Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Italy's 'Google tax law' could fall foul of EU discrimination rules

Re: Hmm

> appoint an agent in Rome, give him a 0.5% margin

Or appoint an agent in Rome, charge him 101% of all revenues as a licensing fee and then apply for Italian government aid to help this struggling local business

Suffering SPITZER! Boffins discover Milky Way's MISSING ARMS

Re: Douglass Adams was right, once again. @Gav

But unfashionable areas can start very quickly

We should describe ourselves as "Ursa Minor Borders"

World+dog: Network level filters block LEGIT sex ed sites. Ofcom: Meh

Re: I Don't Understand

Or stop people accessing the boxing day movie on iPlayer and going out and blowing up German dams

Re: Saracens Rugby Club

Any idea why it is banned?

Religous hate speech?

They think scrums are gay porn?

Or just because Union should be banned anyway

Euro satellite to count a billion stars, find origin of Milky Way

Re: Huh?

It doesn't sit exactly at L2 it orbits around it - there is still an overall resonance that keeps it around that point.

In fact you don't want it exactly at L2 because the Earth would eclipse the sun and its solar panels wouldn't get any power.

The reason for L2 (rather than something closer) is that the Earth only covers a small patch of the sky. So the Earth doesn't get in the way of the targets and there is no thermal change as the satellite passes through Earth's shadow.

A succesfull deployment - unfortunately

The previous satellite to do this, Hipparcos, had a problem after launch and the booster stage didn't separate.

However having a couple of tons of booster attached to it meant that its orbit was a lot more stable and there was a suggestion that all future astrometric satellites be launch with a couple of tons of scrap iron bolted to them

NSA spies should clean up their act, says Prez Obama-picked panel

Re: And it all comes down to semantics, yet again

I would have thought "unwarranted" = without a warrant?

Although somehow I suspect not

A committee that reported?

I know the USA is a new country, but with a bit of experience you will learn that independant committees setup to look into the problem of the day shouldn't report for at least 3 years when all the fuss has died down.

In the meantime you can say that "you are looking into it" and "cannot comment while the investigation is underway"

United Nations signs off on 'right to privacy in the digital age'

Re: Rights and wrong(s)?

Being in public doesn't mean you have no rights

If you were constantly followed around by a squad of police recording everywhere you went, everything you said, everyone you talked to and everything you looked at - you might think that was pretty oppressive

That's a relief then

Although shouldn't the UN have used its other 2 magic wishes to end war, poverty, hunger, injustice etc?

Feminist Software Foundation gets grumpy with GitHub … or does it?

Clarke was right

Any sufficiently advanced 'ism is indistinguishable from satire

Wait, that's no moon 21.5-inch monitor, it's an all-in-one LG Chromebase PC

Re: Too Limited

If it also functioned as a regular display (or TV) I could see the appeal.

Instead of turning on your PC just press a button on the telly and have a secure/simple/reliable web browser instantly on.

I have a chromebook as a replacement for a tablet (couldn't live without the keyboard) - but since this needs a keyboard and mouse and a desk to sit them on - I can't really see the point

Go on, buy Bitcoin. But DON'T say we didn't WARN YOU

Re: Tulips ! @ YAAC

Outside the country (we do trade internationally!) a currency only has the value that the currency markets place on it. Whatever statements the government of $COUNTRY$ make, that does't decide how many USD their pieces of paper are worth.

The UK government guarantees your bank account, but it only guarantees it in £. It doesn't guarantee that you will be able to buy the same amount of Oil/gold/whatever with it. That is the real value of an international currency.

Re: Tulips ! @ Mark

>Bitcoins value is determined solely by the belief of the market that it has value

Any currency only has value because the market believes it has value.

Having a government backing it doesn't necessarily help. Ask anyone holding Reichsmarks in 1945 or confederate dollars in 1865, or Iranian Rials in 201x.

The idea of bitcoin was that it was a universal currency that could be traded without the permission, knowledge and fee taking from VISA/Amex/Paypal. It's no more anonymous than them and is used in astronomically fewer criminal activities than the good old $ in which we trust

Re: Makes your choices and takes your chances

But if you had data on a cloud service that was being used for pirating movies and it is shut down - you don't get your data back

cos they have the men with guns?

Vodafone dodges UK corporation tax bill - AGAIN

Re: Good for them

It's good for all of us.

If I don't have to pay tax on the interest I owe on the mortgage, car and credit cards I'm going to be a lot better off. In fact I'm might borrow some money to put in a savings account if the interest payments are a tax write-off.

Sky rapped over PREMATURE SEXY CONDOM ad

Think of the children

If only a single child later gets pregnant or dies of AIDS it will all have been worth it.

IT bods: Windows XP, we WON'T leave you. Migrate? Chuh! As if...

Businesses may draw another conclusion

>PCs on Windows XP need to understand that they will put their networks and data at high and increasing risk.

They may decide that having Windows on desktop machines at-all is putting their networks and data at risk.

If we are supposed to do everything on the web with Office365 - exactly why do i need a full OS on every desktop, all able to run any programs/attachments/malware they like and all with access to my network?

Google Glass pics will BAFFLE admirers: Nudge nudge, WINK WINK

Re: Abuse

I think this already happened (or at least a proof of concept) the glasses will automatically read any QR code they see. They also automatically update the firmware if you send them to a particular url

Re: whatever next?

My phone camera has a loud annoying shutter noise that can't be disabled. Every camera phone I have had does. I heard it was a legal requirement in either Japan/Korea and the phone makers all want that market.

Any truth to this?

GCHQ spooks told: Break Huawei's grip on 'The Cell'

Re: Not that I buy into this US-led paranoia about Huawei kit...

Privatisation.

GCHQ got asked to do it, so they asked the nice chaps at the GPO to do it because knew about this new fangled telephone stuff. Forgetting that the GPO had now been privatised BT sub-contracted it to the lowest bidder which was Huawei

In a way it's a beautiful example of PPI at work. A bit like the case a few years ago when the Russians came in with the best bid for the Army's new helicopter.

BT network-level STOCKINGs-n-suspenders KILLER arrives in time for Xmas

Re: The filtering isn't my main issue

>Who the f**k are mumsnet?

The paramilitary wing of the Daily Mail

Basically the PTA in SS uniforms (probably best not to google that if you have an unblocked connection)

Re: "strict", "moderate" and "light".

So this Christmas a group of Tory MPs get to ring up a nice lady at BT and ask if they need "strict" or "moderate" discipline on their pron?

I can see how this got passed

Presumably one of Lincolnshire's most picturesque seaside resorts will now be removed from the internet.

Analogue radio will CONTINUE in Blighty as Minister of Fun dodges D-Day death sentence

Re: What about crises?

Twitter?

Obvious solution

Are there short range USB DAB transmitters?

Then you could get a rasberryPi with wifi, have it receive radio from iPlayer on t'internet and rebroadcast it to your DAB radio. Then that would be twice as digital as the DAB radio and so twice as good.

Re: 97% of the population

> North Norfolk coast, we were treated to mostly flawless Yorkshire TV

But did you understand it?

Microsoft's cloudy chief: Azure reliability knocks your own kit for six

Re: VisualStudio online TFS

That doesn't help me if it's the visual studio server that is down.

Azure currently says "compute service performance degradation" doesn't say if that's what's stopping me logging into TFS, doesn't say when it will be fixed.

Having to know their internal details of which host their hosted service uses is hardly the point of cloudy-ness

Re: VisualStudio online TFS

With my own server the problem is TFS.

With their service; it might be my client, might be my router, might be my ISP, might be any one of the multiple Microsoft Online/Live/Hotmail/Corporate/Office365 accounts I seem to need to have to login to any Microsoft service, it migth be their Visual Studio service, it might be Azure, it might be one of their data centers - I have no idea.

It's like saying that since I'm not a professional olympic athlete cycling to work can't be as reliable as the mixture of Bus+Train+Tube because they are all run by professionals.

(It also doesn't help that half of their help pages for hosted TFS tell you to login into the server and start entering TFS commandline admin commands.)

VisualStudio online TFS

Login

Wait

Try login again

Go to msdn blog to see if any outage report - nope

Got to Reddit to see if anyone else has a problem - yes

Keep trying to login

Read story next day on reg about 12hour Azure outage

It probably is more reliable than an in-house server. But at least I know if the in-house server is borked and don't just sit there hopefully pressing retry.

Striking Amazonians warn: Don't rely on us for Christmas pressies

Re: So that's why they're moving to Poland

In the UK, Amazon is being investigated by the Inland Revenue about how it employs >2000 people but makes no sales, has no income and pays no tax.

Amazon.co.uk's operations in mighty Luxembourg make £10Bn in sales.

Security guru Bruce Schneier to leave employer BT

Re: "natural end", "great asset"

His US consulting company got bought by BT in 2006 when it (BT) was trying to pretend to be a world player.

They are now either annoyed at the Chuck Norris of crypto, or have abandoned the US business or having his company made an internal report go onto a second page and it was easier to get rid of them than reformat it.

Either way it's not like they marched him from the desk with a bin-liner of his stuff.

He will probably get more work now he isn't associated with BT.

Re: B3

For the former official state owned government telecoms provider who were privatised to become the unofficial government telecoms provider to claim that its relationship with GCHQ is no different from Tesco's is a little disingenuous. It's like QuintiQ claiming it is just another software company.

That Google ARM love-in: They want it for their own s*** and they don't want Bing having it

One of the big advantages of ARM is that the chip is so small you can stick it in the corner of the GPU/ASIC/custom lol-cat search combobulator to handle all the ancillary computer stuff while the special silicon gets on with the hard bits

Apple iWatch due in October 2014, to wirelessly charge from one metre away – report

Re: iWatch ? I cannot believe

>Wristwatches came in because pulling a pocket watch was too much hassle in a busy environment.

Specifically the trenches of WWI

However the idea of attaching my phone to a gold chain and removing it from my waistcoat pocket to consult it through my monocle is appealing

Sensation: Chinese Jade Rabbit FOUND ON MOON

Obviously fake - the flag is red.

We know from the Apollo landings that the moon is B&W

'Disruptive, irritating' in-flight cellphone call ban mulled by US Senate

Re: Oh bullshit.

All of them

"Welcome to your CORPORATE SLOGAN flight, here at CORPORATE SLOGAN we take .. so list to theis CORPORATE SLOGAN safety video ... thank you for flying CORPORATE SLOGAN"

Followed by a bunch of ads for CORPORATE SLOGAN's car hire partners

I stopped flying United because it became like a giant game of "Simon Says". - Do you want fly the friendly skies sugar in your fly the friendly skies coffee?

Re: Easy fix

The lag is only an issue if the person involved in a conversation is responding to what the other person is saying.

For the sort of person that is going to talk on a cell phone for the length of a flight, listening to somebody on the other end is unlikely to be a major concern.

Re: Mobile Calling Area

What about some soundproof enclosure for each passenger.

Something like a 1950's hairdresser dryer thing on each seat

Alternately just let people make phone calls AND have guns on board

SpaceX beats off Bezos' rocket for rights to historic NASA launch pad

Re: My how far NASA has fallen :(

An opportunity for a perfect synergy

The BBC's finest hour - broadcasting heroic Churchillian speeches during WWII

Nasa's finest hour - using Nazi rocket scientists to build bigger versions of a V2

So all we need is a war with Germany

Re: Put up or shut up

The same could be said for Boeing or Lockheed-Martin

IBM hid China's reaction to NSA spying 'cos it cost us BILLIONS, rages angry shareholder

So they couldn't reveal to US law enforcement that they were losing business in China - because China discovered they were spying on them - in case the Chinese find out about

Enraged by lengthy Sky broadband outage? Blame BT Openreach cable thieves

Must have been a serious theft

How many cables must they have cut in different locations across the capital to defeat the state of the art enterprise grade, strategic, redundant and reliable fibre backbone that British Telecom operate?

Surely a company that is so mighty that it is the only one considered to bid for most government projects wouldn't have a system that lost service becuase of a single break at one location?

Fisher-Price in hot seat: iPad bouncy chair lets APPLE BABYSIT tots – parents

Re: Could be worse

Or it could be Windows8

How the UK's national memory lives in a ROBOT in Kew

Re: Microfilm

Balanced against that is the chance of anyone bothering to read it - so just as effectively "lost"

Having information like the census data online means it can be data mined to research patterns of immigration, social mobility etc etc. Having it on 1000s of microfilms in different places is more secure but means the data will almost certainly never be accessed or used.

Computers in the basement

Sir Humphrey: .... a few others lost in the flood of 1967.

[to Humphrey] Was 1967 a particularly bad winter?

Sir Humphrey: No a marvellous winter, we lost no end of embarrassing files.

Ten top tech toys to interface with a techie’s Christmas stocking

If you want email/web browsing/netlfix and remote admin ARM netbooks are great value

If you want to be in charge of Linux kernel development then I would buy the Pixel

US cops blew more than $26m buying 1.1m cell phone files from telcos

Re: Something tells me that charging them for the data is the *only* way to stop fishing trips

If it was their money - yes

Since any extra cost is just more budget that the taxpayer is spending on the war on everything - no

Do you want to be the chief of police who spent less on chasing terrorists than the next city?

Shivering boffins nail Earth's coldest spot

Re: So what you're saying is...

>If I'm going to Antarctica, I ought to pack a sweater?

If you are some sort of southern jessy then yes