Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

'Angry Bird' netflinger projectile brings down drug ultralights

Ultralights????

Does DARPA really think that majority of drugs are brought into the US by ninjas on stealth ultralights ? Have they been reading too many Tom Clancy books?

US Supremes liken GPS tracking to 1984's Big Brother

@Particularly

Isn't there already an app that tells you the location of all the massage parlours and donut shops?

Feds warn 'pox party' zealots not to send viruses in post

Smallpox

The difference is that the US one actually protects against the strain of smallpox which would have been used in weapons (if anyone had ever considered using it in weapons and developed a stockpile of them of course)

The UK one which was bought in huge quantities by the last government, from a major donor to the last government, only protects against the natural form which is extinct.

The US one does have the unfortunate side effect of occasionally killing family members of those vaccinated.

Ultrabooks will rescue PC industry – beancounters

I love industry reports

Ultrabooks are cool and sexy and expensive and desirable - but have a limited market.

But if we made them cheaper (obviously at the expense of thin and cool and sexy) we could sell all those old crap laptops we have stuck in Dixon's warehouse - all we have to do is stick an "Ultrabook" label on them

Upcoming EU data law will make Europe tricky for Facebook

And how are they going to enforce that?

They can get Facebook/Google etc because they have an Eu office in Ireland.

If Facebook (Bermuda) is using data centers in Russia to serve web pages to a european how exactly is the Eu data protector going to enforce it? Invade Russia, threaten to cut off trade relations with the USA?

UK firm slammed for flogging spy software to Iran

It's the FO

The telegraph does take a while to get through the internal mail.

The reason they discourage sales to Iran is that it might help them in their war against our ally Sadaam.

Apple trains store bosses to ignore deal with unions

Try the colonies

It's like the 70s here. Everyone has to be the union if you aren't "a professional".

I might have an Oxbridge PhD but since software isn't real engineering I'm not an engineer - so I'm in the teamsters (of Casino fame !).

In theory I can't work overtime without union permission - oddly that doesn't seem to be enforced. For which I pay a $500 joining fee and a monthly sub about as much as my annual professional CS subscription used to be.

Compact Disc death foretold for 2012

Cue price rises

After all they will have to justify the costs of releasing "Dark Side of the Moon" again on a new format.

Anti-smut boss: 'We won't be net police'

Going after art....

Well the organisation with the biggest collection of painting of naked cherubs does have a bit of a problem with this sort of thing

Feds back down from legalizing government lies

Yes minister - true as ever

Jim: [reading] This file contains the complete set of papers, except for a number of secret documents, a few others which are part of still active files, a few others lost in the flood of 1967.

[to Humphrey] Was 1967 a particularly bad winter?

Sir Humphrey: No a marvellous winter, we lost no end of embarrassing files.

Jim: [reading] Some records which went astray in the move to London, and others when the War Office was incorporated in the Ministry of Defence, and the normal withdrawal of papers whose publication could give grounds for an action for liable or breach of confidence, or cause embarrassment to friendly governments.

[to Humphrey] Well that's pretty comprehensive. How many does that normally leave for them to look at? [Humphrey says nothing] How many does

that actually leave? About a hundred? Fifty? Ten? Five? Four? Three? Two? One? Zero?

Sir Humphrey: Yes Minister.

BOFH: We don't need no stinkin' upgrade

Infinite version numbers

Tex's version number is pi - adding an extra digit with each new bug fix. The advantage being that you can prove that the digits of pi are infinite but the only thing you can prove about a program is that a finite program can only have a finite number of bugs.

Similarly metafont uses 'e'

US Army orders more Judge Dredd smartgun ammo

Wirelessly detonated

Hope they have better security than the predator drones

Crime-fighting Seattle superhero unmasked, fired

Wouldn't happen here

You might fire a 40year career headmaster over a fishing license though -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1921809/Headmaster-faces-ban-over-fishing-licence.html

Airbus brews Scandium smackdown for carbon Dreamliner

@The Hub Model

You can already do point-point internal flights in the US and you do them with 737s or Canadair/Embraer commuter jets, the only reason for a 7e7 is to do long range international point-point.

It's not clear if there is a market for weekly flights from the US's 6th largest city to China's 6th largest. And even if there was it's not clear that the US will cope with huge increase in international airports, when every little commuter spoke needs international customs, TSA, immigration etc.

The real market for these aircraft might end up being long haul - avoiding the US - flights. The 7E7 can do south america to europe or S.E asia comfortably without passengers having to experience a trip through US immigration and security (the US doesn't allow transit - so you need a visa to change planes there)

It's the Asians - stupid

The whole argeument about whether hubs vs direct in the US makes most sense is rather irrelevent. The lifeof these planesis50years, in 50years the US is not going to be the big market for flights.

The biggest use of 747s at the moment is in flying city-city in Japan. Soon it will be flying city-city in China. If you have 1.4Bn people to move around then you need some thing a bit bigger than a 737 for your local Ryanair.

It's also why the 380 is certified to evacuate more people than can currently fit in it. Japanese internal flights use a special seat configuration called something like Asian economy mode = don't try and sit down if you are more than 5' 6"

Critical Windows zero-day bug exploited by Duqu

100% virus detection guarrantee

Didn't say anything about false positive rates, or removing them

Apparently the source was recently leaked:

@echo off

echo "Virus detected"

Not the CIA

"it's a highly sophisticated piece of malware that was designed for a very specific purpose"

Catholic Bishops: 'Would you mind not bringing guns to church?'

Marketing opportunity

Given their historical record couldn't they use this to market their own range of bible aproriate weapons?

The "slayer of the first born" - branded handgun

The "sodom destroyer" - tactical nuclear weapon

Right upto the "Red Sea parter 2000", your enemy entirely drowned guaranteed or your money back.

Feds nab granny in moon rock sting

Double eagle coin

They have a bit of a record of this sort of thing.

There was a famous gold coin that was never issued but a couple of samples were sold /given to foreign dignitaries and a export license granted.

50years later somebody tried to sell one and there was a huge FBI sting claiming that all coins were the property of the US govt and it was stolen etc.

Remember in the US law is politics - big name cases that get you on the news so get you promoted and it's a lot safer than chasing bad guys with guns.

Biden: The internet ain't broke, let's not fix it

Now Canada isno longer a threat

Having just agreed to let the MPAA/RIAA write all their laws from now on, Canada has been removed from top of the list of internet terrorist countries.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5773/125/

Olympus gets government grilling after firing nosy Brit boss

@Why

They will be audited - by the same accounting firms that they will be offering lots of M&A business to if the accountants report is favourable.

Then the government will look closely at the accounts - and weigh them against the number of jobs that are being created, the number of directorships for retiring politicians and the size of donations to the party's funds.

Apparently it's even worse abroad.

Too many states are crushing net rights, says Foreign Sec

Internet is just like real life

Allow everyone access to the internet and then launch a super-injuntion stopping them saying anything and then take the to court for a couple of million quid if they break it.

So much more profitable than the government controlling it

Canada founded on 'relentless pursuit of beaver'

Beavers are cuye and furry

Just like Canadians - Polar bears are big and scary!

There is a serous side to this. The senator is from the Candian equivalent of the Republicans and there have been a whole series of measures to make canada more US-Republican like. The armed forces are to be renamed Royal-Army, Royal-Airforce, Royal-Navy. National anthem is to be promoted in schools.

They have had a couple of narrow elections and in the last one the NDP (old-labour) came from nowhere to a close second so the conservatives want to make the country more conservative - along US lines.

Solar power boom 'unsustainable', says Gov

Ground source heat pump

Are great if you have lots of ground - on an average 3bed semi they do tend to interfere with the trout lake

Scotland Yard trackers operate fake mobile base stations

Good job that thieves would never use a stolen phone then

And it's a bit strange that they can track innocent members of the public's phones 24x7 but can't do anything to locate them when they are stolen.

Miley Cyrus cracker: 'I'm too short for the slammer!'

And what does

Miley Cyrus get for creating the images of a 15year old child in the first place?

Steve Jobs: the Exclusive Biography

@Read the book.

Toy Story under Lucas - would have had Jar Jar in it, so moviegoers can thank Job's for that!

Boeing 787 Dreamliner makes first commercial flight

25% British

Most of that is the Engines (by cost) assuming the customer ticks the Rolls Royce option

The British bits inside are some of the seats.

American aerospace design, Japanese heavy engineering, British upholstery!

(The wheels are the same as airbus and built by a French company in England.)

3years late

But pretty good for EasyJet

4 engines

Twice the risk of engine failure - there has never been a case of engine failure on a glider!

Job-seeking university bods panic over incriminating online info

Credit check checks

Over here in the colonies the number of checks on your credit rating somehow counts against your credit rating ( not sure why )

I just had to sign a whole stack of disclaimers for the bank to be allowed to check my credit score to give me a new credit card.

Google report reveals YouTube takedown requests... by country

Silly Americans

You just request that they are removed for copyright violations on the design of the officers baton - or use the UK blanket "national security" excuse

US decommissions massive Cold War nuke

Oh no it hasn't

"has made the world safer and for which everyone involved should be proud"

Huge bombs that had to be flown to their target on big vulnerable bombers and so

1, would never be used and 2, wouldn't get there anyway

Are being replaced by tiny, no fallout, would be perfectly reasonable to use against a hardened bunker in a certain middle eastern country starting with I.R.A. - type bombs. It wouldn't be a nuclear war - it would just be a "fission enhanced bunker penetrating, people friendly munition" or some such (extra points for making the acronym KITTEN).

Then of course it would be convenient to use against a cave complex in Afghanistan, then against a wedding party, then ....

Rockstar officially announces Grand Theft Auto V

@Where to?

But first you have to explore the city to recover your wheels before you can start driving around.

Featuring the UK exclusive, "GTA VI - Scimitar on bricks edition"

Larry Ellison takes a bath on San Fran mansion

Poor thing

Has anyone organised a charity concert?

Leaked Nokia WinMobes ready for midrange scrum

@What do you want in your phone?

Exactly - now if only there was a Nokia 1100 emulator for this thing!

Disk drive crisis: Economists are terrible weathermen

Definition of fragile

What did somebody say about Sun's "the network is the computer" - the network means that the failure of a computer you didn't know existed stops you doing anything on yours.

The problem with the global supply chain isn't so much a single supplier failing - it's that every point in the chain is a single point of failure.

So an earthquake in Japan closing the factory that makes the glue, a mine accident in china that sources the metals for the magnets, flood in Taiwan where they assemble the drives, a Typhoon that delays the container loading, a civil war in the middle east that closes the Suez canal.

You end up with a 100 different events in 100 different regions - all of which can stop you getting your new laptop.

Can the iPad save newspapers?

@newspapers can save themselves...

My guess is that The Economist and Private Eye would be the ones to survive digital.

Tabloids are the ones that should really worry. When you can get video of trash TV on your phone why would you buy a text version of the same thing for more money?

UK shamed in high-speed broadband study

What would you prefer

A choice of 2Mb for a tenner, 5 for 20quid etc on up

Or a mandated government minimum of 24Mb which costs 100quid/month or nothing?

Japanese take World Solar Challenge

@The First Dave

All Mr Trevithick's steam powered car has proved is that powered vehicles will never be a practical alternative to the horse. It costs hundreds of times more than a horse, is only capable of 9mph and when left by the side of the road explodes.

If these engineers would only apply their minds to producing a better horse rather than ridiculous steam engines ordinary people would be better off

Ballmer disses Android as cheap and complex

Reason for the WinPho8 delay

You need to insert a floppy with the RAID driver on it during the install

Libel reform vows to slay anonymous trolls

I object to this reply

Please remove it

RIM lifts skirt, flashes 'new' OS at devs

Brilliant strategy

They launched a Blackberry tablet that may one day be compatible with Android but isn't compatible with the only application that anybody buys a Blackberry for!

Nipples and teen lesbians sexy even when ironic, ASA rules

You think 34 is bad

One person in Canada complained about Dire Strait's "Money for Nothing" and it's permanently banned from airplay across Canada!

Apple slips, moneymen pounce

Apple history

Apple always underestimated their expected earnings by 15-20% so that the headlines each quarter are "Apple exceeds earnings"

The analysts all know this and so add 20% to Apples figures - this is the real 'expected earnings' as far as the people putting down the money are concerned.

Apple did slightly less than 20% over it's announced estimate - less than the analysts (and probably apple) thought. Because lots of people were waiting on buying an iPhone because of an expected iPhone5 announcement that became the iPhone4s ?

VMware ramps crusade to make sysadmins redundant

Sysadmin isn't about the machines

It's about administering the *****ing users. If somebody could automate the irrational, illogical, unrepeatable and random act os the ****y users then admining the machines is trivial

Leo DiCaprio slated to play Turing in biopic

Bubble Bursting

One of the ironies of cryptography is that every side broke the others codes - while at the same time being convinced that their own codes were unbreakable!

Hut33 - the movie

That would be worth watching:

Christopher Ecclestone as Archie

David Mitchell as Gordon

Benedict Cumberbatch as Charles

Milla Jovovich as minka

Steve Jobs memorial brings out tech titans... and Bono

Psion3

Form and function together - and a f**&ing keyboard

Or the Psion5 - a pocket machine bigger on the inside!

Thanks to Martin Riddiford

Pumped-up radio telescope seeks new moniker

ESO naming

Unlikely, it started out as a way to avoid political problems naming their telescopes - we need the name of an astronomer who was 60% German, 20% French, 10% Italian ....

But it has become a deliberate (if slightly tongue in cheek) ESO policy to give them deliberately nerdy names - it's even regarded as an example of a German sense of humour.