Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

UK judges quietly declare text chat can be obscene

Re: Ignoring the sex for a moment

I work in medical stuff for a PLC.

There are memos every day about what can and can't be said publicly without there being an official stock market announcement. There are vastly more complex rules about confidentiality of data. We even had to change email provider because the previous one had servers in the USA and the lawyers decided that if an email went through American wires then a whole new set of HIPAA rules would apply.

Then there is a different set of rules about patents and who things can be discussed with at different filing stages of a filing. We even have a pet lawyer sit in on some meetings so that they can be claimed as privileged during discovery.

If some judge has just determined that all point-point electronic communications are "public" then the whole medical/financial/defence industries are going to have to go back to quill pens.

Ignoring the sex for a moment

If text and IM chats are now publication - what about using them at work?

Are IM discussion with HR, or legal now still allowed?

Is a patent invalidated if we discuss it internally on Lynq in the same way as I would on the phone?

If I get an SMS about a server down - has that been published? Do I need to make a market announcement to the shareholders since I have published material affecting the performance of the business.

And I might just be being cynical but of course there is now no need for a warrant to intercept sms/IM because you have "published" it.

RBS: June's tech enormo-cock-up cost us £125m

Re: Reputational damage?

I thought all those bad loans got magic-ed away when they were bailed out by the quantitative easing fairy?

Seriously it's getting to the point where the banks welcome people with sawn-off shotguns because it's less costly than letting their own people near the money.

Re: Reputational damage?

They went bust (sort of) and were bailed out by the taxpayer

They then managed to lose a billion quid/year while being lent money for free by the Bank of England

What reputation was there to damage?

BOYLE and BONG: The secret story of my OLYMPIC TRIUMPH

Re: Genius - community investment catapults

Remember that for the opening ceremony you also need "Un trebuchet investissement communautaire"

Re: Irvine Welsh...

>Nope, Irvine Welsh wrote it, Danny Boyle directed it and John Hodge wrote the screenplay.

Well if you are embedded in the old pre-iPad linear-time straight-jacket.

With the new internet 3.0 multi-media-cloud-social paradigm then whoever blogged about it last invented it first.

India: We DO have the BlackBerry encryption keys

Re: How It Actually Went

Or more likely - RIM offshored their operations to an outfit in India and somebody wrote the keys on a whiteboard

Nokia shutters Qt Brisbane office

Not necessarily the end

>The ongoing financial basis of Qt will depend on the efforts of Digia....

Most of the Qt work at Nokia has been about putting Qt onto phones and QML.

It's nice, but as the market has decided, if your phone isn't running iOS or Android it doesn't matter.

Qt on the desktop is much more survivable as a community project.

Apple iPad fondlers are about to enter a THIRD DIMENSION

Re: Fantastic!

Children's cartoons are perfectly valid prior art for patents

http://info.articleonepartners.com/blog/bid/76117/Donald-Duck-Patents-and-Ping-Pong-Balls

Lords call for the end of TV transmissions

Re: Prosperity

> I don't see this working well in rural communities"

It's precisely aimed at rural communities.

At the moment you put government money into a new TV mast/repeater and everyone is still unemployed but can watch Trisha. You put the same money into running a broadband fibre to the village and they all have jobs as social media experts ;-)

Re: I'll be damned...

TV is less and less broadcast these days - with 2^N channels and PVRs. Really it's just a CDN/caching issue.

Bribery claims call Chinese labour audits into question

well duh....

Or to put it slightly more eloquently:

Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

RBS must realise it's just an IT biz with a banking licence

Re: Change Management

>Nail - meet hammer head

Unfortunately it's more like "that's a thumb"

"Yes but we are required to hit something 99.99% of the time"

"But it's a thumb"

Well we could escalate a "not hit a thumb" request to the new 6levels of change management but in the meantime keep hitting the thumb - we don't want to trigger a failed to hit something incident.

Re: > trend towards pigeonholing folk

It's not just pigeonholing people but companies

Even when the job isn't outsourced there are so many different divisions/subsidiaries/competing business units/etc all of who are at each others throat then if some other dept asks you to do something that will destroy the company it's better for you to do it - and meet your SLA - than say no that's wrong.

It may even be a legal requirement to "your" shareholders to destroy the bank rather than fail to perform your contract tasks !

Hobbyist builds working assault rifle using 3D printer

Re: So they didn't build a gun with a 3D printer at all

No the article is more important than that. It's not about making a gun at home - that's easily down out of metal.

It's that the government decided that this particular component is impossible to make (it's a complex shaped cast+machined part) so this is the component that they would serial number/track/register etc - this is the licence key to the gun. The poster has shown that this isn't a valid assumption with 3D printers.

Metalwork class

I don't know about this new fangled 3D printer stuff - but back here in the 19C we have lathes and mills and planars. With this we can build everything from a vickers machine gun to a battleship - hopefully this new metal technology never gets into the wrong hands.

Jackson’s Hobbit becomes a trilogy

Re: "You saying you don't think it's a bad word?...."

I think the bigger problem is making all the crews American and moving the dams to Iran

The Hobbit Trilogy

Showing in 1D 2D and 3D

Sellers flogging vid games to underage kids face jail, unlimited fine

App store

So does this apply to all games?

If I write tetris for the iPhone or Android do i have to get it approved by the BBFC?

What if I live in the USA - will i get extradited if someone in the UK downloads it?

Re: No it wont...

Remembering that for leap years don't count.

So it's not being 18 years old - it's being the 18th calender anniversary of their birth that matures their brain.

Re: No it wont...

>It's common sense really.

Would you buy your 13ear old son a comic where people are killed because of their race?

No - Well that's all the war comics we had when I was growing up.

US flags from the 1970s SEEN ON MOON

Re: Hubble

> they simply can't focus on something that close

The moon is still 250,000,000m away - that's not terribly close for something with a 57m focal length.

Your cell phone manages to focus on things 25km away doesn't it ?

Re: Hubble

>but we can't take a fu****ing picture of the damned thing

I believe there there is an English mission to make a brass rubbing of it

The asymmetry implicit in Internet data retention

Don't worry

The new laws will only be used against terrorists, or child pornographers, or drug smugglers - and you aren't one of them are you ???

Skype denies system upgrade enables in-call spying

Re: According to the policy on their website

>they require a warrant

Or just a quiet word from somebody in a dark suit from a 3 letter agency.

After all we are all on the same side here, and it's a matter of national security - no need for all that paperwork.

According to the policy on their website

They will supply: "Content and/or traffic data to an appropriate judicial, law enforcement or government authority lawfully requesting such information."

So basically everything is recorded by the governments in every country skype operate in.

BOFH: Shove your project managementry up your mailbox!

Re: Simple solution

>* "Say Paradigm again - I dare you!"

Fscking genius!

Re: What do you mean

Yes it's always been like that.

The technical brief, "put one less rock on each layer until you come to a point" - became in management speak:

Bird with squiggly line, man walking sideways, man with dog head ....... and so on....

The cricket bar, an elegant weapon from a bygone age - not as clumsy or random as a shotgun

Twitter airport bomb joke conviction binned in common-sense WIN

Re: Great, but...

"well bugger me!" - or would I get done for soliciting ?

Girls tricked by STEAMY message: Webcam spyware student jailed

Re: They fell for it?

I'm beginning to think the deer tick inspector who just visited and had me run around outside naked to dislodge - might not have been genuine !

Re: @LinkOfHyrule

> what is the US equivalent of "shall we have a nice cup of tea" or "shall i put the kettle on"

Shoot something ?

Devs can't be bothered with Nokia's Windows Phone – report

Re: Duh! @Jim Coleman

Windows8 will be installed on 95% of all new desktops sold in Walmart.

It isn't going to be on any corporate seats.

Or are are going to make a living from home desktop users (if there are any left) buying widgets ?

That must be were all those screen-saver billionaires came from.

Re: re: So you write an app now and it works on WP7.5 & WP8

I think there is a reasonable assumption that if you buy a $500 smartphone less than a year before a new version of the OS is out then the customer could reasonably expect an upgrade to be available.

If there aren't going to be any upgrades in the WinPhone world then people will wait for 8.1, or 8.2 or 8.5 or 9 .... or buy a competitor.

GPS-equipped sheep prove herd mentality exists

Re: Huh?

>it'll become tricky to track the movements of any given individual sheep on video

Particularly because once you start to count them you fall asleep in front of the screen ?

Brooks, Coulson to be CHARGED over phone-hacking

Re: Phew what a shocka

Most of the leaks about politicians (sorry deep background information for context) is from other politicians trying to do them in.

At least we can all be relieved that it was only a few journalists and one private detective.

No police officers or civil servants were handing information to the tabloids - so all of us, and our data, have always been well guarded by trusted public servants.

EC probes 13 resellers over global optical disc drive CARTEL

Decisive and timely action

Now if only their investigation into punch card price fixing was ready

UK Border Agency to create 'national allegations database'

You people just aren't thinking "outside the box"

This new system will need a lot of people to run it - say around 276,000?

To keep costs down, and in keeping with home office policy on jobs having access to sensitive data - you probably want to employ illegal immigrants.

Problem solved!

Re: what a bonus for racists and other noxious people

Who is colette, and are her statistics so impressive that an entire government database is needed to collate them?

Re: What could go wrong?

The only difference being that in this case - that would be a good thing

It's often been said that the only thing that stopped Britain becoming a fascist dictatorship is that we couldn't have organised it.

Re: Be multi-cultural and inclusive in your allegations...

So we are going to be left with just Norfolk?

At least they have been careful to preserve their genetic identity from any foreign invasion

(or from anyone outside the immediate family)

With only a change of sign that would work perfectly.

On the other hand the deportation of everyone inside the M25 would simultaneously solve the problems, of high unemployment, high house prices, Westminster, phone hacking tabloids and the Olympics

UK.gov warned: Halt exports of spyware to brutal regimes

Re: @NumptyScrub

@politi - "stability" is diplomatic language for brutal dictatorship that is going to stay in power.

"Vital ally in the war on terror" is code for brutal military dictatorship that is more scared of Al Queda than he is of us.

Syria and Libya didn't suddenly surprisingly turn bad in 2012

AWS says disk is to cloud as tape is to disk

Filesystems - why bother?

If you only need a 1Tb for your database, keep the stuff in RAM

Why British TV drama is crap – and why this matters to tech firms

Re: Money doesn't matter.

The arguement is that current BBC is crap precisely because it is entirely done by independents.

Instead of people who have been in the business for years able to match a screenwriter from coronation street with the director of Reggie Perrin and the camera crew from Life on Earth. You get a small company that needs to make a product fast, that needs to maximise returns so must have a global market and it must be fashionable enough that it will get good media coverage now - because all you have to care about is the current quarter, because thats all the funding you have. And their purpose in producing the drama is to be noticed so they can get a job in movies.

New lightest-ever material: Ideal power for electric car

Re: Is this really what matters?

It's the surface are for weight/volume. This stuff is so porous it has an vast surface area for the electrical reaction to take place on - and it's conductive so you can get the electric out

It wouldn't matter if it was 10x heavier, but the same area of copper plates would be enormously heavy

Raspberry Pi rolls out speed surge Raspbian OS

Re: (Not a) Daft question

>The FSM gave us Sugru and hot glue guns for a reason.

At least these days you don't need the milk carton to stop it overheating.

Now what I really want is a combined CPU cooler / coffee pot warmer.

Re: Daft question

intel don't seem to have done too badly selling you a bit of silicon that's useless without a motherboard, ram, PSU, keyboard cuddly toy drinks trolley......