Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!

Re: Do they have spare parts?

There are a couple of companies making PDP11 addin boards for PCs that emulate a PDP11.

The green roadside boxes running traffic lights were PDP11s until recently

Soylent days and soylent nights

Re: Obviously, you need to combine....

> Imagine "lunch" as a warm, wheat-coloured oily liquid that has grainy stuff in it that sticks in the back of your throat, and you're there.

They still make Watneys Red Barrel ?

Latest NASA ASTRONAUT class is HALF FEMALE

>Astronauts used to be the pick of the bunch, the right stuff,

50% of them are still fighter pilots.

So if the ISS ever needs to skim along a trench into the death star before firing into it's unshielded exhaust port.....

That's why space is cooler than high energy physics. If CERN only picked special forces commandos to work on the LHC it would be as cool as the ISS - and produce as much science

Re: Congratulations to the New Astronauts

> NASA needs to develop its own again. To bad to lose US Space leadership.

They are trying:

Step 1, hyperinflation in Germany

Step 2, rise of a far right party

Step 3, World war

Step 4, develop new weapons

Step 5, pinch enemy scientists that developed those weapons.

Number of cops abusing Police National Computer access on the rise

Re: Titanic meet PNC

No this is a sample of those that got caught by journalists and the news got out.

how many were arrested?

Of those found breaking the public trust in the most serious way - how many are now in prison?

If due to their actions the public now distrusts the noble guardians of our safety - isn't this a rather more serious crime than fiddling expenses?

UK telcos chuck another £1m at online child abuse watchdog

Re: Mary Whitehouse would be spinning in her grave

One alleged side effect of this in Australia is that porn must now involve massive breasts.

Any pictures of ladies with a more svelt physique now risk tagging as being underage - or appearing underage, (apparently a grandma in a school uniform is considered child porn).

Apple's screw-up leaves tethered iPhones easily crackable

Re: RE: MrXavia

I'm surprised the defualt password list isn't just: "steve","jobs", "turtleneck", "shiny","rounded","corners"

Ask Trevor Pott ANYTHING about Office 365

Can we use "ize" and "re"

Or does that confuse the NSA filters?

Robbing a bank? Carberp toolkit now available for just $5k

Can I buy online

Just put my bank details into their site

NSA PRISM snoop-gate: Won't someone think of the children, wails Apple

Re: I call BS on this

Funnily enough those are also the main reasons for drone flights in the US.

The main reason for the use of hellfire missiles remains "kittens in trees"

Re: another attempt to diffuse the ongoing row

Actually I think they are hoping to DIFFUSE the ongoing row into a lot of narrow arguments about which companies did what and who knew when

Re: Really?

I suppose you could beat them with logic.

Ask Google, "if I asked Amazon were they being forced to lie about national security letters, would they say yes?"

Re: Really?

Or to put it in a British context;

How many Brazillians has the met shot this year?

The majority of calls to the police are to deal with lost kittens or asking a local bobby the time.

Oracle's Ellison outlines plans for Hawaiian Electriclarryland

With volcano?

I always have the image of him in a collar-less jacket saying " No Mr Torvalds - I expect you to die ......"

New material enables 1,000-meter super-skyscrapers

Any rope is the problem

The limit on skyscrapers is how many lifts you have and how long people are prepared to wait for them.

If you have a rope, however ultra, you are limited to one lift per shaft.

A shaft takes up floor space, adding shafts means less tenants.

The solution is maglev lifts than run on rails in the walls of the shaft so you can have multiple lifts in the same shaft. You can also queue them like tube trains on the circle line. So in the morning rush, after the first lift leaves the ground floor there is another one that was parked in the basement which can follow it up a few seconds later.

You do need a bit of software to make sure that destination for lift 1 is > destination for lift 2 but even VB programmers should be able to manage that.

Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++

Re: The usual non-USA cost bias.

Funnily enough for most textbooks it's the opposite way around, they are $200 in the USA and £40 in the UK

Based on, if your are paying $50k in tuition you won't mind a few $100 on books

Google flings another £1m at online child sex abuse vid CRACKDOWN

Re: Eh?

I want some official government authority with judicial review and a known political agenda - not some "charity"/religous group/think-tank to have quasi-government power to ban anything that they don't like.

Won't somebdoy think of the children is not a valid reason.

Re: Eh?

The problem is that - even if this were possible - the list is supplied by a "charity" with unknown political aims, unknown backers, and no review process.

They already blocked wikipedia over an album cover you can buy in HMV, their counterparts in other countries have blocked gay marriage and breastfeeding sites.

Not just telcos, THOUSANDS of companies share data with US spies

Re: My apologies to everyone I thought was a paranoid fool.

Use security software with links to the shadier end of the Russian government ?

CIA spooks picked Amazon's 'superior' cloud over IBM

Re: Correct choice

> Smart choice CIA

Of course negotiating is easier if you are recording all the calls of your supplier !

The big difference is that IBM normally has enough lobbyists to ensure that government contacts don't go to anyone else.

US Supremes: Human genes can't be patented

Re: Hmmm

So how is rearranging naturally occurring DNA into a new pattern to do something new any different from rearranging naturally occurring iron ore into a new shape to do something new?

If I can manufacture a bit of DNA to make a bacteria produce diet coke how is that any less patentable than me inventing a machine to make diet coke?

DHS warns of vulns in hospital medical equipment

Updates and FDA regs

Most machines in hospitals run Windows, most are connected to the network and almost all have the auto update turned off - is anyone surprised?

Confidence in US Congress sinks to lowest level ever recorded

Re: Dumb voters want someone to blame

Actually the electoral colleges choose the politicians

And the existing politicians choose the electoral college, and set the election boundaries decide who gets the broken voting machines and decide who gets to count the votes

Re: So why the %$#@! do we keep re-electing the same politicians?

Things have changed:

You used to have a choice between, a southern baptist millionaire lawyer backed by the oil industry, or a southern baptist millionaire lawyer backed by the entertainment industry.

Now you have the same choice but one is half-black.

PM Cameron calls for modern, programmable computers! (We think)

Re: Just asked someone who did GCSE IT last year

I did O'level CS in the early 1980s probably soon after it was introduced.

It was a joke then, we wrote an "ask 20 questions" app in BBC basic and had an exam that asked you to do little more than circle the picture of a mainframe. I remember the exam took about 15mins - we were all looking around confused as if they had missed some pages out.

Now don't get me started on the differences between maths/physics O level 30years ago and what we teach today .....

Re: Don't underestimate the Bollocks

Well if Maths is going to be reduced to arithmetic and English to spelling then computer science should be about taking computers out of boxes and plugging them in.

NSA: 'Dozens of attacks' prevented by snooping

Re: "NSA's "intent" to get specific figures on the number of attacks prevent out in the next week."

>If a bomber goes on a mission and gets run over by a car,

That would explain America's appaling road safety record. If those 30-40,000 deaths were all actually CIA hits on terrorists

My dog prevented hundreds of attacks

Although none of the operations led to any arrests, drones attacks or anything that could be mistaken for evidence - rest assured that in his own top secret and unidentifiable way, spot prevented 100s of terrorist incidents

Facebook turns on frigid Swedish ice-maidens in new data centre

It's sweden why bother?

I mean unless you are going to round up the people you spy on and put them in offshore camps to tortue them - what's the point in spying on them? It's a complete waste of time and money.

Swedish taxpayers should demand that some small visible minority are rounded up (possibly people that don't like meatballs or can't assemble IKEA furniture) - it's the only way to get value for money.

Light goes down a fibre at 200,000km/s so it takes 1/20 s to go half way around the world.

what to people do on facebook that makes a 10ms ping a problem?

Scientists investigate 'dark lightning' threat to aircraft passengers

Re: Compare to Dental X-Ray

>No proof of course but lots of hosties in their 40's, 50's and 60's have developed lots of nasty cancers that friends in their peer group have not.

Presumably STDs are also caused by altitude then ?

What did the Lehman Brothers implosion look like to a techie?

Re: Not quite...

RBS needed bailing out because it had retail customers whose savings you were guaranteeing anyway - plus allowing a high st bank to fail would cause a run on all the others.

Bailing out a merchant bank's trading business is very different.

Re: Banking failure

There needs to be better protection for retail banking from their merchant arms but it's not as simple as that.

Presumably you want your savings to pay interest, so you need your retail bank to invest the money - just buying US government securities isn't going to pay for all those branches and pens on chains.

In the days when you had to talk to a bank manager somebody had to pay for that, either you paid bank charges or the bank only allowed accounts from people with plenty of money and paid pathetic interest. We don't go back to women not being allowed accounts without their husband but we do go to women only being allowed an account if they have a BMW

Google donates £1m to child abuse charity ahead of Whitehall meeting

Re: IWF

That's the really clever part.

They aren't official so there is no official process or review.

An ISP gets told to block an entire website (like wikipedia, or akamai) because of a single complaint from an unknown person. The ISP doesn't have to do this of course - it can explain to the Daily Mail why it is a fan of child porn.

It's secret censorship by "concerned citizens" - exactly the same problem of official response to an unofficial body that you have with ACPO.

Re: Are there 'other' IWFs?

Yes they are UK based.

They are a charity so there is no government or official oversight over what they say should be banned. There is no need for them to disclose any backers, funders or political ideology. There is no reason for an ISP to use their list other than a Daily Mail backlash if they don't.

You could just as easily decide that Greenpeace, or CND, or the Socialist Workers Party should publish a list and you should use that.

Other countries have their own groups of citizens concerned about the children. Some of these groups also don't like gays, or abortion, or breastfeeding - you have no way of knowing what their agenda is because the lists are secret.

Internet Watch Foundation

Is not a child abuse charity, they do not help abused children. They publish a list of websites that they don't like.

It's like saying Mary whitehouse's National Viewers and Listerners Association is an anti-war charity because they don't like swearing on TV

Report: Cloud could slash biz software energy use by 87%

Re: Funded by the NSA?

On the positive side, a FOI request means you don't need to keep your own backups

KEEP CALM and Carry On: PRISM itself is not a big deal

Re: Bullshit Damage Limitation

Indeed - the suggestion that a sysadmin earned $200K and had a pole dancer girlfriend suggests that the whole thing is a fantasy

Re: Cost Analysis

The $20M in project costs are worth an investigation on their own.

It will be the first government IT project to only cost $20M since Babbage got a contract to put some brass gears together to print navigation tables

Re: The scary thing...

Similarly with the companies involved =ie. The NSA doesn't have direct access to Google's server

No, It only has access to the switches feeding Google's servers.

But the servers are owned by Google data center inc - a wholly owned subsidiary, which the has NSA access

So we have a department of deniability that handles NSA requests and they are careful that the CEO doesn't know about it.

Re: You're not as special as you think you are.

You are special now - you pay tax.

And you file to pay the extra sales tax on anything bought out of state, and you declare any souvenirs you bring back from a foreign trip, and pay income tax and social security on anything you sell on ebay?

I hope so because the IRS now have a copy of all your internet traffic and all your credit card slips

Bill Gates slurps bigger share of Olympics bungle-boys G4S

Re: Gates Buys Private Army !

Getting good staff does seem to be an issue for even the most technologically able evil supervillian.

You can build a planet destroying death star but manager to hire millions of troops that couldn't hit a womp-rat's arse with a banjo.

Yes, maybe we should keep hackers in the clink for YEARS, mulls EU

Re: Menu-driven sentencing is NOT justice: ever heard of three strikes?

Except for the odd corners where the police don't give a fsck or don't have the resources.

So instead of being able to hack a German bank from a computer in Cyprus because they don't have laws against it, you will be able to hack a German bank from a computer in Cyprus because their police have got bigger problems to deal with.

Re: Theory vs Practice

Perhaps a new offence of Coding Under the Influence.

Singing astronaut Chris Hadfield resigns from Canadian Space Agency

Re: A Sarnia Homecoming is Due.

Never understood why it's such an honour to have a building that everybody hates so much named after you:

Before we can get to Disneyland kids we have to queue for 3hours at Chris Hadfield Airport

We were stuck for 6hours becuase of a delay at Chris Hadfield Airport

Snow at Chris Hadfield Airport has meant a 2nd night for travelers sleeping on the floor.