Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26111 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
>There's not a lot you can do with a bit of knowledge of programming.
You can teach people how computers work, that they follow programs, how mistakes happen, that anything on a computer isn't automatically correct.
There's not a lot you can do in geography with a bit of knowledge of ox-bow lakes either.
Here in Canada we pay a fee on blank CDs (about 20p/disc) - although strangely not on blank DVDs - but it's still illegal to do just about anything
The levy doesn't quite raise enough money to pay for the administration, so none has actually gone to the major artists. But it does apply to indie musicians - they have to pay the levy on the discs they try and sell at gigs !
So the Italian built ones would be sleek, fast and beautiful but unreliable and require lots of maintenance,
The German ones would be powerful and efficient but soulless
The American ones would have a pair 4.8 liter V8 hemi funbags on the front but weigh 4tons
While the British ones would just leak oil.
4Bn euro for a population of 4million ?
So assuming all that debt went into providing services for it's customers they must have put a couple of grand into linking each household.
How is the service over there - do you get gigabit at home or did they skip that and go straight to fiber?
Can I ask what I program this in?
According to the announcement, the new developer platform is HTML5 + Javascript to bring a new buzzword-buzzword-buzzword to my Windows 8 applications
According to MSDN I use MSFT's latest attempt at their own version of C++ together with a bunch of COM components to program Metro. Oh joy - I really do miss 1991
WPF, their last new paradigm in modern GUI buzzword apparently doesn't run on Metro but will run in Desktop legacy mode. I think Silverlight will run as a browser plugin.
And who knows which of these also work on their smartphones - probably MFC and VBA ?
In other news - druids say a disagreement on the standards for stone circles could make it difficult for them to interoperate across europe.
Seriously - by the time this is ratified, they hit the market and the public is completely switched over to the new sets who is going to be watching national TV broadcasters?
The iPhone is pricey because it includes a phone!
iPads are pricey because people will pay that and because bigger screens cost
A replacement for the ageing iPod touch priced at a point that stops anyone else entering the market sounds like good sense. And it drags in nice profitable appstore and iTunes customers who couldn't afford a $500 iPad and might be looking at Androids
Precisely - why this isn't a watch.
The problem with a watch is that it only told the time, and you only needed to use it when you needed the time, which was less often than you used your phone.
Now that your phone demands your attention every 2secs for SMS, twitter updates, facebook pokes or all the other stuff those young people do nowadays with their social networking - you need a quick glance dashboard to manage all the data.
A wrist mounted display seems the ideal solution. It's a more rugged, cheaper, easier and more practical version of the google glasses.
I remember a few years ago when the NSA were developing a super secure version of Linux - it suddenly got canceled in favour of the American government being free to buy any of the wide range of commercial OSes available on PCs from a small patriotic company in Redmond.
I have an idea. What about some government office to manage and examine patents, staffed by experts in the field to judge whether the invention is obvious or has been done before and reject it. The application could also describe the implementation in such a way that somebody 'skilled in the art' could reproduce.
The same office, with technically proficient judges, could then asses any violations of the patent.
Alternatively you could leave it all upto who has the most lawyers and what a jury of 12 East Texans with nothing better to do that day, think
When there are patents on "comparing online data and presenting a decision based on the data" or "collecting money for an online service" it's pretty difficult to use our new idea
Anyway - I have a patent on claiming that patents stifle innovation so Woz will have to pay up as soon as I can get to East texas
Paid $69 in the US.
Good points, easy to copy epub content, will read PDFs (although you need to do a lot of scrolling/zooming)
Bad points, SLOW,takes a couple of minutes to boot and another minute to reopen a book. Replaced it with a Sony PRC which wakes up and opens a book in seconds.
Found the link to the story. He was put in the local police station holding cell was rather than prison, where the other inhabitants stole all his clothes before attacking him.
His point was that ( risk of detection * sentence) for cop killing is less than punishment for mouthing off to a traffic cop. So you should logically shoot the cop.
It's like the mandatory life sentences under "three strikes", if you face the same punishment for killing all the witnesses as you do for a minor theft - why not use a gun?
There was a case a few years ago, an architect in a BMW made some remark to a cop when he was pulled over for speeding/busted light minor offence.
So the cop had him thrown in prison for the weekend, they took all his clothes before throwing him the general holding cell (or whatever it's called) where he was raped.
He was released without charge but while waiting for the results of the AIDS test he made the comment that if they were going to do this it was statistically safer for a driver to just shoot the police officer in the head as soon as they approached the car. Your chances of getting away with it are pretty good and if you are arrested for a speeding ticket you face a possible death sentence from your weekend in jail anyway.
Surely you aren't allowed to take a young child on a plane?
Remember those safety-ads for car seats? The ones saying an un-restrained child had the energy of 100 charging bull elephants or some such rubbish. A small child could be hurled down the aisle of a plane as a weapon.
Of course a balastic small child could also be thrown to incapacitate a hijacker, which is why sky marshals are now present on many flights armed with a baby. When you next see a women with a crew cut, a mustache and badge breast feeding a child at an airport you will now why.
So the highly trained government security specialists at the screening with access to all the databases, high tech screening machines and so on, can't confirm that somebody is a pilot.
But when they walk upto the aircraft they are allowed to walk straight into the flight deck with perhaps an air hostess glancing at their badge?
Makes you wonder about the air marshals. "You can't take that gun through security". "I'm an air marshal" "Well we don't know that".
Actually in practice it's probably - "I'm an air marshal"
"Well then you can keep the gun but you have to take your shoes off and hand over any liquids"
Of course if it had happened today then there would definitely be a committee formed to address the question of adding icebergs to the scheduled list of items to avoid in a statement of principles in navigational best practice.
In addition there would probably have been a new safety branding throughout the White Star line and, if the number of deaths was high enough, probably id card lanyards with a new "safety first" motto. If it was really considered serious then there might have been mouse mats.
It doesn't have zero effect.
Remember the last "we must fight the terrorists" data act? The one that was used by local councils to check which schools your kids should goto or who was letting their dogs crap in the park?
This same data is going to the same local councils. Complain about the potholes in the road and the council can do a quick check of which porn sites you have been visiting before writing you a letter suggesting you apologise before the list gets sent to your kids school or your employer.
Big box electronics stores are dead - deader than a parrot that's been run over by a steamroller while pining for the Fiords. Wake up guys, even my gran buys this stuff online!
Nobody is going to miss Dixons staff, $80 HDMI cables and attempts to sell $100 extended warranties on a MP3 player.
The only bit of Best Buy that made sense was Geek Squad, at least for the 99% of people that seem to be confused about which end of an HDMI cable to plug in the back.
A business based on Geek Squad type outfit charging you a fee to help you pick a TV online, sync with Amazon etc to be there when it's delivered, set it up for you and be there when it breaks - could work. Manufacturers could even bundle Geek squad instead of their own appalling service support.
Apple have figured this out, one of the reasons the 99% used to buy Apple computers was that they could go and get help from a person that had a reasonable chance of being able to actually help them.
Since pretty much 100% of imports and exports end up on a lorry at some point, and all the stuff going around the middle is on a lorry - then lorry drivers must contribute something like 300% of GDP. And so should be in for a lot of treasury-love come budget time.
Reflection - cheap low efficency panels reflect some of the incoming light, especially at low angles of incidence. In this configuration any light that bounces off the main panel is absorbed by the
other.
If the signal is worth more than the detector it's a common way of making high efficiency photodiodes - putting a larger one facing back at the main receiver to catch any reflection losses.
