Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Navy Carriers: We want two or no votes for you, Tories

Build them where?

If the point of the Navy is to keep shipyards busy and their workers voting for you.

Where exactly was a tory government planning to build them /

The Clyde - probably not worth wasting billions trying to buy votes in Scotland !

Ditto Tyneside. You might get a few Ulster unionist votes by building them in Belfast - but they are going to vote for your anyway.

Unless you are planning to fit out Portsmouth to build massive carriers to keep the LibDems happy or you are planning a new shipbuilding industry somewhere in the M25 - you might as well keep the money for tax cuts (or BAe) and forget the carriers.

Little Chef in 'I ♥ Charlie' t-shirt outrage

IT Angle

I believe the next release of 'Monarch' - the management app for small countries everywhere - is going to be called Charlie 3.0, this might be showing your support for him.

ICO wants clearer definition of 'personal' data

Result

New law will be drafted which makes the internet effectively impossible, eg banning an ISP passing on the return address of your web request to a foreign server.

Meanwhile the police/government/etc will get caught sending all your phone calls to Libya or something and get a strongly worded letter in the Gruniad.

Hull man guilty of snooping on hundreds of medical records

Good job I don't live in Hull

My NHS records are completely secure that nice minister said so.

iPhone app tagged as terror tool

Don't forget buses

Seem to remember the last bit of naughtiness was against buses - and yet the bus stops even have little displays showing the arrival of the next bus - a gift to terrorists.

In my day the arrival time and location of buses was kept a closely guarded secret.

Goldman downgrades Microsoft stock to 'neutral'

Who do you believe

So a bank that conned it's customers by telling them that a buy was a good deal while knowing it was dodgy. While being itself conned by lots of other banks.

Thinks a highly profitable company is a bad bet?

Met chief fears Brit cybercrime gangs

Solution

Just arrest anyone in the street with a computer.

Hang on that digital camera is a computer isn't it? You're nicked Mr Photographer

Terry Pratchett computer sniper-scope deal inked

@next item for sale

Already exists, there are laser scanners that look for the retroreflection from the sniper's scope and others that use a cluster of microphones to get the distance and direction of the shot.

At least in western armies there are also specialist anti-sniper-sniper units.

Snipers are incredibly effective in modern wars. You have an individual bad guy a mile away, your options are assault the position possibly with lots of your own casualties, call in an air strike and kill lots of innocent civilians or have a sniper take out the target.

There is also a tremendous morale effect on the enemy - you are safe inside your own people and the leader exorting you to overthrow the infidel suddenly drops dead in front of you.

@How

Yes, wind changes the density of air, that changes the refractive index and so bends the light.

I worked on one more than 10years ago, it's based on the systems you use for measuring atmospheric distortion to do adaptive optics in astronomy. Although back then the calculation would have needed a laptop.

We did invent a system that used lasers to let a soldier fire a grenade on target without sticking their head up and getting shot. Worked great in trials, army loved it then we tried to sell it to them. Think Yes Minister meets Thales/BAe/Vickers

Trucker pulled with DVD and laptop on dashboard

New law

So a new law will be rushed in to ban DVD players on dashboards

Then some celeb will get off on the basis that they were watching a Blu-Ray

Canada prostitution laws pulverised: politicians apoplectic

mixed morals

The same court just deported a guy to the states to face 20years for selling pot in Vancouver.

The Canadian's wouldn't prosecute him on the same harm/public good basis - but the US claimed that some of his customers were Merkins and so they handed him over without an argument.

Miliband retains Labour line on DNA and CCTV

missing the point

Anyone noticed that he wasn't concerned about civil liberties but only that the Tories had claimed the slogan?

Apple now world's second-largest company

@We need a new accounting paradigm

The share value is the markets opinion of the FUTURE value of the company.

If you think Apple is going to continue making good (and so profitable) products in the future then it's shares are a good deal.

if you think DELL can continue cutting costs and make it's computers cheaper and so get more market share - then you buy DELL.

Google cools data center with bottom of Baltic Sea

@Why not

Not many customers in the artic.

Santa already has his own secret data centre - holding his main naughty-or-nice DB

and polar bears don't watch much porn.

This data centre is about 50mi from St Petersburg/Stalingrad/Leningrad (delete as appropriate) but without the political problems of having to rename it with each new president.

No one needs Blu-ray, says Microsoft exec

@Whatever you say Microsoft.

They didn't say that they could stream Blu-Ray, they said that the users didn't want it. The customers would rather pay for a SD or 720 download of a TV episode/movie today than wait 12months and buy a $50 blu-ray disk.

And remember that the PS3 and XBOX sell for the same amount but Sony have to fit a $50 Blu-Ray player while MS only pay for a $5 DVD drive.

Zuckerberg leapfrogs Jobs on Americans' rich list

Lies, damn lies and Wall St valuations?

"private equity firms valued Facebook at around $23bn"

And we all now how reliable Wall St's analysis of the value of assets is.

Universities warn Willetts on science cuts

There's a lot to cut

When I left for the USA 10years ago, professor salaries topped out at around 36K, a senior lecturer got less than the starting salary at a Cambridge spinout.

Those salaries more than doubled under the last lot, and the number of posts doubled - i know a bunch of people that have returned from the US.

There are a lot of reasons the system is crap in the UK but funding isn't currently one of them

Europe sets minimum PNR standards

Reques it from the airlines

So instead of requesting the data from any Eu governments the US authorities simply request it form the airlines. No data - no permission for them to operate in the US.

In turn the airlines request the data from you and demand you waive all your rights over the data and what they do with it - no check box - no ticket.

Crash grounds RAF Eurofighters - for Battle of Britain Day!

F35 alternative?

So the Navy's new fighter costs even more, we can only use it with addon kit the americans sell, when the Americans tell us, and if the Americans let us borrow their itunes account (or whatever the onboard software used).

It can't take off vertically from a carrier without melting the deck, and can't land with any fuel or weapons onboard. It costs so much we can only have enough aircraft for one carrier - which rather begs the question what the other carrier is doing.

Wonder if jerrry would sell us those spare F4s ?

Intel confirms HDCP copy-protection crack

RE: Erm .... so what

The blackmagic (or Haupage or AvertMedia) can only grab 1080i.

To grab full 1080p@60 you need some serious broadcast quality gear - Matrox's one is $3800 plus $5000 development license for the SDK plus $500/year runtime.

Erm .... so what

An HDMI capture card that can grab 1080p is >1000quid, plus whatever Matrox are charging for a license this week - the PC and raid array to store the raw stream isn't cheap either.

All this so I can save my cable box's recordings of midsommer murder or copy a BluRay disk that was on torrent sites a month before the movie came out?

Laptop potato scammers turn to onions

re: A fool and his money

>What kind of person decides to pay cash for a laptop from someone they've bumped into on the street

The kind that grows up and joins the government where they are put in charge of IT projects.

Pope makes central London no-go zone for BT engineers

As BT excuses go it's not bad

Following in their legendary series of ..

We would open up local ADSL to competitors but we don't have the address of our exchanges.

We needa subsidy to install ADSL in a village 2mi from Cambridge science park because it wouldn't be commercially viable

We didn't realise phorm invaded privacy.

Now we just have - wrong sort of religious leader on the roads.

Trident delay by the Coalition: Cunning plan, or bad idea?

Mutually Assured Destruction and the British Shed

The point of deterrent is that if the Russkies/French/Germans/Iraqis/(delete as appropriate) ever try and nuke us - we will blow them to bits.

To make this threat credible we need a massive amount of nukes - a coupe of 100kt Trident warheads aren't going to destroy the USSR.

The obvious solution is to forget the expensive submarines and missiles and just put them all in a big shed in Berkshire - with say 100-200 * 10MT weapons the blast from the home counties would damage the enemy wherever they were in europe without the inconvenience of having to deliver the devices to them.

Facebook follows papal line on censorship

"its about making sex dirty and keeping it dirty"

Yes please.....

Custom superchippery pulls 3D from 2D images like humans

@3D cameras do not create 3d images

You can create exactly the same 3D model from a stereo camera as a laser scanner - all you need is to find the same point in both images and know the camera separation.

This is going to be fun with the fake street scenes painted on the sides of buildings here.

I also expect a lot of cars to drive into bus shelters that have car ads featuring pictures of the open road on them!

Tinfoil 'radiation shield' maternity wear hits 'Frisco

Too late

But by the time you're pregnant it's too late - the baby will already have been programmed to buy iPhones by our lizard overlords.

You need my new tinfoil underwear to protect your love-spuds from being tainted by the EM waves

ID fraudsters sell stolen Aus house

Re: Odd result

>Basically, you need to be able to go the land title office and find out, definitively, who the owner is.

Ironic that .

>What if the fraud was four, five, a dozen, transactions ago?

Or in Australia about 230years ago ?

Linus Torvalds outs himself as US citizen

Finland and WWII

When it comes to Finland and the last little pan-european adventure the Allies don't have an awful lot to be proud about.

Software re-sale restricted by US Court of Appeals

Other things with software

> funny how there was 2nd hand book shops

The publishers did try this 100years ago and the same court ruled that first sale doctrine applied.

The problem with this ruling is that everything has software in it. You bought your car but you only licensed the ECU software, so the dealer gets to decide who you can sell it to?

Same for your iPod, phone, PC CPU with embedded microcode ?

Playboy centrefold freaks out at 10,000 feet

open seseame

So given that it's impossible to open plug doors physically - would I be arrested if I sat in my seat ad said "open sesame" after all it's about as much danger to the aircraft.

There was an incident in australia where an oxygen bottle blew up and happened to hit the door arm opening it - but the door still didn't open.

Cinema chain bans laptops, tablets

@Perhaps he has a job.

Unlikely - it did say Leeds !

US raygun jumbo jet fails to beam down test missile

@pew.. pew..

Laser puts out lots of energy in a short time.

The energy heats up the outer skin of the target and melt/svapourises it.

If the target is the thin skinned wall of a highly pressurized liquid fueled ICBM fuel tank then it goes pop - if it's anything stronger it laughs at you.

The choice of wavelength is limited by something that isn't absorbed by the air/water vapour between you and the target. Shiny metal is roughly the same reflectivity across most of the practical wavelengths so target doesn't really matter.

Main defence is either to put some extra layers of insulation on the target so that these can be destroyed by the laser without doing any real damage - or simply shotting down the lumbering 747 that is flying in slow level circles around your missile launch site.

Rackspace claims credit for shushing Koran-burning 'pastor'

IT Angle

Really it's just a case of offshoring.

Catholics have been the official bogeyman and suppliers of terrorism services by royal appointment since 1536 - proper hand crafted British terrorism.

Now they just outsource it all to the third world with shoddy cheap foreign terrorism.

It's just not fair..

Hurd to take $950,000 salary after Oracle pay cut

@Why Hurd

For the stockholders that understood this and sold in the quarter when Carly/Hurd startede firing and outsourcing they did very well.

It's only those stockholders that expect the company to be in a good state AFTER the new CEO's performance bonus vests that suffered.

HP sues Hurd to keep secrets from Ellison

A happy ending

HP fired him because he single handedly destroyed HP last vestiges of engineering ability by driving out any remaining engineers.

They came to their sense and fired him - now the HP board obviously feel such remorse over what they have done to the proud Hewlett Packard name that they want to protect Oracle from making the same mistake.

That must be it.

Unless of course there is a good reason you would want to stop somebody so incompetent going to your competitor ?

NASA buys cutting-edge Cornish robot

@What the hell

Because it's much easier to have a dedicated 10p ARM processor responsible for the real time control of some valves than have the main control system be some ultra complex hard real time construction that has to respond to ever sensor and operate every valve.

It's the same reason you having an extra 'wasted' CPU in your disc drive/network card/printer/keyboard.

Happiness: Yours for £50k a year

@Rich people are happier

For happiness it does. People are happier in societies where the gap between rich and power is lowest - even if the average income is lower

(at least according to the same sort of survey last month)

Glasses-less 3D TV by Xmas? Not likely, says 3D TV exec

@Specless

The only reason for the shutter glasses is that it's (mostly) just a firmware upgrade on an existing 120Hz TV - so the incremental cost to the maker is bugger-all.

Then they can sell you a new 3D-TV at a nice price and screw money out of you for the $200/pair, only work with our brand, until somebody sits on them, glasses.

Large screen polarizer TVs using the same light, cheap, comfortable glasses you have at the cinema are much more pleasant to watch, but they cost more to make.

So you are selling your 3D TV at 2-3x the price and relying on the sales moron in Dixons/Best Buy to explain to the customer !

Monster Afghan spy airship to feature quad drinking straws

Vulnerable

Wouldn't this thing be a siting duck for the Taliban's advanced Mach2 stealth jet fighters?

You know the ones that the US and UK need the f35 lightning to fight against

Little black dress with SIM card slot offered for 2011

Paris TNG

Underwear that tweets what/who you are doing ?

HP and Dell trade (still more) 3PAR bids

@The Worrying Thing

The Worrying Thing is that HP are having to pay over the odds for somebody capable of putting disks in boxes - because the departing CEO fired almost their entire R+D staff, except for the ones that left in disgust when he was appointed.

Now they will acquire this new inventive company and fire their R+D staff to enhance shareholder value - then repeat.

If only there was an alternative, like HP having some ability to "invent" in-house!

US colonel blasts PowerPoint bureaucracy in Afghan HQ

@Why keep promoting?

Mostly it's time served as you said - there is also a problem of pay = rank.

So if you have a vital technical specialty that would get paid more in civi street the only way to pay them more is to promote them.

Lt Colonel is very common among a lot of engineers because it's the only way to pay them anything like what they would earn commercially - and so keep hold of them.

A great victory

Wasn't the whole point of our little4th Afghan adventure to bring the benefits of western democracy to these lovable but backward people?

Isn't sitting around giving Powerpoint presentations while trying to back-stab your way up the greasy pole the central theme of western democracy?

Isn't the solution to drop 1000s of laptops onto the Taliban all loaded with Powerpoint until they also dissolve into the same level of efficiency

First Dreamliner delivery slips into 2011

@Lee

Although the passengers in the "backside-turbine blade interface zone" are back in cattle class so it shouldn't be too upsetting.

Mozilla shrugs off 'forever free' H.264 codec license

does it help?

Is there any guarantee that the patents held by the MPEG-LA won't also apply to any future video standard?

Remember these aren't patents on H264 - they are patents on various techniques for compressing video,.

ARM chips put on their server boots

@64bit indeed required

You aren't going to be running CAD/CAE on an ARM

Imagine an ARM built into the SATA controller or the NIC - now your server instead of having a bunch of drives bottlenecked though an expensive Intel processors you have a 'server' per drive.

Royal Society opens inquiry into why kids hate tech

untitled

>Is programming still a fundamental literacy for the modern age?

Nope, never was. Kids today learning to make mouse over JScript is no more use than us learning BBC basic 25 years ago.

>What is the purpose of ICT or computing classes in school?

God knows

>Are existing qualifications fit for purpose?

No, but they never were.

>Should computing even be taught in the school environment

Typing would be useful. When I was at school they got rid of typing (girls only) and made the room into computer classroom.

>Why do students study computing?

Think it gets them a job.

>Do computing qualifications carry as much weight with universities as, say, maths >qualifications?

I sincerely hope not

I'm awaiting the Royal Society of Chemistry report into why kids don't want to study chemistry but are very interested in 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine

Energy-saving LEDs 'will not save energy', say boffins

@I re-echo the calls of "arsewash"

When we had candles we didn't light the streets, with gas lights we put one small lamp at the street corner, with high pressure sodium we illuminate entire freeways.

With LEDS it will be practical, for the same power cost, to light every parking lot and every street as brightly as the inside of your house

And in the US after the first person trips in an unlit packing lot or crashes on an regular lit road - the lawyers and insurers will make it compulsory

How extreme is your pr0n? Depends on your lawyer

Chopping bits off your willy

So is it only images or are we going to arrest people for ACTUALLY chopping bits off somebodies willy?

It would involve a large expansion in the prison population - you would probably have to start building special camps. On the other hand the Daily Mail would support it.