Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

UK probes Snickers over 'celebrity' Twitter adverts

Sponsorship

The same Rio Ferdinand runs around a bit of grass on saturdays wearing a shirt saying AIG.

Well I was concerned about AIG's credit downgrading following liquidity problems - but if an insurance expert such as Mr Ferdinand is willing to wear their name in public they must be OK.

Of course I wonder trust his opinion on what penautty chocolate bar to eat - that's just silly.

Google exec questions Reding's 'Right to be forgotten' pledge

That's a relief then

I wasn't sure if this was just a bit of pointless Eu bureaucracy or another law by lawmakers who don't understand technology.

But as soon as Google rushes out to say that the privacy rules are unworkable - I know the law must be effective. It's like you can't go wrong by automatically opposing anything the Daily Mail supports

NEC slashes 10,000 jobs – blames Thai floods, smartphone slump

Things have changed

You can't be a 2nd tier industrial supplier and a 3rd tier consumer products company and just get by on being big and having a few existing customers anymore.

Nobody says - I would like an iPhone but I'll settle for a not as good NEC smartphone instead because ... why ? .....

Why O2 shared your mobile number with the world

Yes but you can presumably also find your arse with both hands - this is a mobile phone company we are talking about!

The EULA when you get the phone. You have a commercial contract with the company, they can do anything that's in the contract - if you don't like it get another phone.

Nuke support in UK hits record high

You can turn off a pebble bed reactor and will just sit there, you can pretty much turn off any negative temperature coeff design. There are still safety risks of having a big lump of glowing stuff sitting there even if it can't melt down.

I don't think the UK is going to be mining Thorium locally. If you can't economically mine coal from an existing coalfield, when you already have the mines built and the miners sitting on the dole - I don't think deep hard rock mining of Thorium is going to happen.

Proliferation isn't a big risk for the UK, we already have nukes - they MIGHT even work.

Thorium reactors aren't magic. They work by breeding U233 in situ, they don't (generally) produce as many long lived waste isotopes but these aren't the big problem to store anyway (long lived = low activity) the real pain is dealing with massive amounts of lower level, but still paperwork-involving waste, especially when you need to shut one down.

The plant itself still has the same safety issues as any modern reactor design - the big advantage of Thorium really only comes if your country happens to be sitting on piles of the stuff but you don't have any Uranium. Since the UK doesn't have either it's no big deal.

So all you need is a really deep mine shaft, with a very large cavern at the bottom, in watertight rock, where it's geologically stable enough that dropping a billion tons of water into it won't have any effect.

I suppose there might be bits of Scottish granite mountains where you could dig one, but it's going to be quite an impressive feat of engineering.

That's cos Forgemasters are dee-daas and therefore thick.

If instead of trying to borrow 80M they had bought derivatives in a credit swap in wippet futures the government would have given them 80Bn to bail them out when the deal went bad.

They ship dirty lignite coal to Poland, burn it there and pipe the electricity back.

The Germans get cheap power and clean air, the mining unions get to keep their subsidised jobs, the greens vote for the ruling coalition who got rid of nukes - everybody's happy.

The Poles get the shitty end of the stick - but that's what they are there for.

And the €0.1037 costs don't include having to keep an army in the middle east to protect 'our' oil supply or having to deal with rising sea levels putting London underwater.

Although personally I'm prepared to pay a lot more for electricity if it means the south east being underwater

Hold on a sec - leap seconds granted a last-minute reprieve

That's the exact problem. You get the time from GPS which has to and look in it's copy of The Farmer's Almanac to find out how many seconds off it should be.

If instead we all just adopted the sensible solution of counting seconds since 1970 and let the astronomers and druids worry about what local time the sun rises.

Now we have won this battle we can start campaigning to have the 0deg meridian moved back to Greenwich

Australia, US agree to space junk talks

The free market solution would be to have a refundable deposit on satelites, then people could collect them for scrap

NHS trust to digitise millions of patient records

What they were waiting for

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/09/swiss_penknife_ssd/

Now they can leave the entire NHS' records on a train

A preview of SOPA: Web shut down before my eyes

Assuming he doesn't want paying.

eBay, all the credit cards and almost all banks do whatever the USA wants

Iraq demands return of Saddam Hussein's arse

Actually Mussolini just ordered the burning of waste shrubs in order to save coal.

He made the trains run on thyme!

I'm here all week .... try the veal ... remember to tip your waitress ....

Darwin's lost fossils found down the back of a cupboard

If they find a wooden crate in a giant warehouse with millions of other wooden crates - they would be well advised not to take the lid off. At least if they don't want their faces melted.

Boffins quarrel over ridding world of leap seconds

It's all the moon's fault

I vote we blow up the moon!

Trouble is then you don't know in advance how long a second is going to be - the rotation is constantly changing - Which makes timing stuff a little bit tricky

Yes, but even if you are losing 1second per year it's going to take 12 * 60 * 60 = 43,000 years to accumulate 12hours of difference.

I think the proposal is to have a leap hour every few millennia to handle this.

Rumoured 'GarageBand for e-books' to bulldoze textbook biz

Finally

Now that the only barrier, of creating PDFs, has been removed - I'm going to write my own replacement textbooks.

Not sure which to replace first, "The Feynmann Lectures" or Knuth?

Raspberry Pi Linux micro machine enters mass production

That's about the least imaginative use for a computer.

The ethernet port shares the bus with theUSB so the throughput isn't great and you can get a Linksys router running Linux for about the same price with more hardware.

It clocks in at around 500bogomips, the Sparc2 I used to do Hubble image deconvolution on 20years ago was around 1/100 of that - so for advanced space research it will be great!

It does anything a Linux PC can do and plays 1080p video with hardware decode if your queue of pre-cospar Hubble images is running low.

NHS fined £375k after stolen patient data flogged on eBay

The big problem with this fine is it's going to mean a return to the IBM / CapGemini / WAACTW getting all the contracts just so managers have their arse covered.

Cryptome releases list of social sites monitored by DHS

No reg?

Our opinions aren't worth anything to the DHS?

Surely the top-secret undercover rocket spy plane should be worth watching?

Bookies set odds on Apple NYC launch

Indeed - risking your OWN money on what a company might do in the future, what kind of job is that ?

Ordinary people should go back to betting on serious stuff - like which horse can run around a field with a short arse on their back the fastest.

US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux

Didn't MSFT claim that the TCO was higher on Linux because you had to hire expensive Unix admins - instead of presumably worthless bargain rate windows BOFHs ?

Not often that a company tells you that if you want to be well paid and respected you should learn to use a competitors product.

Kids should be making software, not just using it - Gove

Yes - if only you had instead learned the job control language for a 1980 Tandem Q42B you would be employable today!

School is about learning not training

How many olympic runners does the country need?

So why should PE be compulsory?

If you never expose the kids to something how do you know which are going to be the ones to take to it?

RIM demos PlayBook OS2

A calender AND a contact list

If it also came with Tetris or MineSweeper it would nearly be capable as Windows1.0

Dell dithers over fresh fondleslabs

Which windows8?

So far there are three OSes for PCs tablets and phones - all called Windows8

It's not clear how compatible they will be with each other or with existing Windows code so most statements about supporting it at the moment are marketing speak

Windows8 for PCs is already out - just another gui rearrange.

But they get paid $2 for the "designed for Windows8" sticker, $1 for the "Intel inside", $1 for bundling each of Norton, Mcaffee, Crap-o-backup and Office-nearly-works-once demo mode. In fact actually building a computer into the case is probably not really worth it from a business point of view.

ICANN snubs critics, opens domain extension floodgates

Alternatively

How many big ISPs / backbone providers are there? If Canon/Sony/Nike just paid ATT or Sky $10K to add .canon .sony .nike etc to their root DNS soon other smaller ISPs would have to follow just to avoid customer complaints and you wouldn't need ICAN at all. Google and Apple already add extra market domains on their phones - I can see complete separate Android , iPhone and PC internets

Polaroid develops Android camera combo

People who venture outside their parents basement or the local starbucks?

Bit-part actress slings sueball at IMDb over age gripe

I think that is her whole point - if casting directors looked at the photo they would hire her. But if they simply search IMDB for people under 25 they never get to see her photo.

I was hoping for roles as a hot asian chick before IMDB unfairly - although totally accurately - identified me as a 40year old Yorkshireman.

Michael Dell: PC profits plunge not down to tablets

That's going to take some spinning

So after 20years of selling Dell as the cheap place to buy your PC, they shift into being the cheap place to buy your servers.

And the new idea is that they are the deeply committed and highly professional place to manage all your data and support your operations - a better IBM than IBM?

A bit like GM using it's widespread brand recognition, reputation for style and deep pockets to go into the fashion business.

Panasonic pitches portable Skype screen

Time to dump their shares

So a major Japanese consumer electronics group's main announcement is a cheap bit of obvious that a $75 tablet can already do and that can be cloned for $30 by any chinese maker.

A bit like having Mercedes' announcing at the motor show a sleeve on your sun visor to hold CDs.

Apple, RIM deny claims of data backdoor for Indian government

Patriot act

"We would never develop or help distribute a backdoor program regarding anyone’s programs, mobile or otherwise. Ever."

That's a very unpatriotic attitude for an American company to take. Even if there was an ongoing war (on terror for example) that threatened the very fabric of the homeland's apple pie ?

1TB USB stick shoved into Swiss Army knife

Or

I just duct-tapped a knife, nailfile, scissors and corkscrew together to make my own swiss army knife!

GCHQ wants to enlarge 'experienced' specialists' packages

Obviously

If you are listening in to communications from all over the world - you have to be at the centre of the world - hence Chelmsford.

A similar reason for the UK space center being in Leicester

>I couldn't imagine anywhere worse to live.

Try being a nuclear physicist and working in the picturesque village of Aldermaston half way between the brightlights of Reading and the fleshpots of Basingstoke.

Mafia hit suspect cuffed after BlackBerry chatter intercept

hacking != illegal

You can't use evidence obtained illegally

But there is nothing illegal about law enforcement cracking encryption

It would be illegal for me to walk into a telco and attach a recorder to a phone line - that doesn't mean it's illegal for the police to do it.

But since the messages were just public BBM then it's pretty much like taking out an ad in the Police Gazette and publishing your messages there.

Apple said to threaten legal action over Steve Jobs doll

Solution

Have it say "Apple are shit" when you pull a string and it becomes parody and protected under the constitution

Study finds piracy withering against legal alternatives

It's called jurisdiction

In international waters the pirates attack a Liberian flagged vessel - exactly what rights does that give the British navy to charge them?

You might also like to consider why you are spending British tax-payers money and risking British sailors lives protecting ships that their British owners registered in Liberia to avoid paying British tax or requiring British crews.

ps I not sure of the link between this and me ripping a CD to my iPod - but no doubt the RIAA can show that I'm funding terrorism somehow.

Are you listening BBC?

I would much rather pay you for access to iPlayer from the colonies, or even a reasonable price per episode download, than pay for streambox.

But the current business model seems to be charge me $60 for half a series on DVD, 6months later, with a random bunch of edits of stuff that would confuse the natives. ( Pressumably the reason there is no legal way of watching Qi - if you cut out the bits that confuse foreigners there is nothing left. )

Man convicted of murder gets retrial after virus eats transcripts

unbelievable

"Cowart has been FIRED for the monumental screw-up"

Must have been a temp / non-union / outsourced job.

There is no way anyone in law enforcement is ever fired for a screw up, or occasionally killing somebody. Or for launching a nation wide missing person hunt for an african-american, non-spanish speaking teenage girl. And discovering that they had accidentally deported her to Columbia instead!

'Mobiles bake men's balls' bog ad is cobblers - new ruling

Scientists claim

I'm a scientist and so's my wife

So if I were to claim that true happiness could only be achieved by rolling around naked in chocolate could I advertise that as "scientists believe?"

ps.. if you try this - avoid anything with hazelnuts in it.