Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Solar power can head out of the clouds says CSIRO

Re: local limit

The other alternative is to wire most of the rooftop PV direct to the Air Conditioner.

Sun comes out, AC goes on, Sun goes in AC goes off.

Torvalds splits 2012 Millennium Technology Prize with gene scientist

Re: not socialist

And conservative - in europe means a centre right party that believes in privatisation of utilities and in the US means someone who thinks electricity is the work of the devil

Re: not socialist

Jeremy Allison (Samba) - on GPL "I instantly recognized it for what it was: Socialism. Coming from Europe, where socialism isn't a dirty word, I had no problem with it."

Note to Americans - socialism means people getting together to organise those bits of society where everyone benefits from them being there however much they individually pay toward them. Like roads, police, fire engines or the Army

Re: Dont get it

What a loser - he just got lots of other people to do all the work and tricked them into getting together producing a bit of kit that now runs a big chunk of the world.

Wraps come off UK super-snooper draft plans

Re: Yet Another Anonymous coward

Yes anyone with the intelligence of a 5year old and the moral standards of a tapeworm would see that the whole bill is crap - I'm just pointing out the dangers of "we only track the endpoints not the actual content"

Re: Making lock-picking illegal ..

No, it's making doors illegal because some crooks open them

Re: No Content of communication - Not accurate

Logging the content would actually be safer.

So it logs that you connected to 123.123.123.123. That server hosts KnittingPattern.com, but it also hosts NakedTherasaGorman.com and JihadWeekly.com - they just didn't record what you accessed.

It logs that you made a cellphone call to a certain number and somebody on their terrorist watch list made a call to the same number later. You were ordering a curry and somebody in their kitchen has a relative that's a bit naughty - but now you are logged as part of a terrorist network.

Re: Make hi tech unusable ...

That's damn unsporting of Johnny terrorist.

Surely if you just speak English loudly they would understand? Some of these foreigners just need to make an effort.

Re: Benefits from this investment?

Ever bought anything online from a foreign site without paying VAT/duty?

Ever sold anything through an online ad without paying income tax?

Nokia's Great Software Cleansing scrubs off everything since the '90s

Re: I wish they'd spin Trolltech back out

Ironically Qt is your only real choice for developing desktop app in C++ on Windows.

So if MSFT sank Qt they are looking at no reasonable way to do proper apps on Windows

- no C++/CLR and WPF doesn't count as reasonable.

Another investor pulls out of Habbo Hotel after grooming claims

Re: So just how

A friend of mine was trying to meet a 40year old FBI agent online and all she got was 13year olds pretending to be FBI agents.

Re: huh?

I think you will find that no teenagers think about sex until they are 18 - even the ones who get marries at 16. Similarly no Americans think about alcohol until they are 21.

Anything else is the internet warping their tiny fragile minds....

Girl Geek Dinner lady: The IT Crowd is putting schoolgirls off tech

Re: Calm down dear....

In the IT crowd the woman isn't a geek that's the whole point.

Of course its portrayal of male geeks is so flattering I'm sure it has converted 1000s of teenage boys from wanting to be footballers or rockstars into dreaming of a career on a help desk

That new 'Microsoft GCSE': We reveal what's in it

Re: technology consumers

Better than ####ing "stakeholders" - the next person that uses "stakeholders" is getting one through the heart

Re: Have you heard...

Better than that - you take the test at 16 and you can only drive that model year Ford when you leave college and get a job 5years later.

Re: Who Needs Computers!

You were lucky - we just had "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem:" and this long bit of tape.

Re: M$'s programming products?

Visual Studio is the nicest profesional C++ dev environment out there. It beats emacs+make+gdb

But that doesn't mean you should teach kids it. It's like saying we are replacing your crappy metal work tools with a class on how to change the oil in a BMW 5series, just because it's a nice car

Blighty's new anti-bribe law will do more HARM than good

Re: I used to work for Siemens

Same with Intel. They had a real "holy-than-thou" attitude, even firing one poor sod who accepted a T-shirt from a booth at a trade show. Then some emails got leaked to the SEC....

Re: Irrelevant and rubbish law

There is a slight difference between a bribe and a more expensive contract.

Here Mr Health Minister is $50K in cash for you to pick my company's $2M contract to run your hospital rather than my competitors $1M bid. Don't worry it's only taxpayers money and you can save that by cutting back on doctors.

Re: Blame the US - Yep

Try and do a trade show in the US:

$100 to the teamsters so your kit gets off the loading dock and to your stand

$20 to each of the electricians to allow you to turn on your own lights on your own booth

$20 tucked under the trash can so your booth gets cleaned.

Thief open-sources Richard Stallman's laptop, passport, visa

Re: I hope he has learned his lesson

Real men don't backup - real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it

Re: Shitty thing to have happen

>I hope he does not suffer from losing his meds etc

That's what he's like WITH the meds !!!

< whinney manc voice=on > the drugs don't work .....

Re: Not pleasant :(

You have to watch the demented ones.

One anorexic loony in a loincloth and we lost a whole sub-continent !

New UK curriculum ramps up lessons in SPAAAACE

Science exams

There was an example of a "science" question posted recently

The instructions for a microscope included "the microscope should be carried carefully"

One of the MULTIPLE CHOICE questions on microscopes asked: How should a microscope be carried?

Re: I hate to interrupt this valuable talk about THE CHILDREN, but...

Just wait - once MSFT fund a city-foundation-academy-technology-college-institute that will go on the national curriculum.

So rather than memorize all 12x12, just learn 5x and 10x then interpolate.

Want 7*8? Then it's just 5*8 + 2*8 = 40 + 8 + 8

I still have the letter home I got when I tried to explain this to the teacher in infant school!

Re: Why 12x12?

Thankfully we only had 8bit machines when I was at school.

Learning your 2^64 x 2^64 times table is a real pain

Supercomputers need standard shot glass to measure out juice

Re: interruptable...

The problem is what do you do with it in Summer?

You end up with a massive cooling plant that is shut down over the winter, when you have to heat it to stop it freezing up!

Volkswagen Up!

Re: Frankfurt Motor Show

Return of the multi-colour golf?

The one with every panel a different colour so that people knew you were an art teacher (did anyone else buy them?)

Re: 52MPG ?!?!

Yes but the only thing you want from a small city car is good MPG.

It's like building an 1000hp 8L V16 and saying well it isn't fast but what do you expect from a supercar?

The only reason for not fitting a diesel is to sell it in the US, and the US aren't going to buy a family car that you can't fit 6kids and 36 cupholders in.

Microsoft 'mulled Nokia buyout, ran away screaming'

Re: asking too much? for an OS code base?

Download, change the name + improve it and add support for your fancy hardware while keeping compatibility for all the Android apps.

You can drive on any road in a Lada but people are prepared to pay a premium for a BMW or Merc which still uses the same commodity petrol.

Re: Eflop

>The shareholders thank Elop for his important work for stablising Nokia

It didn't say which shareholders - I imagine Apple's and MSFT's are pretty happy

Now TalkTalk cuts Brits' access to The Pirate Bay

Re: Blocked? CENSORED.

You don't think that now the technical and legal framework has been introduced it won't be extended to other purposes? Like RIPA was only necessary to catch international drug dealing terrorist peadophiles.

It doesn't even have to be the government. Here in Canada one of the major telcos blocked access to the communication workers union site for all it's customers during a dispute. It's argument was that this was perfectly legal - because the government ordered them to do the same thing for downloads.

Re: Anyone wondering what BT are up to?

We do appreciate the secret undercover work by 1000s of BT engineers, installers and call centre operators - all striving as part of a massive underground network to prevent people being exposed to effective broadband internet.

Japan still in love with the fax

Re: Why the fax is still popular in Japan

>sure that the fax has gone to a specific geographical location.

Actually you can't - unlike a telex.

That's why you can't fax a patent application to your lawyer - you can't prove that the fax didn't get a wrong number and so a fax counts as published. An encrypted email is allowed - one of the few area where patents caught up.

Re: @YAAc

It's not necessarily a question of is it really secure - it's how much does it cost me to argue in court.

Being the test case of SHA-1 message digests and explaining PKI to a 100year old judge and 12 citizens of ToadSuck Ak. is likely to be harder than showing them a scrawled signature at the bottom of a fax.

> are still keeping paper files on their clients!

Often they have a requirement to keep files for decades - what electronic format would you recommend I store a 99 year lease in? Word .doc or .docx?

There are also a whole bunch of regulations on privacy and handling for some industries - it's a lot easier for me to prove in court that nobody broke into a locked filing cabinet in a locked office than it is to prove a computer wasn't compromised

EU lurches behind copyright free-for-all landgrab

Let me see

Individual downloads a song from a multinational corp - they get fined a billion-zillion quid and threatened with prison

Multinational corp downloads an image from an individual - and gets told that it was all right as long as they shouted across the office 'does anyone know who took this?'

New London Bus API arrived at approximately ... 15.00

What about security?

Couldn't this be used by terrorists?

Surely unauthorised users must be blocked from the system for the "people running around event that must not be named" in a capital city in a year between 2011 and 2013

Alternately I suppose you could mount tanks on a few roofs to deal with buses.

Police called after Romney's email and Dropbox accounts cracked

Re: Romney:

>just let's have a competant, literate candidate

Are you serious! Imagine the trouble a competent, literate president could cause.

At least the moronic illeterate ones are relatively harmless

(well unless you happen to be living in the middle east)

Google Maps adds aircraft, tricycles and skiers to cover all bases

Re: Apple iMaps?

OpenStreetmap? Yes Apple could embrace an opensource platform where they have to give something back. Alternatively they could fit cameras to airborne pigs and duplicate Google's aerial mapping.

Windows 8: Not even Microsoft thinks businesses will use it

Re: Errr what about Windows Server 2012?

>When it's sitting in a server room, and probably running headless too.

That's what the Kinect's gesture recognition camera is for.

You just stand outside the server room and gesture to the server you want to reboot.

Re: Errr what about Windows Server 2012?

And what's wrong with a touch screen server?

There are a whole range of finger based gestures I have come to associate with managing exchange

because ....

Picture the scene at MSFT HQ.

One thrusting young VP says that if Microsoft embraced the whole new tablet-cloud-mobile-multimedia scrumptious we could be just like Apple. And remember what happened when we ignored that internet stuff back in the 90s

Another greybeard says - our core strength is in the enterprise desktop, don't change anything, just make things more consistent and easier to manage.

Which button does Blamer press to drop one of them into the shark tank?

10m years ago there was less CO2 - but the Earth was warmer

It's the geology stupid

A few other trifflingl little events did happen in the Miocene.

Antarctica separated, Africa and Europe met up, the Indian ocean stopped flowing into the Med the Andes and Rockies formed. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/tertiary/mio/miotect.html

On the other hand it was before the iPhone - so evidence that iOS causes global cooling and so long as we stay away from Android and buy American we are safe.

Space shuttle Enterprise makes final voyage – to New York

The Intrepid doesn't have a very good reputation as a museum compared to something like the Smithsonian (http://www.nycaviation.com/2012/05/will-the-space-shuttle-be-loved-by-intrepid/)

Fortunately the National Air and Space Museum is getting a real shuttle and is swapping this dummy.

Facebook tests parental-guidance tools in plan to pull in under-13s

Re: Two accounts for the price of one!

On the other hand - that probably teaches them more about computer security and online privacy than their parents know

Hackers expose 6.5 MILLION 'LinkedIn passwords'

Re: Found my password

It doesn't contain hashes for any simple words like "password" and "linkedin".

So either ALL linkedin users are good little security experts - or this is only the list of ones that they didn't immediately crack with rainbow tables.

Since 6.5M is only a fraction of linkedin's 160M users - it could be that an awful lot of them are using the same password

UK websites: No one bothers with cookie law, why should we?

Re: While we are on the subject...

We really need a more complex approach to cookie management.

It seems fitting that this should be based on the hierarchy of crunchy comestibles.

So a cookie that you are prepared to keep permanently until it expires would be flagged - "rich-tea biscuit"

One which will be deleted as soon as your session ends will be represented by the shorter lived "hobnob".

And a cookie that never even makes it as far as the cupboard would be a "chocolate caramel"