Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26130 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
Great story on the daily WTF about a US university that cut into an unused elevator shaft to lower some big iron into the basement machine room. They then covered over the shaft at the bottom - not the top.
After a winter of heavy snowfall came the spring thaw - and a 5 storey plug of snow and ice melted into the machine room. Quite impressive tsunami apparently.
If I had money disapear from my account I wouldn't expect the Bank of England to be able to trace it - but the online wallet company he used should have been able to.
Probably not very smart to have kept it all in one bank - but tell that to a few local councils who thought Iceland was safe.
So what if he speculated? The money was worth what it could be exchanged for. Arguing it's worth only what he paid for it is like the BSA claims that software piracy costs billions - because every kid that pirated Photoshop would have otherwise paid retail for it.
One of the problems is that the USPTO used to (they are trying to tighten up their act) only searched prior art that was in their own patent database.
That's how that American pharma company got away with patenting Turmeric as a wound cleaner - the Sanskrit authors in 300BC forgot to register it.
So if it was obvious to send email reminders and nobody patented it they wouldn't find any prior art. You can bring up any other prior art you want when it goes to court. Of course this will cost you a $M in legal fees and they will hear the case in East Texas where the court always finds for the patent holder.
Strange that they would go after Zygo - probably just the last entry on the alphabetical list of customers.
In the remake a gang of plucky Germans will develop a bouncing bomb for use against Ladybower.
Pity it wasn't as feeble as American dams. I visited the Hoover dam and had my tiny Swiss Army keyring knife taken off me - apparently the dam is a terrorist target and a 1inch nail file could destroy it.
Whereas officially approved installed aircraft entertainment systems have provably caused at least one crash (Swiss air 111) kill 250 people. Passengers own equipment might, according to something someone heard a mate of a pilots cousin say in a pub to someone on Facebook - cause problems
ADD TRANSACTION-AMOUNT TO LEDGER-BALANCE works but -
"ADD THE FLOATING POINT ABSOLUTE OF THE PHASE OF THE INPUT SIGNAL IN RECEIVER 7 OF BLOCK 3 OF RACK 12 TO THE ACCUMULATED SUM OF THE PHASE DIFFERENCE IN THE MAXIMUM ENTROPY FUNCTION UNLESS THE COMPLEX PART OF THE BASELINE IS MORE THAN ..."
Is probably easier to put in as a formula.
You just need to check for jeans and a T-shirt.
My experience of the Met's specialist anti-terrorism detection capabilities are limited to trying to get into a defence trade show at Edexcel while wearing (gasp) jeans and a t-shirt.
I had left my company logo shirt and suit on the stand, cos I didn't fancy a walk across London in the summer in a suit or a tube ride with a baby-killer-corporation logo shirt.
He wasn't interested in my exhibitor pass or business cards - I obviously looked like a wrong-un. Meanwhile people were streaming in by simply wearing a nice suit. Eventually he got a call on his radio and wondered off - presumably somebody muslim looking wearing a suit was taxing their powers of logic.
Generally other PCs running remote desktop.
Or simple hardware that just runs Remote Desktop? Except because of economies of scale they cost more than a PC. And somehow the company only ever stays in business a year so you end up with a dozen different models from different vendors because you can't get the old ones fixed. Or they only run 1024x768 screens, or they don't do HDMI.
Or remote desktop gets updated on the server end and the old model can't handle the new security so you have to buy new ones.
Funny, X-terminals seemed to work perfectly well 20years ago.
Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to manage a list of a couple of hundred events and post the list out to media and a web site.
Team A - you get excel
Team B - you get to start the tendering process with CapGemini, Lockheed, WAICT (whatever Anderson is called today) to decide if an enterprise resource planning is better than enterprise resource management solution. Then organise a conference on distributed cloud web3.0 semantic web unmediated data sources in a post modern context. Then remember the games open in less than a year.
No, prosecuted means you have to have laws, and trials, and juries and evidence and all those old fashioned things.
Persecuted means you just pick some identifiable group,decide they are the enemy of all we hold dear and be as nasty as possible to them.
Of course identifying an anonymous group of people on the internet might be tricky so we probably have to select an easier target - like teenagers who wear hooded sweatshirts - but the principle is the same!
Notice how when some proper accounting company renames itself 'thus' or a bank renames to 'twinkle', or ITV2 to 'dave' it all seems to go to crap.
Wonder what will happen now the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference becoming build (tm) (r) in lowercase, in nice pastel colours, and it will now be held somewhere exotic and fashionable but obviously no hardware engineers allowed.
Since we have now brought peace and democracy to Afghanistan - that nice Mr Blair said so -
and in most modern wars the main threat apparently comes from our friends in their jet fighters or from training accidents.
Wouldn't the safest option be to paint them school bus yellow?
It would be easier for soldiers (or even marines) to avoid being run over and those colonial chaps are trained to spot school buses when they first learn to drive.
Even better than that.
The shuttle main engine is probably the most complex moving thingy ever built. It's amazing that it works at all - it's less amazing that it has to be rebuilt after each flight and on average the life of each part is something less than 1.5 flights.
Of course you could just leave them off, add two more boosters and gain more payload - but then it wouldn't really be reusable and the whole thing would look silly.
The entire design process for the Shuttle was the sort of bizarre, complex, multi-agency fuck-up that you would never believe it unless you had worked in IT.
In a study of American teenagers over the last 10 years have shown that cellphone use causes obesity, the inability to form sentences that consist of more than "it's like - you know", a decline in maths scores and wearing your trousers half-way down your arse.
Well I'm blaming the cell phones.
Non-ionising doesn't mean safe, I used to program a non-ionising source of radiation that was used to slice through steel plate to make ships.
Mind you, the control group is going to be tricky if LF fields and coffee also cause cancer. We need to find some people who have been heavy users of mobiles for 25years who didn't drink coffee or work near CRTs !
Everywhere else in Europe the poor downtrodden consumers are landed with 2year minimum warranties.
But our brave and nobel leaders managed to get an opt-out so that British consumers would be free from this and the great British computer manufacturers would have more flexibility.
Funny, from my engineering days I seem to remember that mesh is quite flexible - obviously not in this case.
@well - I think it's the other way around.
If they have NO manual controls they can say - well the computer does it all, if the nasty spammers are clever enough to get around the algorithms what can we do?
Whereas if they do any filtering at all - a court (at least a particularly stupid one) could claim that they are subject to the same editorial standards as a newspaper and are liable for everything in their searches since it is published by them.
You can stop a virus being able to install itself easily enough - a write protect switch will do that.
But if when you go to your webmail, your browser pops up a dialog asking you to re-enter your webmail username and password which the xss attacker then users to get your email later does that count?
"Stability is always the better environment for a company; steady income, steady expenses and as such a steady profit"
Assuming you are in an industry that is stable, where nothing changes and it's very difficult for new companies to startup or for overseas companies to compete - like say making stone circles.
Remember a big computer company that knew about stable steady sales of mainframes - so didn't mind that some little startup in Redmond writing the operating system for some silly little desktop toy?
The problem is that you have umpteen megawatts of power coming out of your data centre at 40-50C you cool this with sea water at 2-3C.
Once the water you have heated gets to the output temperature of your data centre then you don't have any cooling anymore.
You can use a heat pump to boost the output temperature of the waste heat so you can use it to generate much hotter water. But boiling kids in the local swimming pool is the sort of publicity that even Google would have difficulty putting a positive spin on.
Or you could have a bunch of chillers to then cool the swimming pool to keep it habitable - but that rather ruins the whole point of the sea water system.
They probably do divert some of the heat to heat the rest of the building and, being Finland, probably a sauna or two.
The seagull with a grenade is easily defeated by the Botham air defence system already fitted to all cricket class ships. An array of sailor's with bats line the ship ready to deflect any casually lobbed ordnance.
The earlier Boycott system was abandoned when during tests it chose to ignore anything fired at it for the first three days of any conflict.
Our enemies de-jour don't have aeroplanes. The most advanced technolgy they have is a Toyota pickup truck and they live in countries more than 75miles from the sea.
Any aeroplane flying over one of these ship sis either civilian, on our side, on the other side but belonging to a country with a big army and lots of nukes who you really REALLY don't want to annoy.
So learning from our allies' preponderance for shooting down their own and our aircraft in error - wouldn't it be safer to just take the batteries out of this thing and hide the remote control?
