Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

TSA bars security guru from perv scanner testimony

Re: Empty bottles are highly dangerous...

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.

Re: I don't really expect to see another successful airline hijacking in my lifetime.

There is an old military cliche that generals are always prepared for the last war.

I suspect the TSA is screening Japanese passengers arriving in Hawaii for any hidden torpedo bombers.

Re: false security theatre

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"

Re: false security theatre

>no easy way to tell the difference between a pilot and someone in a pilot's uniform, with a fake id

So safest not to let them on the flight deck then ?

Re: It's not the first time.

To be fair - the polygraphs were rigorously tested.

The hooked up the salesman and asked "does this thing work" and it said yes.

What more could you want?

Re: false security theatre

And pilots being made to eat with plastic knives, with an axe on the door behind them.

And Congressional medals of honor being confiscated from Generals, it had sharp corners.

And penknives being removed from DHS agents who were still allowed to carry their gun

And nail clippers being confiscated from a US marine returning from Afghanistan - on a plane with 330 other marines - in case he used them as weapon to take over the plane.

Either it's a conspiracy by makers of video conferencing software to stop people flying - or the lizard people have taken over

What does the Titanic's sinking tell us about modern science?

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.

UK.gov to unveil reborn, renamed net-snoop plans in Queen's Speech

Re: Ship of Fools

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.

Use the holy word of God to stay secure online, says bishop

Re: I'm an atheist.

Depends - are you in the United Atheist Alliance, United Atheist League or the Allied Atheist Allegiance?

otherwise just use Hitch-Hikers or Monty Python

Re: YwetfoysatfoydL2630ish

It's a pity all those quoting Leviticus 18:22 don't seem to remember that

Best Buy shuttering 50 stores, laying off staff in $800m cost slash

Don't they have the internet at Harvard Business School?

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.

Osborne+ and Schmidt+ say 'the internet' = 8.3 per cent of UK GDP

Re: So

At least with this lot you only get pointless PR releases based on some imaginary info found on the internet - with the last lot you got wars

Good news for the lorry drivers

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.

Raspberry Pi supplier coughs to ship date delay glitch

Re: This is a frickin' joke

Although to be fair, any outfit that picked rswww.com as its web site does need a visit from the clue fairy

A million TVs to go dark across London

Re: South East News Bias ? - Nahhhhhh.......

At least we have decent chips in Yorkshire - not just McDs french fries.

High school student expelled for dropping F-bomb in tweet

Re: sadly

If you are a front line police officer and feel threatened simply because a member of the public uses an anglo-saxon derived term rather than a latin alternative.

Perhaps it's time to consider a less demanding career - something in the tea shop waitress industry?

Re: Seems he was inspired.....

Remember God hates German but loves Latin

Shit, Piss, Fuck = makes God cry

Fæces, Micturition, Copulation = doesn't bother God one tiny bit

O. Land of the Freeeeeeee

Home of the fuckwit

Dotcom hike will net millions of bucks for Verisign, ICANN

Re: Ahh, capitalism.

Because the Chinese it wouldn't be able to enforce the same level of control over online gambling, pornography and other naughty stuff on the internet that the US can.

Solar power towers overpower PV panels by 20X

Re: Pointing down?

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.

Egypt ponders smut suppression

See - the revolution worked

They threw out the military dictatorship and became a free western democracy - they are just trying to copy us.

Still if Rick Santorum loses he can always get a job in Egypt.

Force Google to black out searches in new privacy law - MPs

So ...

So instead of sad losers searching "google.co.uk/pointless big brother z lister sex tapes" they now have to search "google.com/pointless big brother z lister sex tapes"

Yawn.....

Female Chinese astronauts must have no scars, straight teeth

Re: Departmental Budget Infighting?

Or conceivably the only reason for manned spaceflight is PR and they don't want somebody who looks like a chinese version of stig of the dump plastered all over their posters.

Same reason that Gagarin was chosen - his family was suitably working class and US astronauts were picked from married crew-cut test pilots

Google asked to bin autocomplete results for Japanese man's name

Re: if someone offers me a job, I am obliged to take it

There did used to be a rule about accepting work in your own field.

So if anybody needs any llamas 'warmed up' for IVF you could be in trouble !

Microsoft censors Pirate Bay links from IM

That's solved then

Wonder why they didn't apply this same foolproof solution to blocking spam email for the last 20years?

CD: The indestructible music format that REFUSES TO DIE

Trust

People will buy disposable music on download - you listen to it fro a few weeks while it's popular then delete/forget about it. It's really replacing FM radio not records.

People buy CDs because they want to keep the record and don't trust the companies to keep it available - at least anybody over 20 doesn't trust them.

Americans resort to padlocking their dumb meters

That's just what the brain rays want you to think !

Re: Dumb meters for dumb people

What's it got to do with the customer? Business exists for the good of the shareholder.

Smart meters allow them to increase prices as the market price for power goes up - in theory it could also allow them to reduce prices when the market price goes down ( snigger )

UK.gov gives nod to .scot

Re: Who has the authority?

Same thing that normally happens.

The politicians make a lot of noise and get on telly.

The lawyers make a lot of money arguing the point

Nobody else gives a flying *************

Hard-up Iceland plumps for cheaper open source

Re: Cost? Don't make me laugh

"just extend service contracts" - That's the reason to switch.

Hello Mr goverment, microsoft here. we've just decided you are upgrading all your machines to Windows8 and Office 2012-turbo-ninja-cloud edition.

You don't want to?

Well in that case the service contract for next year is $1000/seat, then $10,000/seat, then .... stop me when you've had enough

We switched a huge project from VMS to Linux in the mid-90s when Dec informed us that the we were switching to Ultrix or the licence on our Vaxen was going up to around 10x the purchase price.

We figured they would later do exactly the same to us again so we bit the bullet , bought a bunch of cheap NT alphas, installed RedHat and rewrote everything. Anyone remember what happened to DEC?

Elsevier's backpedalling not stopping scientist strike

Re: Pay?

The funny thing is that Elseveir charge the same for it's online journals. Those colour pixels are expensive you know!

Re: online

So I publish my research on my blog - does anyone see it?

How do i get it 'peer reviewed' - a comment section like the reg, a star rating like Amazon?

How do I get it into citation index scores

There are some solutions. 100 years ago university departments published their own journals and exchanged them with other institutions, and handled the reviewing - that's why you have university presses.

Then they were persuaded that it was an expensive extravagance that would be better handled by commercial publishers with their own printing presses.

Now that you don't need a printing press and many universities own a web server you could return to the "proceedings of the institute of XYZ"

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Re: The Matrix 2

Too bad they never made any sequels to The Matrix

http://xkcd.com/566/

FAA mulls scrapping in-flight iPad, Kindle ban

Re: Even better

I used to live in a house with kerosene oil heating (aka Jet-A)

You couldn't light this with anything less than a magnesium flare

Yet I can't use my phone until I'm inside the terminal building because planes are being refueled.

Except in the US where I can use the phone while taxi-ing, they must have less flammable Jet-A

Re: Frustrating

United have a strictly enforced 10lb weight limit for carry-on. Except it doesn't include laptops.

Bag is overweight.

Remove laptop/power-supply/ipad/etc

re-Weigh bag

Replace all the heavy electronic junk in bag.

BBC Micro team to celebrate historic machine's 30th year

You had a BBC micro

You were lucky - we only had a C64.

.... etc ....

Pope Benedict in .XXX pro-Islam cybersquat drama

The Vatican's quickest option for shutting down the domains

Is presumably a thunderbolt from on high?

If the man upstairs was prepared to flood the whole of New Orleans because of gays then a quick surgical strike of first born frogs, or whatever, shouldn't be out of the question

Actually it should be, a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Muslim and a Mormon all walked into a bar - sorry I mean coffee shop - sorry I mean non-dairy vegan halhal kosher non-caffeine beverage shop.

I'm sure one day all the religions will sit down together and be friends - at least once they have lunch sorted out.

ARM's ultra-low-power fridge-puter chips: Just what the CIA ordered

Re: Kitchen Appliances

If they aren't connected to the net how are they going to download security updates and anti-virus software?

Enormous Apple market cap swells and swells ... like a bubble

Re: Lack of dividend — so what?

But if they did pay a dividend people could use it to buy more apple stock ;-)

New NASA snap of game developer's electric cart FOUND ON MOON

He could be in for a big fine

I assume he doesn't have a resident's parking permit?

Lawyers of Mordor retreat from The Hobbit

Re: $100?

To be fair, they weren't just calling the pub 'the hobbit' after the novel. They had entirely decorated it, including the sign, with images and posters from the movie.

Try doing that with Disney and see how far you get!

A $100/year license to use all that sounds like a bargain.

UK's Guardian prints 'Assad family' emails leaked by activists

Re: Computer Misuse Act

I don't believe that Syria is (yet) part of the UK

The US seems to think it's laws apply everywhere but I don't think we are quite there yet.

Cheeky SalesCrunch flips Cisco $1 for WebEx biz

Re: Wait and see

You forgot their master strategy =

1, We are known for high end enterprise network gear when reliability matters.

2, Lets buy linksys and stick our name on every bit of cheap crap sold in BestBuy

3, Customers stop buying Cisco gear for their business because Cisco = cheap crap

Wait and see

Cisco also paid $500m for Flip, a maker of USB video cameras - on the basis that people would post videos online and youtube would have to buy more network gear.

They shut it down, laying off 600 engineers and a lot of dumped product.

Perhaps Cisco should go into the wine and lingerie business on the basis that baby photos get posted online and so they should encourage sex to sell more routers

Startup slices solar panels using ion gun

Re: Hydrogen ions?

Because if you crossed the proton beams there would be trouble - didn't you see Ghostbusters?

Re: And?

Wafers are normally sawn individually from a crystal boule and then polished.

They aren't cheap, and if you want more of them you have to slice the wafer again finer.

This system gives you a lot of cheap smooth wafers from a single initial one.

Thin flexible wafers have a few other advantages - you can glue them to flexy plastic to make roof coverings rather than having to ix rigid glass-like sheets in current thick panels.

,