Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Schmidt 'very proud' of Google's tiny tax bill: 'It's called capitalism'

Re: Talk about stating the obvious...

If you buy apples for 50p, sell them for 60p but claim that you have to pay 11p to your Bermuda based parent company for the IP rights - then claim a grant to make up for your loss.

Re: VAT

VAT for online services isn't paid where the customer is located - it's paid where the seller is `based`.

Guess where Google is `based` - it's not London

Sleepy North Yorkshire village is first to get gov-subsidised BT fibre

Re: Suspicious

It's between the A1-M and the east coast mainline - so convenient for ministers to visit without having to stay oop North for too long

Re: At least thats a valid target

The area is white - by carefully defining it as anywhere that doesn't actually cross a vigin fibre.

Re: Evans Business Park, York

>and it can't cost more than £20k to get a nice fibre cable

Through BT's ducts ? Or by getting planning permission to dig up every road and right of way across dozens of bits of private property to run their own ducts?

We used to pay more than this/year for less than ISDN speeds from a BT leased line. There was the M11 in the way and BT had the only duct that crossed it.

Revealed: The Brit-built GRAVITY-powered light that costs $5

Re: Nice

Not many batteries come with a 25year guarantee.

cheap NiMh cells used in garden solar light last <1year and to provide more than an hour runtime you would need a few of them

Re: Heath Robinson, where are you now?

>Also they are unlikely to be eventually produced locally using available resources, tooling and technical know-how.

We used to say the same sort of thing about India and china

Re: I think that my idea is better

The batteries are either large, expensive and heavy to transport (lead-acid), wear out quickly (NiMh) or ridiculously expensive (li-ion)

Elon Musk's solar energy biz scraps IPO liftoff at last minute

I think I would rather be a Telsa investor than GM/Chevy/etc

>Telsa EV's

Telsa was offering free charging because the government was buying their solar feed-in at 5x the rate that Telsa was buying power back to charge the cars.

At some point though people in Chicago are going to wonder why pensioners are freezing, because they can't afford heating, in order to give people in California free top-ups for their $100K sports cars.

UN's 'bid to wrestle control of internet' stalled by asterisk

Re: Check your assumptions

No it should be handed over to the corporations - then Murdoch and Haliburton could decide what websites I view and who I can email

>The best control is no control.

There is control, it's ICANN, a US corporation controlled by "you don't need to know that"

They are the ones that could decide tomorrow that .uk doesn't exist or whether or not to allow a ".sex" domain

MPs: 'Chilling' new libel law will CENSOR THE TRUTH online

Re: Giggs and Imogen anyone?

So all the papers move their servers to Gretna Green and the laws don't apply anyway

Re: One tiny little country

So define "ridiculously long lens"

> If you are also in a public place, nothing to answer at all.

Is a shopping center a public place?

Carpark of a Tesco?

What if the council hands over management of the whole pedestrianised town center to a private company?

Another Apple maps desert death trap down under

Re: Longest street in the world?? - - I think not!

The point was that the 200km length is all WITHIN the city boundaries.

There are lots of other long streets.

Source: Google StreetView

Seriously ? Somebody drove a Google streetview car the length of Australia photographing 2000km of bugger-all?

After 50 years, Europe gets one patent to rule them all

Re: step #1, one target.

Except that would require the French to roll over and let the Americans be in charge.

The main purpose of France is to stop the UK doing whatever the Americans want.

Re: About time

Yes - I should have said that it's enormously expensive to fight a patent case in the UK.

The point of a patent isn't "is it granted" but - "can I afford to defend it against Apple/Samsung/IBM/etc" in court.

Depends who is in charge

At the moment you only have to patent in Germany. The Europena patent office is there and if a competitor is locked out of the German market it doesn't matter if they are allowed to copy you in some 3rd world island off the coast.

At the moment it is hugely expensive to patent anything in Britain. QCs cost you and arm and a leg (in Guineas) and you only have to say England / England and Wales / England and Scotland wrong somewhere on a form to end up paying for the QC's daughter's new pony

Also, recent Samsung events aside, the courts in Germany normally take the ludicrous view that the technical points of a patent should be decided by a judge with a background in science/engineering - rather than latin.

GhostShell hackers release 1.6 million NASA, FBI, ESA accounts

>"while in October it released student records from the world's top 100 universities" did you actually look at the data? much of it was worthless.

Well only one record was genuine, the other 99 had just been copied off wikipedia

Re: US Government: The worlds biggest data sieve

>The 1960/70's technology of the UK Armed Forces is already pretty much in the public domain.

The chinese now have the secret of Tea and biscuits-Brown ?

Of course it did - there were lots of new Powerpoint presentations about the importance of security.

This did mean upgrading every government employee to the new version of Powerpoint but we were able to offset the costs of this by firing some admins and moving all the computer stuff onto Dropbox.

Intel launches Atom S Series at servers

Re: 64bit?

Windows-server is only available in 64bit.

If it's intel you must run Windows and if it's a server you must run Windows-server.

Intel knows that it's real customer is Microsoft - not the guy buying the chips

the customer is always wrong

The customer tells you that they want cheap low power chips to basically glue the ethernet cable to the sata cable.

You tell them that yes - so long as the chips are 64bit, run Windows-TM and VMWARE.

Google honors computing's first developer Ada Lovelace

Re: Damn those school systems!

If they let the boys do poetry we would have legions of "mad bad and dangerous to know" men roaming around europe starting revolutions.

Real programmers use an analytical engine.

If it doesn't leak oil it's not a real computer

Girl gang targets Microsoft's Seattle stores for $5,000 theft spree

The originally only stole $99 worth of phones but had to go back and steal $9900 in CALS to use them

The latest tech firm to be accused of tax dodging: Microsoft

Should extend to everyone

So if I work for Microsoft and get paid 50p/hour (call it training/apprenticeship so minimum wage doesn't apply)

Then I pay no NI, get supp benefits, council tax discount, free school meals, etc

Once a year I fly to Guernsey and do a REALLY hard days work for Microsoft Guernsey Inc for which I get paid say 50,000, and I pay local (0%) tax on. I have a Guernsey credit card to pay for all the little toys that I need to survive the other 364 days of grind at my 50p/hour job.

Re: Tax-avoidance is both legal and ethical.

Exactly and it should apply to everyone:

Why can't I claim back all the food I buy as operating expenses?

I should be allowed to declare that my home is registered in the Caymens and not pay council tax

I should be able to pay YAAC-Bermuda for the rights to my name so I make a loss on my salary and claim benefits.

Yes because got that 100euro DVD you bought, Microsoft Germany had to pay 110euro to Microsoft Luxemburg for that copy, who then had to pay 120 euro to Microsoft Bermuda for the rights to the name.

You should be thankful that they are prepared to lose all that money to sell Windows to you - it's a public service really.

Tor node admin raided by cops appeals for help with legal bills

This is a common tactic against legitimate porn sites in the USA

The operators are required to keep records showing the models are over 18 - the police have a right to "inspect" those records

This is often interpreted as a right to seize anything that may contain a record = every computer, every disk drive, every digital camera, every video editing console - and take them away for a few months "to be inspected"

Sheryl Sandberg offloads $41.5m in Facebook shares in just 6 weeks

fads can last a long time.

Books, plays, music, religion, drinking are all social fads

Deputy PM: Rip up Snoop Charter, 'go back to the drawing board'

Re: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

>I've always viewed the Internet as a 'Public Space' and treated it as such,

i think a number of celebs, several tabloid editors and a Lord Levison might have differing opinions on that

Re: What about councils?

If the police and council have no official record of it then it must have been put there by terrorist peados as part of an attack they were planning - in the same way that they disguise themselves as Japanese tourists and take pictures of Big Ben.

You should have gone door-door telling everyone to leave immediately and then called the bomb squad

@Okay

Or they could just declare it to be a security matter, and is covered under the existing "do whatever you want - that's why you're called the SECRET security services" law, and do it all anyway without bothering parliament.

Re: Julian Huppert did well

People who visited the reg also visited iamaterrorist.com

- Well actually they didn't, a one pixel tracking bug got downloaded from that IP address

That site hosts terrorist/child porn material

- Well actually it doesn't, it's the IP address of a huge CDN that hosts 1000s of websites, some of which point to websites which today we have decided are terrorist (like Al Jazeera) or to facebook pictures that don't have a 18 U.S.C. 2257 statement.

Still - links with terrorism/child porn should give us enough for a warrant to impound everything electrical they own for 3 years.

Unless they have brown skin of course ......

Re: "You've not needed it for the last 2000 years "

Did we need to monitor all phone calls to deal with IRA terrorism in the 70s?

Did we need to read everyones mail to protect children from the moors murders in the 60s?

Did we need to record everyones movements on public transport in the 50s to prevent Mau Mau guerillas infiltrating

London?

At least ID cards prevented a German invasion in the 40s

Bye Bye Moto: Google pulls plug on Motorola Korea

Re: Google: Bringing the jobs home to the USA?

Except the jobs that will be "brought home" are the patent lawyers

Motorola was bought for it's patent portfolio, they will keep making handsets while the current models are selling but there's no point in doing R&D on a company that has no future.

The reason for the drop off in Korea is that following the Samsung-Apple spats it's now impossible to do business as an American company in Korea. It would be like buying a Japanese car in America in 1941

Apple's iOS 6 maps STILL muddle Mildura

Re: Big intake of breath

And a sextant, compass doesn't do you much good in a vast featureless wilderness (or Australia)

Come to think of it - people using a sextant are the obvious explanation of why they can't pull out of a slip road without waiting for 20mins.

Last moon landing was 40 years ago today

Re: Scary thing is ...

Who are ironically the same companies that were benefitting from the largesse of the apollo program

Re: Last man

And it's only on the last mission they decide to send a scientist.

It's like deciding that the first dozen robots rolling around on Mars should be tanks

'UK DNA database by stealth' proposed in £100m NHS project

Re: IN 2026 I PREDICT

No Apple will have patented all the genes and anybody with rounded corners will be fined.

This will lead to a huge boost in fitness and replace beer guts with 6-pack abs.

Re: Opt out?

1, it's opt-out for now. Just like computerised medical records, it's opt-out if you write to 6 different depts demanding that your records not be included.

2. anonymous in the sense that it only records your postcode, the procedure you went in for and the prescription details of any drugs you needed. The prescriptions are filled in at your local chemist with your name address, and clubcard number. Or at least that's what happened with a had-to-be-abandoned breast cancer trial here.

Apple updates maps to remove Australia’s ghost-city in the desert

Re: Interesting.

Same reason that if you put in a zip code it doesn't recognise Google Earth centers you in the middle of the USA.

The mapping is so bad here in "the land above the land of the free" that a local company makes a very good living by driving around following all the roads and addresses and then selling the data to the city/fire/ambulance/police.

FCC urges rethink of aircraft personal-electronics blackout

Re: I agree on the "re-think"

In the US you are generally allowed to use cell phones wile taxing - in the UK you can't use them until you are inside the terminal - because other aircraft may be being refuelled.

This is because US aircraft run on Jet-A (kerosene) which - if you have ever owned an AGA - you will know can only be ignited with a small nuclear device. British aircraft apparently run on a mixture of shaken Nitroglycerin and lithium tri-iodide.

Re: Missing the point

The point is that as soon as the airline fits WifI that they charge $15 for, or a pico-cell so they can add $5/min call charges - then suddenly all your gear is OK.

Now unless they also broke into my house, took my phone/tablet/laptop, tested them and replaced them without me knowing - we are in exactly the same risk situation we were before.

It's just that now they have a $$$$ reason for allowing them, while in the days of sky-phone and charge-for headsets they had a $$$ reason for banning them.

The same thing applies to underwear.

AFAIK there is no established FAA standard for thongs so they should be removed before take off