Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Walmart falls in with Washington's war on terror

re: Where have I read this before ?

Wouldn't happen today of course

The kids would have just shouted 'peado' and Mrs Parsons and her concerned neighbours would have hung Mr Smith there and then

Do I smell a sales opportunity here?

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.

Mastercard downed by Anon-Assange-fans

and NORAID

But of course there was no such thing as terrorism in the UK before 7/7 was there?

@neh...

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.

Police back ends must be slimmed, says Home Sec

Cutting IT

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 ?

Gov to resellers: Glory bonanza secrecy days are over. For real

All the civil service's fault?

So the decision to give a non-cancellable contract to build a couple of aircraft carriers to a ship yard in a certain Scottish constituency was purely down to civil services incompetence then ?

These contracts never have any political significance ?

Selling Apples to Japan: Complicated as a Nipponese typewriter

@Geez...

In the UK in the 90s Macs were priced assuming 1GBP=1USD and only sold through official Mac stores.

We used to support visiting US profs with Macs but nobody that hadn't worked int he states had one.

Tube to get phone coverage by the Olympics

@Paris Metro

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

Unarmed Royal Navy T45 destroyer breaks down mid-Atlantic

Ideal solution

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.

MP wants age verification for net smut

The old porn definition

No problem now that we have a (mostly) tory government again - so they would get to decide what is porn

In this site it's just men and women having intercourse - thats obviously not sex, there are no oranges or suspenders visible

Immigration caps won't touch tech transfers

@Maybe I'm being a dumbass but

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.

Facebook royal rant bishop suspended

God botherer talking sense shock

Although if the guy you are complaining about is going to be your boss - you might not want to do it on twitter.

Get out the bar, your plane's leaving

@Heathrow

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.

Maude: Gov contracts 'made my eyes water'

New open bidding form

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

Christians vs metalheads in FB flame war

Crusades

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.

Has CERN made the VATICAN ANTIMATTER BOMB for real?*

The anti-lewis

The 1 at the end of lewis's name signifies that he is the matter (+1) version of Lewis, if he ever meets lewis(-1) we are in trouble

LIDL punts circular saw blades to innocent kiddies

The Christmas connection

Well yer man was a carpenter, "parkside - the saw blades Jesus would use"

US may disable all in-car mobile phones

@Dazed and Confused

Simple, instead of a rule making it illegal to carry kids in the back of a pickup - simply make it compulsory

Lincs authority lets schools decide on Pagan lessons

Splitters

"new age paganism, neo-celtic paganism or neo-norse paganism "

I think that's how they managed to prove that they were a genuine religion.

Of course it was a bit tricky when they couldn't demonstrate they had bombed anyone else over a difference in interpretation .

$8.9m poker prize up for grabs - humans only please

Suspicious ?

“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"

Plastic plod used police database to find dates

@Really

No they don't have to wait for a conviction to fire them - you just make unauthorized use of the PNC a sackable offence.

It's a sackable offence for me to enter some parts of this site without authorisation and the correct safety gear - doesn't mean they are dispensing instant justice.

Perv scanners

She should have waited until the new airport scanners are linked into the great police database - then she could have really 'checked out' prospective boyfriends.

US Army's new $0.5bn British airship will fly 'mid-next summer'

@target practice, anyone

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.)

Nominet forgets what the first .uk domain name was

Janet addresses

The Janet format "[e-mail]" makes a lot more sense if you are writing a router - you just keep matching parts of the name with your local name until something doesn't fit.

One of the reasons that 2 letter domains weren't allowed (along with domains beginning with a number) was that when DNS came along there were a lot of bits of hacked together scripts trying to guess which way round your address was and how to translate it to the other format

@MoD or UCL

As a young student at UCL 25years ago I was sent to the computer centre to find somebody to get our department's new Sun3 hooked up to this Janet stuff.

I forgot his name, but it was explained to me - just go and find the guy with the white beard and sandals = not the most useful description for the UCL computer centre back then.

Netbooks: notebook evolved - or stunted throwback?

Polls

Asking people what they would/might buy isn't as accurate as seeing what they do buy.

They work fine with 7-starter, just as well as XP.

As a $250 way of web browsing and sending emails it's fine - I'm in no hurry to pay 3x as much for an iPad so I can do the same thing with prettier icons.

Testy Turkey re-blocks YouTube over naughty hotel romp clip

@what ?

There was a ban because of the founder, the ban was lifted when it showed an opposition MP

Sounds like they are perfectly ready to join the Eu, all they need is a law making it illegal to disrespect any politician or civil servant, another making the current president immune to prosecution and a way to ban anything for reasons of national security and they will be a modern european nation.

National Rail tweaks departure board API, 'orders' coder to kill site

If you want to know a train time

Obviously you file a freedom of information act request and pay 10quid - unless of course the departure time of a train is a matter of national security.

Stealth Carbon 'efficiency' tax could close UK data centres

Job losses

So we are looking at 10,000s of job losses in London as these major data centres in the capital shut down?

Or are we looking at places that employ 6 people to watch a bunch on monitors in lights-out facilities that are only built therebecause they got some local tax break to 'invest' in the region.

OOo contributors make a dash for LibreOffice

Oracle thought processes ?

Don't really understand this.

Oracle only has two interests, making money and pissing off Microsoft.

They can't make money from OOo, nobody want's to buy a copy it doesn't leverage sales of Oracle kit, and they can't sue anybody for using it.

It does piss MSFT off - but only if it's successful. Treating it like the rest of Sun's technology ie, burying it in a big hole or killing it off doesn't make any sense.

The only thing that would make sense to Oracle is flogging it to IBM for a few quid, or posting a CD of it to every windows user in the world.

Competitors seek killer application for Bluetooth Low Energy

obvious

What about a device that tells you where your bluetooth headset is?

Rocks, hard places and Congo minerals

Do I smell a competitor?

So just like De Beers who want to cut these guys out of the diamond market by calling them blood diamonds - of course this was the same De Beers that worked in S Africa happily for 100years.

Perhaps we could also insist on freedom oil? Only using oil from countries that are nice to small furry animals? Obviously the middle east is out, and Norway (cruel to whales) and Canada (oil sands kill birds) - so that leaves the UK (or at least Scotland) as the sole supplier of ethically acceptable oil to a grateful world.

Wales loses 'dot-cum' domain to tax haven

hierachial internet naming structure

I think the problem with a hierarchal system is that "cardiff.wales.uk.british-empire" might upset the taffys

Radioactive Litvinenko poison trails now much easier to detect

Europol

And because the Russian federation is a member of europol if you get arrested demonstrating against Litvinenko's murder the police hand them a copy of your record and DNA etc.

Nice to have friends like that.

UK.gov plans net censor service

[title unavailable]

So what seditious anti-government pornography was in the sub-title to cause it to have been removed?

Boffins mount campaign against France's official kilogramme

@UK and US

The US has always been metric, when they had their little tantrum over the tea in Boston harbour we wouldn't let them into the houses of parliament to compare their yard against the real one.

So the french lent them a metre ruler - but they didn't quite do the sums right which is why a US inch and a proper inch used to be slightly different - until we compromised on the international inch.

Wikileaks Iraq War Logs vanish from Amazon US

Can I be the first to say....

If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide.

EU to lift flight ban on carry-on liquids

Erm.. duty free shops

You can buy liquids in the duty free shops now, they are AFTER security.

I imagine of course that they will welcome you being able to buy bottles of wine in local supermarkets and bring that home instead of having to buy it in duty free.

I suppose they are currently deeply upset at having to charge you 2quid for a bottle of water after security.

US raygun jumbo fluffs another test missile-blast attempt

@misguided

Laser power is one of those "cheque's in the post" type figures - It's not the laser power that matters when you are trying make holes in things - it's the pulse energy. Having a MW laser in the back of the plane doesn't translate to megawatts into the target.

The specs for the ABL call for it to lock onto a target for 5-10 seconds (tricky when they admit the boost phase is <12secs), rotating an ICBM during 5-10secs is easy.

The typical defence against this sort of impact is layers of material that can be burnt off, wrapping the target in half a dozen layers of tinfoil would probably work quite well.

But the system has already proven itself in the operation that it was designed for, transferring money from Washington->california.

Google slips $3.1bn through 'Double Irish' tax loophole

@Does anyone know if Dell Corp does this

It certainly does something like this in Europe. It's registered in Eire and allegedly makes a loss on every computer it sells elsewhere in europe. The germans were quite annoyed

@Makes you feel better about downloading

You mean like where they claimed that LotR made a loss so they didn't need to pay Peter Jackson?

Or how they sold the DVD rights to Spiderman to their own company for $1 and paid Stan Lee a percentage of $1.

Or my favorite, where they didn't pay the author of Forest Gump, because it made a loss, then went back to him to write the sequel. He refused saying he couldn't let them waste any more money.

Invade

So if somebody were to invade Bermuda or Sark (say looking for weapons of mass destruction) they could gain control of all the worlds largest companies ?

Sounds like a good ROI for a defence ministry looking to make up for some cuts.

Gov depts to cut back office, IT spending

@Centralize procurement for 'gold' items

Trouble is that if you centralise all the IT then only IBM / CapGemini / EDS etc can bid. Of course these outfits are so efficient, honest and easily beaten down by politicians in negotiations the savings will obviously be huge over allowing a local council to buy a computer from a local supplier.

Apple rolls out two new MacBook Air models

@Lovely, but.

> No 3G?

Then you need a cell phone provider and a contract.

Apple don't want to confuse potential iPhone / iPad buyers (ie they make more profit off you buying an iPhone/iPad)

Hand over illegal porn at the border, please

Exports?

What about poor little delicate Australians leaving the country - they might come to Britain and see a picture of a naked ankle and have it warp their tiny fragile minds.

The obvious solution is to prevent any people leaving Australia - thus depriving west london of most of it's bar staff.

Was Ozzie's head in the clouds as rivals stole his role?

It's the office stupid

MS has a single product , MS Office - and the Windows/Exchange/SQL server licenses that go with it, that makes all their money.

That means that whatever an exec in the MS Office group wants he will get - everybody else inside MSFT is either working for the greater glory of Office or is an enemy within.

Or at least that's my experience of working in companies with a cash cow product - any innovation is seen as a threat to the cash cow. Generally the company does really well (on paper) right upto there being an external competitor - then it becomes obvious that they couldn't innovate themselves out of a paper bag.

Vatican confirms Simpsons as Catholics

@Eh?

Specifically “The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism”

UK promises 'transformative' cyber security programme

TRANSFORMATIVE

Does that mean we get aeroplanes that can turn into pickup trucks?

Apple posts $20bn+ quarter

Economic conditions

Nice to know there are still people with more money than sense.

Although with nobody having any money you have to worry about how much sense there is left.

The great Aussie firewall is back - and this time it's personal

@Cinema

Not to mention books.

I came across this real slasher novel. Full of mutlilation of penises, wholseale murder of first born sons, child sacrifices.

The sequel isn't as gruesome but does end with a naked snuff scene.