Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26107 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
I mean Britain would never fall into the trap of keeping out foreign expertise for purely political reasons and thanks to our students getting exponentially better grades each year our universities can hardly cope with the numbers of brilliant scientists and engineers.
It's not because the Feds can suddenly crack all encryption - this doesn't make it any easier for N Korea to get pgp.
What it does prevent is some embarrasing cases where major bits of open source software couldn't be hosted in the US because the license said free to anyone but the US made you click a bunch of disclaimers that you wouldn't use it to build WMD or export it to N Korea.
It also meant somebody could in theory sue any US company for violating the GPL - they are using the GPL software but cannot distribute their changes - because they can't be exported.
So you could go after Oracle, IBM, etc and possibly get some judge to block them using FOSS whileit's all sorted out (or until they settled out of court with you)
MSFT's TCP stack is almost entirely open source ( BSD) - would it have been better for them to have 'done a DEC' and implemented their own proprietry version of the internet?
If using open source components without them giving anything back means that MSFT at least stays a little more compatible with open standards that's fine
It doesn't - 20M is the cancellation cost.
It's redundancy payments to staff, paying off leases on offices and equipment and paying to destroy and hard drives and storage in accordance with whatever data protection policies.
And of course a big chunk of cancellation clauses to companies that knew this was doomed when they signed up - and so put big front loaded costs into the job
Of course certain 3 letter agencies will still be able to do it secretly, or in the name of national security, or will just 'ask nicely' and then forgive the ISPs later, or will just get a warrant that covers such a broad range of people that it's pointless
Because the makers know that half the price of these cars are being paid for by grants / tax-breaks / etc and so double the sticker price - and then double it again for the UK
Remember when the government bought BBC micros for every school ? Remember how they cost twice as much as every other home computer ?
To be fair two tin cans a bit of string and a pigeon is better than BOWMAN.
The issue with military and industrial kit is that I might just want to replace a broken unit next year with the same model. But instead I have to upgrade my entire army because I can only buy new iPhone7 and they aren't compatible with iPhone6 that the rest of the unit has and iPhone5 that the navy has and ...
So we will buy COTS and next year we will be buying the old stuff from specialist suppliers at 10x the cost.
Developers not allowed to bring in their own laptops to check online docs etc
Managers allowed to take their company laptops home, lend them tot he kids for a bit of downloading, log onto all the services through un-encrypted wifi at every airport, exempt from having any sort of password for anything - because it slows them down.
Yes you can sell for whatever you want to different sectors.
But if you want to sell your product across the EU at different prices - and you want the individual countries to ban somebody in the UK buying the cheaper one from Germany then you can't also complain if the German government decides to add a 100% tax to UK software.
If it's a level playing field for goods and services then you can't demand to pay the same tax and the same for raw materials and then not allow the consumers to do the same
Attention shoppers - the world is ending, time to panic
"Buy canned goods, aisle 1, gas masks aisle 2, guns and ammo aisle 3-99"
In the UK it only takes 1/4in snow and people are panic buying bun-cases and royal wedding tea towels. Imagine if you ran ads about a terrorist attack in a store that sells machine guns.
It's in the news, which means that the story that MC blocked wiki is also in the news which means people are talking about whether the US government leans on international companies for it's own political reasons.
Which is worthwhile - but don't worry there will be another royal wedding or popidol winner along in a moment to restore the news cycle.
Funny how in business you invest in IT to save money but everytime a public body wants to save money it does it by cutting IT?
I think I'll go an turn off a few servers to save make us more profitable.
Anybody know where I can buy carbon paper, typewriters and some box files to replace them ?
They mostly aren't really 'tunnels' - the metro ones are at least 2 and mostly 3-4 tracks wide, they are square, straight and concrete. All you have to do is mount a directional antenna in the top corner and point it down the tunnel.
When there is nowhere to mount an antenna without it being wiped out by the next tube train, the tunnels are bendy and most of the early ones have iron liners it becomes a bit of an advanced exercise in RF design
The point of the armed forces is to keep BAe/Thales/RR executives in gravy and workers in marginal constituencies in pot noodle.
Since our enemies de-jour either live in caves in land locked countries or can wipe us off the map with nukes in a few minutes (or just turn off the gas) then the only thing the navy is going to get to fight are icelandic fishing boats and somali pilots = a small cannon seems more sporting.
Not fitting them with big expensive missiles seems like a sensible measure - rather like not giving traffic wardens shotguns.
And if you are a mature student coming to do a degree you leave your kid back home in day care for 4years? Or a PhD student leaves their husband/wife behind?
There is a simple solution to the scam language schools - pull their accreditation.
And those coming for 'sub-degree courses', that includes those attending Eton and Sandhurst - who are probably admittedly scum but you can't really blame them for that.
I always considered Heathrow a sort of desensitization experiment.
You arrive on your nice comfortable efficient Singapore Airlines flight, after a week in nice,comfortable, efficient Singapore, or Malaysia, or Korea, or Japan then Heathrow is a very nice efficient way to inoculate you against the world of broken escalators, dirt, permanent half-finished construction and British 'customer-service' before you hit the tube.
Field1 - Number of jobs you will create in marginal constituency we want to win
Field2 - Number of jobs you will transfer from safe seat of other party
Field3 - Number and salary of directorships for senior civil servants / cabinet ministers when they retire
Field4 - Number of contracts for UK stuff your government will cancel if we don't agree to buy your computer/missile/fighter
Yep, can see that being plainly detailed in an online form
The first crusade was due to the pope-of-the-day, having invited lots of heavily armed knights to help him deal with some troublesome vikings in Sicily suddenly needing somewhere safe to send the horde of blood thirsty hooligans before they started making too much mess in Rome.
Later crusades were mostly a church land grab and an excuse to kill a few Jews.
“We're at mid-range amateur level. Nothing particularity spectacular,” says Bowling from the university of Alberta's gold plated underground monorail equipped poker department.
"Nothing to see here ... please don't trip over the piles of gold bars on your way out - we aren't very good at online poker honest"
Yes but anything that can shoot to 20,000ft and have a large enough warhead to damage a helium filled airship (they aren't exactly vulnerable) isn't going to be something you can carry on a donkey or hide up your burka.
So 0.1seconds after you fire the outgoing round somebody's artillery radar is going to spot it and do a bit of serious counter-battery fire on your ****.
This will give the artillery something to do since they have generally been a bit limited by the lack of targets they are allowed to shell (dropping large amounts of explosive ordnance on civilians or your own side being a role generally reserved for the airforce.)
