Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Nissan Leaf electric car

Alternatively

I do 15mi each way on a carbon fibre+aluminium bodied vehicle that runs on mars bars and chips.

Only cost 250quid from Edinburgh Bike Coop

Gets through downtown faster than the cars and gives you an excuse to wear Lycra in public.

Red Dwarf to blast off on new adventure

@A superlative suggestion, sir, with just two minor flaws

That didn't stop them making the last two Inspector Clouseau movies !

PARIS team raises pint to Yuri Gagarin

@Poor astronaut

I think you drink from the bottle

The potty (human waste management system facility in Nasa-speak) is for the end product.....

US Navy laser cannon used to set boat aflame

@deniable responcibility

They already have a system for that - it's called sail in and out of Portsmouth submerged at speed. Hit fishing boat, sink it and kill crew.

Then deny that you had a sub in the area until a passing group of school children show you the pictures of the sub submerging that they drew just before the incident.

Then when you raise the wreck of the fishing boat and find the hull smashed in and acoustic tiles embedded in the wreckage - classify the whole thing as secret. And prosecute the owners of the fishing boat for their life raft being out of test date.

Top secret kinetic energy weapon

The Royal Navy is beginning trials of a top secret kinetic energy weapon

It will fire a spherical Ballistic Action Launch Load into the enemy vessel at super-clarkson speed. They should be able to deal with targets this size with a single shot

The kinetic energy generation system is smaller than the laser and uses a loading and targeting system that is completely immune to computer failures and ECM.

It is believed that because of the lower electrical power demands even the new class of small warships will be able to carry hundreds of individual launchers .

To reduce radar cross-section, susceptibility to magnetic mines and reliance on fueling, a series of new natural organic composite hulled warships with a wind power system is envisioned to carry the new weapons.

Gov denies special celeb NHS record treatment

Or just have the same name as a celeb

My GP used to regularly send me details of somebody else with the same name.

My wife was a little surprised that I was having IFV treatment with another women (whose name was helpfully on all the letters). On the other hand since they had all been sent to my address they could claim they hadn't leaked any location data.

Punter bags 500GB SSD, finds 128MB Flash inside

MP3 players

Used to be common with chiPod 4Gb MP3 players - they were 2Gb chips fixed to look like 4Gb

Steve Wozniak ready for return to Apple

Slim not going to be a design goal then?

The iPad3 will be a little thicker around the middle then?

Hasselblad H4D-40 Stainless Steel 40Mp camera

Classic

No it isn't - even in stainless steel it looks like any other electronic toy. In 10years it's going to look clunky and out of date and in 20years all the electronics will have stopped working and the little rubber buttons will have worn away.

Now that nobody uses film you can buy used Hasselblad 500s for next to nothing - I'm almost tempted to get one as a piece of sculpture. They were classics

UK.gov opens Red Tape Challenge regulation-slash website

Goldplating

So the idea is to blame europe when the 'Eu regulations' are less strict than the UK ones?

New leader - same tories.

Sex Party's down-under struggles with dominant Catholic priests

@Curb the Church

Exactly - who died and made them God?

Nokia admits 'open' Symbian is not open

Simple misunderstanding

He was just saying "Nokia are still open" ( for now )

- you might have been confused by the way all the doors are locked, the windows boarded up and the tumbleweed blowing through the carpark

Toshiba readies 'cinema specs' 3D TVs

Passive 3D TV

Are MUCH better- we have a couple of JVC 46" TVs with REALD cinema glasses, much better brightness, colour and picture than active sets. Only problem is that they cost about 5grand.

The reason makers like the active sets is that there is no real change from a standard 120Hz TV to an active set - other than flogging you a 100quid transmitter ad a few pairs of 200quid glasses.

ps. If you don't like the early 60s Michael Caine, cinema glasses - there are a bunch of companies that do fashion versions, even clip-on sunglasses style if you wear specs.

Dig deep! Radio asks taxpayers for blank cheque

@Ummmmmm

That's not really fair - some people have got a DAB radio to work!

@Enormous waste of time

Because 3G licenses raised 25Bn so somebody has decided that selling a few 10MHz of FM spectrum will obviously raise more (not sure how - they probably multiplied the number of people listening to FM by the price of an iPad or something)

Blighty's official Space Agency starts up on 1 April

NASA IS a model of effectiveness and efficiency

Remember Nasa's job is to do tax payer funded R+D for Boeing (sorry support all US large passenger aircraft makers).

Manage pork barrel contracts with whichever aerospace company has a supportive senator in it's state (or was Houston chosen for it's natural closeness to space?)

Hide the cost of some military projects

It does all those very very well, it's crap at space exploration but that's not really important.

Australians can’t read or count

Maths with a calculator

How does having a calculator help with maths?

The only example I can think of is the proof of the 4 colour problem and that needed a bit more than a pocket calculator.

(They are useful for arithmetic though)

Microsoft, Nokia, and RIM's wasted R&D billions

R&D isn't white coats

What is corporate R&D depends on the company accountants, what Wall St wants to hear and the local tax laws.

So company A counts almost nothing as R&D, everything is product development, to Wall St analysts it looks very lean and productive.

Company B counts everything that hasn't actually shipped yet as R&D, it writes off all it's development costs as R&D tax credits and tells Wall St it is a major innovator.

Deleting 'innocent' DNA will cost £5m

Cost savings

How much does it cost to do a DNA profile?

I can't imagine it's cheap, private companies charge about $250 for paternity tests etc. So assuming that $1=£1 and add a 1000% government contractor markup they are paying a few quid to put innocent people's DNA into the system in the first place

If you waited for them to be convicted before doing the profile than you could save the cost of removing the innocent ones pretty quickly

Google open source guru: 'Why we ban the AGPL'

Obvious

They use GPL software written by other people but don't have to share it because they never 'distribute' the software. It's like me renting a DVD pointing a video camera at the screen and broadcasting that - claiming that I'm not "distributing" the DVD

The AGPL stops this loop hole so they don't like it.

Stop sexing up IT and give Civil Servants Macs, says gov tech boss

Etch-a-sketch

Cheap, Colourfull, Low security risk, hard to hack, and no USB sockets to be left on a train

And because it can't run Powerpoint or IE the effectiveness of any manager issued with one should increase hugely.

There is also a reduced support overhead since it can be rebooted by simply shaking it (http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-04-03/)

Irish cop child abuse image plan attracts data protection ire

Pre-emptive

Although the west midlands police standard procedure of automatically locking up the first 6 Irish guys every time there is a terrorist bomb might need small tweaks to be effective in Dublin.

First 'extra' site blocked

www.vatican.va

Air NZ safety vid provokes terror in the skies

Ummm actually.

Hasn't been a fatal US major airline crash in about 10years

Some of this is marketing - when you book a ticket on UA and end up flying on a 12seat commuter plane operated by 1man and a dog thats just code-sharing, if one crashes then it was nothing to do with UA.

Water landings aren't that bad - assuming it's a water landing a'la Hudson not a water landing as in falling from 38,000 ft and hitting the atlantic nose first. People normally die when they inflate their life jackets inside the plane. Which suggests that the American flight's passengers either listened to the briefing - or didn't know where the lifejackets were..

And finally Aeroflot's reputation is unfair - all flights in the USSR were counted as Aeroflot. So cargo flights into Kabul, supply trips in winter to siberian bases, one man survey flights over the artic all counted as aeroflot crashes.

NASA systems dangerously at risk from cyberattack

Couldn't they simply turn it off

"Agency-wide mission" = what mission?

They aren't doing space flights, they haven't been launching commercial or military sats since challenger and the science projects are built by universities.

If you stop the bits that are just a tax-payer funded R+D write off for Boeing and the bits that are a back-hander (sorry strategic investment) in the other California aerospace companies then all you have left is two theme parks - and you can get Disney to run those.

George Lucas 'very happy' with 3D Phantom Menace

Could improve with the right 3D

If you simply swapped the Z direction ( DirectX instead of openGL) and had Jar-Jar be rendered into the screen - actually behind the screen, and behind the background, and preferably appear in the alley out the back of the cinema

Tesla Motors sues BBC for defamation

Go on the attack

Make some ads showing footage of car crash victims burning to death in petrol powered cars.

The Professionals set to abseil into cinema

Updated version

Bodie and Doyle go on holiday, get captured by local farmers and Cowley has to ring up and explain they were only there looking for butterflys.

The Bayeux Tapestry archiving model

@Ridden down

No that's what the ruling norman elite want you to think - he was actually hit from a grassy knoll not shown in the tapestry

Your census data will be kept secret - except from MI5, police, courts etc

Question 17

It's the "are you a terrorist?" question:

If yours is blank then they have already decided and you don't have to answer it.

Scarface blows onto Blu-ray

Foresight

Prescient of them to record 7 channels of audio in 1983.

Or is this just the normal take an original mono/stereo track and put all the background on the rear channels effect?

Plane or train? Tape or disk?

Thought this was a government security briefing!

Now pay attention - you leave USB sticks in cab's, disks on trains and tapes on planes.

Libya fighting shows just how idiotic the Defence Review was

Bring back the spitfire

Since the only plane actually downed so far by the collective air superiority of the great and the good was a single engined trainer, taxiing on the runway, blown up by a missile from a French fighter might I suggest that a fairer match would be for the UK to use Spitfires (or possibly Hurricanes) - not only would it be a great saving over buying F22s but it would give the whole affair a much better public image - plucky chaps in mustaches and scarfs etc.

RSA won't talk? Assume SecurID is broken

RSA customers can't make educated decisions

Yes they can - if your security supplier is refusing to tell you about a security breach then there is only one educated decision you can make.

Slow Shutter Cam

@oops maybe no

It would also be inconvenient to have to cryogencially cool the CMOS imager to stop the dark current you would get in a 30s exposure.

Since the software is adding images together it could at least do a simple shift+add algorithm to take out some of the camera shake.

Government shells out £2m for ID card compo

@Sounds like effectively a political Booby Trap

Trouble is without cancellation penalties no company would ever risk a government contract - or if they did they would simply add a 100% markup.

If I said I wanted you to paint my house, but tomorrow my wife is back and she might not like the colour, in which case you have to repaint it, how much are you going to be charging me for the job?

But yes this was just a Booby Trap. It wasn't even an old fashioned 'Jobs for the Boys' scam where all the outgoing ministers get directorships at BAe out of the deal

Landlocked Bolivia seeks legal route to Pacific

@ Imperialist British out

To be fair it's been pushing 1000years since Britain had a a native leader.

Hanoverians out of Buck house, and Old Harrovians out of number 10.

BAA promises to get its Heathrow act together

should adopt an improved resilience target

I'll think I'll do that as well - can I do while I'm having a little lie down?

Mac OS X daddy quits Apple

@LOL

I don't think those people were leaving a sinking ship so much as floating up from the wreckage

Except Elop - he was sent to sink a different ship

Paramount buries Dune remake

Well I liked it

Apart from the trauma of Sting in purple posing pouch I thought it did a good job.

The visuals were stunning, the performances mostly very good and it did an impressive job of keeping to a fairly complex story. It's been a while since I last read it but I think he film was a lot closer to the book than PJ's LotR for example.

Confused

I though Hollywood's business model was to do pop-star studded glitzy remakes of old movies that in their day made lots of money in spite of poor visuals

So their plan is to do a crap remake of a glitzy movie that made no money despite having glitzy production , lots of good actors and the pop star of the day

ps. I hear Peter Jackson is doing a remake of the 2005 King Kong, the new one is going to be in black and white and will use advanced CGI to make it look like it was shot on grainy 16mm film

Japanese quake shakes semiconductor biz

Supply chains get complicated

Even if Intel/AMD don't make chips in Japan there are a lot of bits needed to run a fab and a lot of consumables.

And you can be surprised how few places in the world are making one key part - just because you can order it from a dozen catalogues.

Where do the wafer dicing saw blades come from, or the bonding wire?

BA jihadist relied on Jesus-era encryption

@IMHO

>AES is an approved form of encryption and it is doubtful the US Gov would allow it unless it was readable

That's exactly why you know it ISN'T readable. The US govt wouldn't use it if their enemies in the secret service could break it, the secret service wouldn't use it if their enemies in the NSA could break it, etc etc

The Whitehouse don't give a damn about the Russians reading their emails - it's the CIA reading them that is a threat

Excel ban

Does this mean that Excel is now a terrorist weapon and it's export should be banned?

9 months ?

Is this the same plot that the police had taken 9 months to crack the encryption?

Perhaps their IT experts don't know about letter frequencies and started with A=B and went from there?

Beeb reworks Wuthering Frikkin' Heights

Hamlet

So Hamlet is a medieval king of Viking Denmark and we are meant to think he swanned around in tights soliloquy-ising?

I'm thinking that an historically accurate Hamlet would be a bit more Brian Blessed than Brian Sewell.

MeeGo or MS? Nokia ponders tablet OS

Waiting for the bank statement to decide

Presumably the confusion lasts about as long as it takes the next investment form MSFT to clear?

If the reg readers had a whip round we could probably persuade them to consider something else - VMS or BBC basic?

MoD rejects Gaddafi low-flying aircraft complaint

@Nothing much wrong with French jets

No there is nothing wrong with Fench jets it's just that it's hard to tell if their users are a stalwart bulkhead against communism (Galtieri, before the Falklands) or a murderous dictator (Galtieri, after the Falklands)

Mind you it used to be even more confusing. The last combat use of the Spitfire was in the Egyption airforce against the ME109 of the Isreali airforce.

@Interesting

There are subtle difference that aren't immediately obvious to the untrained eye.

You have to look for the "Made in ..." sticker on the bottom of the jet fighter.

If it starts with the word "United" then it's part of a necessary show of force to defeat terrorists in which there may be inevitable collateral damage. If it starts with "Union of" or "People's Republic of" then it's a tool of a murderous dictator intent on crushing freedom and democracy.

If it says "Made in France" then it's anyone's guess.

Pr0n domain approved by ICANN

@Am I missing something here

ICANN think that online porn companies and their customers want an official 'x-rated' branding and that they will both be willing to pay for this.

ICANN and reality don't really get together as often as they should