Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

US spyboss: Yes, we ARE snooping on you, but think of the TERRORISTS

Re: Counterterror fail

If the purpose of this was to catch terrorists that would be true.

If the purpose of this is to have some dirt on everybody - just in case - then the more data the better

Re: And for non-US citizens?

>But spying on the citizens of your allies OK then?

That was the origin of the UKUSA agreement.

US president Hoover's swore that he wouldn't spy on Americans "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail.". Unlike Mr Obama didn't have his fingers crossed. So he got the Brits to intercept US mail and read it and he did the same for them.

A more refined form of lying for a more civilized age.

Re: GCHQ

Better idea.

GCHQ can only spy on Americans / NSA can only spy on Brits

And they hate each other and don't share any info

A bit like when we used to have actual real enemies

Re: GCHQ

Damn good thing too - if we don't spy on all those Americans how can the counter revolution succeed?

Long live King George and the defeat of the North American rebels

Re: A wide variety of threats

Here it's the "threat to national security from the misguided activities of citizens manipulated by foreign interests" ie people who object to running a crude oil pipeline through a seal sanctuary

The government hasn't started calling them terrorists yet....

“The unauthorised disclosure of a top-secret US court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation,”

No it doesn't - it tells potential terrorists that they will be immediately detected by the all seeing eye of the NSA and so they shouldn't try anything.

It's like claiming that leaking the existence of American nuclear weapons to the USSR put America at risk.

Reseller Computacenter LITERALLY smokes out squatters from offices

Re: Boo

Check your small print - it used to be that if the DSS decided that a claim was invalid/fraudulent they came after you for all the rent you had been paid. If you didn't pay up they seized the property.

So you had full retrospective liability for a benefit claim that you weren't allowed to know any details of - try getting insurance against that!

All major UK ISPs prepping network-level porn 'n' violence filters

Re: Paul Crawford

"That would be for a court to decide. They're the only people empowered to make decisions on what is or isn't legal."

They would do the ASBO trick. The material on the list wouldn't have to be proved illegal - circumventing the list to access these sites would itself be illegal, even if the site was on the list by accident

Re: Babbit55

"The national comittee of people who know best" - you aren't allowed to know who is on the comittee because they know best, and you can't see the list because then you might be exposed to naughty stuff - so just keep calm and carry on.

Leaked docs show NSA collects data on all Verizon customers

One of the first prosecution under the UK's data protection act was a senior police officer who saw a car parked outside his house had the owner traced and then beat up the man who was knocking off his wife. He got off because he didn't know how to use the computer so had a WPC do the actual typing.

We then had our own PATRIOT act to stop international terrorism. One of it's first uses was by local councils asking fro cell phone location tracking so they could detect people not picking up dog crap. Then they launched total surveilance programs on people who were living outside the catchement area trying to send their kids to a good school.

Culture Sec: You - Google. Where's the off switch for all this filth?

Re: Illegal content is already illegal

But it worked so well for Australia

Why aren't knife makers doing more to ensure their knives are' used illegally?

Jobs' 'incredibly stupid' prattlings prove ebook price-fix plot, claim Feds

Re: Costs

>, I imagine a large chunk of the cost of production is in the skill and knowledge of the creator(s), not in the distribution?

Yes that's why authors typically get 95% of the cover price of the book

BBC boffins ponder abstruse Ikea-style way of transmitting telly

Re: Green screen

I was picturing Stephen Fry as a sort of clippy.

"i see you are trying to make a comedy program" just drop a Stephen Fry in

Websites to 'close' for China's 'Internet maintenance day'

So what is microsoft covering up?

Hosted TFS on VisualStudio.com has been stuffed all day

According to wiki it's the anniversary of Emily Davison throwing herself under a horse for womens' votes and the anniversary of a non-Windows software cockup with the ArianeV.

Microsoft: Our clouds don't bleed you to death

Re: One word. Licensing

Unlikely - monopolies will really hammer them for charging themselves less than a competitor for the same "product".

Especially when they claim that the Azure is a wholely separate business in Timbuktu and doesn't pay any tax anywhere else.

Motorola shows off tattoo and swallowable password hardware

Re: Users already have fingerprints

>2. Your password can't be changed.

It can, a drastic bit of surgery to revoke one I'll admit

But you do get 10 chances

Re: But 666 is a wonderful number!!

>I thought it was 616 other than in films

666 the typo of the beast

Elon Musk pledges transcontinental car juicers by end of year

Re: Musk obviously has staff to pay his bills and thus never actually sees them ...

Electric cars could be the savior of the electricity grid - especially in developing countries with poor infrastructure (like the USA).

You have coal plants which you can't adjust and a massive demand during the day for AC (which you can't meet) and no demand at night (which destabilises your grid).

Having a million UPS distributed across California hooked up to smart meters could save billions on having to build super high capacity DC links like Germany is having to do now it got rid of its nukes.

TSA: Perv scanners now fully banished from US airports

Re: Hmmm...

You don't even need to spend the money on roads. There was a study that claimed the increase in driving due to hijack fears/security hassles already upped the death toll significantly.

The more worrying one is the increase in food contamination/poisoning since the food safety inspectors came under DHS and were reassigned from checking food plants to searching for terrorists.

I'm reassured

So they fitted software that they claim will stop the operators viewing nude images - unless you press the test button.

To the same machines that they claimed had software which couldn't save images - unless you pressed the test button.

'Syrian Electronic Army' fails to crack Israeli water system

Re: Let me get this straight

Sorry got the of/and confused in the post

Let me get this straight

Syrian government groups attack Israel (allegedly)

Because Israel blew up a convoy (allegedly)

Carrying weapons to the terrorists/freedom-fighters/rebels attacking the Syrian government (allegedly)

Are they putting something in the water?

Kettle 'which looks like HITLER' brews up sturm in a teacup

Re: People are stupid as a whole.

> My comment is based on the fact that it's annoying not being able to make a cup of tea in a hotel room. And I'm British, dammit.

I believe that this is a major part of the US defence (no spellchecker it shouldn't be "s") against a British counter revolution. The right to bear arms and the requirement to drink coffee.

Re: People are stupid as a whole.

Post and wire is great, it allows you to find a live connection without all that tedious removing of insulation

Re: People are stupid as a whole.

Who would have thought that an article about Hitler would have descended into such a flame war !

Re: People are stupid as a whole.

Actually a combination of wussy little girly 110v and no ring mains so you can only pull about 15Amps from an entire circuit means kettles that take 10mins to make a cup of tea, no electric showers and washing machines that need their own dual phase supply.

UN to call for 'pre-emptive' ban on soulless robot bomber assassins

Re: Not sure I get this

Sinking merchant shipping without warning was one of the war crimes Admiral Dönitz was charged with at Nuremberg. So unless your homing torpedoes can stop, put up their country's flag, wait for the crew to get into lifeboats and then sink the ship - you might be in trouble.

Unless of course you are on the winning side!

Re: Not sure I get this

Exactly - a cruise missile is just a naval bombardment on steroids

This is a remote install minefield.

Send a drone to loiter over an enemy camp (or wedding party, or village in Gaza). It's programmed to shoot/missile/bomb any target (or women collecting water) that appears on the street

At the end of the news cycle you move the drones to the next village.

EMC inks deal to take Brit F1 racer Lotus to the clouds

Logo

Is it printed backward so that the other drivers can see it in their rear view mirrors?

Australia's de-facto net filter has ZERO regulation

Re: 313 and secrecy..

The civil servants have a choice, publish each banned site along with the reasons and be prepared to justify it in court, or at least in the media when you 'accidentally' ban a breastfeeding site or a rape survivors charity.

Or keep everything secret and face no risk whatsoever

Re: “I doubt that an individual citizen can walk into a police station.”

Instead a concerned citizen would have to tell their MP who would have the site (and any others in the same netmask) banned

@Bootnote

Fortunately all the law enforcement operatives understand this distinction when they log you accessing an illegal IP address.

Remember there is no need to worry because they are only logging public traffic data, not anything private so no need for any warrants or protection

China announces giant military hackathon at SECRET Mongolian base

Re: The USA can't care really...

The navy has been doing rather badly in the war on terror.

It's difficult to show that building another 12 carrier battle fleets will substantially reduce the risk form Al Queda

They really need a distant enemy - and a pacific one is best for the publicity photos.

A cunning plan

If you could persuade the Chinese to steal the plans for the F35 and then spend $$Bn building a pointless fleet of air superiority fighters while at the same time devaluing their own R&D and distracting their manufacturing from developing it's own high tech products you could destroy their entire economic and political system.

Worked on the other lot.

May threatens ban on 'hate-inciting' radicals, even if they don't promote violence

Re: Pro-Freedom

So completely unlike our own government process then ?

Re: Won't be able to post hate comments

Sometimes you aren't allowed to hate Nazis. That's what the FBI got Chaplin for, "premature anti-fascism"

Who did Apple LIE TO: Australia or America?

Re: Localized Market Rate

It's not the pricing - it's what Apple singapore (or Apple Ireland) does.

They claimed to the US that Apple Singapore is a real company that markets and sells apple computers, buys Apple products at wholesale from the US, runs it's own operations and makes it's own profits and so all the profits made by Apple Singapore don't go back to the US and don't get taxed.

If in fact Apple Singapore is simply a brass plaque on a wall somewhere and Apple US make all the decisions and sales it' s a little harder to claim that all the profit should be taxed in Singapore or Ireland

SEC slams NASDAQ with $10m fine for Facebook IPOcalypse

you can say that again

Facebook bows to pressure, vows to rid itself of sexist hate speech

Re: Venables?

I did think it was a rather severe reaction to someone who wasn't even the England manager

Re: Let's call this what it really is...

So long as you make it clear that Neanderthals were peace loving people who lived in harmony with nature before being oppressed by white male Homo Sapiens

Gigabyte's BRIX fall into place

Re: Does it need Linux drivers?

For reasons I completely fail to understand - most of the component makers have deals with the laptops where the official drivers are locked out.

I bought some very expensive Asus laptops for work which had out of date graphics drivers. But the NVidia official ones wouldn't load. There was actually a deliberately coded check - something like "you must use manufacturer supported drivers with this product"

Re: Does it need Linux drivers?

No it's a reference Intel H61 motherboard design, basically the same as the Shuttle DS61/HS61 which works perfectly out of the box with Linux.

The only issue might be the mini-PCI wifi card. The model fitted will probably depends on your region and how picky your local FCC is. But linux can use the windows driver stubs now for most of the proprietry cards

OKPay suspends payment processing to all Bitcoin exchanges

Re: Mining indeed

These days you should picture somebody staring at a computer screen while an automated scoop loads ore into an automated tram which drives to dump it in an automated crusher.

Sometimes these are 1000km away, sometimes just a few 100m below you.

Re: Bitcoin is a reaction

Not necessarily. The point of money is to turn it into goods and services.

I might be quite happy to have some part of my wealth in a form that I can convert into books/music/computers/airline tickets etc without it ever being changed into dollar/euros or pounds

It used to be a common trick here in the frozen north. You contract for a US company but are resident in Canada and pay taxes in Canada on any money your bring back. Of course any money you leave in your US bank account and then use your US visa card to buy groceries in Canada doesn't get taxed. Just an unofficial version of the Jimmy Carr scheme

Bill Gates: Corporate tax is not a moral issue

Re: We're in trouble...

The previous biggest benefactor was Andrew Carnegie, who built a steel empire by ignoring patents on the foreign plants he copied and hired a private army to kill striking workers - so there is at least some progress.

Re: Yup he's right y'know...

"best interests of the shareholders" is different from minimize tax this year.

If the result of these tax games was a ban on government contracts, a monopolies commission investigation into your advertising business or a boycott of your coffee shops by consumers - then your shareholders might decide that you haven't done your best fiduciary duty.

If maximum profit was the only driver then drug smuggling would seem to be the best business plan. A few of your employees might end up in Singapore jails but the shareholders would do very nicely.