Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26130 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
The kill switch is there to protect the market from it's user.
If an algorithm war between two faulty bits of software drove the price of Apple down to zero then Apple might respond by moving it's listing to a different stock exchange - the exchange would like to avoid that.
Remember the market doesn't care about the traders or the listed companies as such - it just wants things to work so people keep using it.
>As it is, Noble and Green are ambassadors for British engineering
So following on from strapping a scrap jet engine from a 1950s fighter into a car, they are now strapping a scrap rocket engine from a 1960s SAM into a car.
And this is supposed to how there is a future in engineer? Or just that we have a lot of scrap lying around from we actually did engineering?
Market saturation - perhaps?
There is a limited number of people who can shell out $699 for a tablet.
Assuming all those who can, already have an iPad then all the future sales will go to Android.
Of course this doesn't really matter for Apple - Porsche do very nicely with a tiny market share compared to VW
No but you can invent something based entirely on maths, numerical modelling and computer simulations.
I work for a consultancy, I design some new product or improvement to a product. I should be able to try and interest manufacturers in buying the idea without having to make it myself.
Yes patents on rounded corners of a tablet are silly - but so is limiting patents only to large manufacturers already in the field.
Yes - that's exactly what they are selling.
Suppose you are an independant coffee shop, or B&B or local library.
You can attempt to use your L33T ninja sysadmin skills to setup a secure, filtered, monitored web access for your customers, separate from all your internal network.
You can call Cisco and be quoted $M for some spare olympic kit.
Or you can pay skype 10quid, and forget about it.
We simply need to build more mountains.
Most of the nice mountains aren't where anybody wants to live (Wales or Scotland) while the majority of the population live in SE England without so much as a decent hill.
If we were to simply move Snowdonia to the Thames estuary we would provide lots of pumped storage, recreational activities and get rid of Essex in one simple operation - I commend this proposal to the house.
It doesn't really make a lot of sense to compare the efficiency of a thermal plant to solar.
If you are saying solar is useless because it's total free energy in / electrical out is less than the Carnot efficiency of burning coal then you should also include the solar energy to make the coal in the first place.
On the other hand saying it's useless because it's expensive and unreliable is perfectly true
If they were doing business in a place with no functioning government -eg Somalia - their cost of business would be higher.
They work in the UK, they benefit directly and indirectly from a lot of UK government services and they pay nothing toward that because of an accounting trick.
If they are allowed to opt out of paying for things they don't directly use - why can't I?
I don't have kids so I shouldn't pay for schools, I don't live in London so I shouldn't pay for the M25, the tube, or the olympics, the USSR has never attacked me so I don't want to pay for Trident, I don't vote tory so I shouldn't pay for any duck islands or moat cleaning etc etc
By your arguments I should only pay road tax and for the bins collecting.
To be fair amazon do stock a slightly larger range than your local pizza place.
Ask for a pizza topped with fresh peruvian elderberries and smoked Coelacanth and they might take more than 30mins.
In New York they were doing 30min cycle messenger delivery for in-stock items. So if you ordered the new Dan Brown novel they would have somebody in lycra come round and slap you quicker than you could walk to the shops.
>why would it be to the UK
Because they expect to hire UK workers who can read and write, from schools funded by UK tax payers.
They expect those workers to get free medical care, rather than having to pay $1000/month as they do for their workers in the US.
They expect UK police to guard their premises. They expect the UK's armed forces to stop bands of guerrilla pirates sweeping out of the hills and raiding their stores (not applicable in Scotland)
They expect roads and streeet signs and other infrastructure to deliver their goods.
As I explained to the man that wanted to collect the council tax - I may live in this house but I'm legally incorporated in Narnia. So unless you send a talking lion around I'm not paying
We are having a public enquiry here into how the police failed to catch a serial killer for 10years:
"You know that man we keep arresting for violence to women?"
"The one with van we keep seeing in the redlight district ?"
"Should we interview him?"
"No need - we went out to his pig farm and there were no sign of lots of murdered prostitutes"
You might be interested in a new prouct me and some friends at IBM are working on.
It's a small cheap standalone computer that can operate without a connection to a corporate mainframe, but just sit on your desk, and do your work, when you need it, rather than just be a terminal.
We are thinking of calling it personal computer.
But that's perfectly justified by the cost of converting all the studio equipment for digital - the EU said so.
They still have to pay back the costs of the CD mastering for Dark SIde of the Moon - that's why it's perfectly justified to charge 25quid for it.
The problem is that disk space is cheap
A small company has 10-20PCs with 200Gb spare on each so 1-2 Tb of distributed capacity. So rather than go and buy a $100 2Tb USB drive (and a spare so they have an offsite backup) they run this?
So the market is a company with 10,000 PCs sitting around, eg banks, who have data that isn't important enough to justify some proper sort of server.
They don't the, patent probably includes somewhere in clause 87, some novel step about eg. adding a hash of the SSID and approx location to the database to speed up the search of possible nearby wifis
Patents are very rarely about the headline use, it's almost always about one tiny step in the implementation.
They succeeded in Canada - we pay 30cents on each blank CD.
There was a $1/Gb tax proposal on MP3 players but it was defeated
Unfortunately the scheme doesn't actually cover it's own costs, so no money actually goes to Celine Dion.
But it does mean that small bands selling their own CDs at gigs pay the levy on their blanks.
He is loud, well known and slightly rotund.
So for distracting the public and hiding behind if a disgruntled employee starts shooting he is the obvious choice.
Although making him fly on the corporate jet everytime they go to the Andes, and giving him his own barbecue sauce hot tub, is a bit tasteless.
That's exactly what happens now - all the money Microsoft make in the USA they pay tax on in the USA.
But Microsoft USA make almost no money because they have to pay Microsoft Grand-Cayman for the rights to the Microsoft name and pay Microsoft Lichtenstein for the license to the software.
>Large scale power generation is always more efficient than small local sources,
Multiplied by transmission losses, multiplied by charger efficency, multiplied by motor efficency
Then that's only true for the same sort of power generation. Ultimately power generation efficency depends on the temperature of the combustion cycle.
A diesel engine in a car could be more efficent than burning coal in a power station 1000km away
