consent

Cost/time to get permission to open a reactor in San Francisco vs permission from feds to moor one 12miles offshore

Don't let no-hire pact suit witnesses call Steve Jobs a bullyboy, plead Apple and Google

>"A burglar may be a career criminal, but the court does not reveal to the jury this fact

But it might take it into account when issuing a shotgun license to someone with 20 convictions for armed robbery vs a gamekeeper on a scottish grouse moor.

The question here is, was there a link between the "don't you try and hire any of our people" and "nice product you've got there - shame if it violates any our patents" emails from Jobs.

But the point here is if a concerned neighbour comes upto you and says - "that wiring looks a little a little worn it could cause a fire, you should get it looked at" you might reasonably make a different conclusion than if a Mafia boss comes into your restaurant with three goons and says "that wiring ....be a shame if the place burned down - you should sell to me now".

Steve Jobs wasn't calling the boss of Palm with friendly business advice - it was a threat, anybody who had dealt with Jobs knew it was a threat, the jury should know it was a threat.

TrueCrypt audit: Probe's nearly all the way in ... no backdoor hit yet

No you wouldn't. The crypto routines are implemented form a set of standard published algorithms. It is relatively easy to prove that encrypting string X with key Y in truecrypt produces the same output as anyone else's AES

There might be mistakes, there might be bugs which leave memory around and help you guess the keys, there might even be backdoors (if you are truly paranoid) in the original design of the algorithms that the NSA and Bruce put in there and the worlds cryptographers haven't spotted.

But backdoors in the code that allow an NSA passwd to decrypt anything are going to be in the keyhandling. The big concern fro truecrypt users was that on windows you need to run a signed driver which you can't (easily) build yourself - so you have no idea if what you were running was what they claimed.

EFF: Feds plan to put 52 MILLION FACES into recognition database

Won't somebody think of the agents?

Soon after this is implemented all the criminals in the USA will be caught - how could it fail with continual automatic CCTV identification of all 51Million bad guys - and then what will happen to all the FBI agents?

Will they all be reduced to collecting used cans in shopping carts - along with all the police officers?

Over half of software developers think they'll be millionaires – study

Re: Ha ha ha ha ha ha

In this city the average price of all homes is now >$880K so it's not difficult to retire with a "net worth of $1M" - it doesn't mean you are throwing $100 bills out of your Bentley

Commonwealth Bank in comedy Heartbleed blog FAIL

Re: Foot, meet bullet

No worse - it says we are changing our system to stop rat droppings in future.

That's what worries people.

It may be ILLEGAL to run Heartbleed health checks – IT lawyer

Re: Politicians....

Doesn't matter anymore though - they don't need a conviction.

They have your DNA and will keep it forever, so a little laboratory mistake down the road and you are a convicted rapist/child abuser.

The record that you were arrested gets reported everytime you need to apply for permission to work in schools, volunteer with the "vulnerable" or coach a kids soccer team.

You will have to go through a long and complicated visa procedure to visit many countries - even if arrested but not convicted.

Dropbox defends fantastically badly timed Condoleezza Rice appointment

Re: Drop box (US based) --> US Laws --> THE PATRIOT Act --> Privacy f**ked

So they lose the free accounts of a few hundred users - and gain a few hundred phone calls from Condie to heads of US Govt Depts and CEOs of honest right-minded US corporations.

It's like complaining that Ferrari are annoying vegetarians and appealing only to the rich by hiring Jeremy Clarkson

Re: Dropbox drops the ball.

Remember the CIA's job is to ensure funding for the CIA.

So you have to keep saying that your current enemies are really dangerous and going to be around for ever - you certainly aren't going to tell your paymasters you expect the USSR to go away in a few years.

NSA denies it knew about and USED Heartbleed encryption flaw for TWO YEARS

Or they weren't using SSL at all because it's illegal for un-authorized users to access a government server so there is no need for any security !

Banks slap Olympus with £160 MEEELLION lawsuit

Re: False statements for the purpose of deferring record losses?

Oddly enough Olympus is the only $Bn Japanese company who has done anything wrong.

They all have the same set of board members, the same secretive reporting rules and the same lax regulators and all face the same challenges in the same market conditions - but it was only Olympus that ever did anything naughty and coincidentally hired an outsider as CEO who blew the whistle

In other news

Pots International have declared that Amalgamated Kettles Inc are a bit sooty

Death of data retention directive: What it means for OTHER data laws

Re: Does it matter?

Because shadowy government agencies who can and will kill people / overthrow governments and sell arms to Iran to finance terrorists in Nicaragua will always operate outside the law.

So to say - oh well we can stop them so we might as well extend that power officially to every level of officialdom from the Milk Marketing Board to the RSPCA - is probably not a Goof Thing (tm)

Re: Does it matter?

Yes, you can't stop US Navy tapping an underwater cable or the CIA breaking into a data center to plant a bug.

But you can stop your local council having an automatic right to a list of every website you visited and the contents of every email you sent and having the right to pull up that list when you go to complain about the roads.

It's like saying it's pointless to ban park keepers from shooting children who walk on the grass because the USAF have drones.

Bendy or barmy: Why your next TV will be curved

With movies these days the director would have cut to a different shot twice in that time ....

The gift of Grace: COBOL's odyssey from Vietnam to the Square Mile

Re: Real Programmers *and* Mythical Man Month?

/* comment in K&R :-) */

surely?

Re: Happy Birthday System/360 and COBOL ...

IIRC Cobol was intended to be read by the business managers so they could understand what these computer people were doing with their money.

That's why it has such verbose statements instead of math-geek freindly symbols.

Gay marriage foes outraged at Mozilla CEO flap, call for boycott

So ...

Are we now boycotting Firefox because they don't support FreeSpeech or OkCupid ?

Do I have to signup for OkCupid before I can boycott it?

Can i still boycott it if I have no idea what OkCupid does and had never heard of it before this?

VAT's all folks: Telecoms and services tax to be set at consumer's homeland rate

Re: Administration knightmare

You already have to do this with the physical goods you described.

Now you just have to do it with stuff you download - instead of pretending that all your business is in a lawyers office in Luxembourg

Internet is a tool of Satan that destroys belief, study claims

Re: So access to information

That's not fair - not all Opera users are like that !

Re: So access to information

It was teaching the peasants to read that began the decline - damn enlightenment.

In Australia, protesting against Brendan Eich will be a CRIME

Re: Boycott The Australian Government?

Or we send Boycott in to bat against the Australian government.

Why won't you DIE? IBM's S/360 and its legacy at 50

Re: Why won't the mainframe die?

Put it this way - nobody is running around in a panic wondering how they are going to migrate 1000s of users off a mainframe platform they only installed 10 years ago.

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

Surely "there are no silver bullets" doesn't apply anymore now that we have the cloud and web and hadoop and node.js ?

Mad Raspberry Pi boffins ripped out its BRAINS and SHRANK them for your pleasure

Re: It's still too expensive

So a single one of these as the controller and a bunch of $5 arduinos managing each thermostat

India's GPS alternative launches second satellite

Re: Wrong search term

AFAIK Baidu the chinese system now uses LEO and a cosntelation the same as GPS/Galileo/etc

Their original system used a single GSO space segment providing timing only along with a ground network of stations.

Advantage was that they only needed a single satelite but you needed to have a comms channel on the ground.

Real advantage was that nobody could use it without the ground stations also knowing who and where they where.

Interested in how the Indian system is going to work. Would the time difference between satellites in a line 40,000km away really give you a good position?

Re: What happened to

>There are pieces of it sitting about 50 metres from me

So a highly accurate if somewhat localised system?

Tesla in 'Ethernet port carries data' SCANDAL

Re: I'd guess none

You still have to, according to the FSF (it hasn't been tested in court) offer to ship the customer the source for all the packages in the Ubuntu distribution you are using.

They claim that pointing to the ubuntu repo isn't enough, but worst case you would just have to mirror ir.