Posts by cyberdemon

Judge rules FBI can hack any time, any, place, anywhere

Planting of Evidence?

If these Merkins (sic) can go round "hacking" anyone they please without a warrant, then what's to stop them from remotely planting evidence on whomsoever they choose, before having them burned as paedos/terrorists/witches?

Google-backed solar electricity facility sets itself on fire

Re: Supply commitments?

> There have really been just two disasters with catastrophic effects, Chernobyl and Fukushima

Chernobyl was a catastrophe. Fukushima was a catastrophe in terms of the PR it caused (e.g. Frau Merkel's knee-jerk) but in every other sense I think it was a triumph for nuclear safety.

Like you say it was an old design and was not built to withstand a double fault (modern nuclear plants & their safety systems are built to "SIL 4", which requires being able to cope with and immediately diagnose two simultaneous independent faults - more onerous than you might imagine..)

Fukushima was smashed by a "natural" tsunami that killed 10,000s, and made 100,000s homeless. In spite of this the nuclear plant itself has killed nobody. Not one of the "Fukushima 50" who went in to stabilise the plant expecting to die, has died yet. But we have almost forgotten about the tsunami.

Yet people are killed in ordinary "industrial accidents" every day, especially in the "third world", although three were killed (IN BRITAIN!!) demolishing an old coal plant down the road from me at Didcot a few months ago.

When people tell me that Chernobyl or even Fukushima were the worst industrial disasters mankind has known, I like to remind them of Bhopal.

But I suppose that happened in a part of the world we don't care about. :@

Closing nuclear in favour of coal..

Is beyond retarded.

For a start, if it's radioactive waste you're concerned about, then the stuff that comes out of coal stacks is actually very radioactive as well, possibly dirtier than nuclear waste. Per GWh, I expect it's even worse for coal.

That's not even counting all the other nasties that come out of burning coal (carcinogenic nanoparticles, exotic hydrocarbons, sulphur, never mind the CO2) and the kind of coal that Germany has (lignite) is the worst of the worst for all of these.

So let's all build Biomass power plants & burn trees imported on from South America on Diesel boats. That sounds like a better idea Eh?

Seriously though, the real trouble with nuclear is that nobody will define a "safe limit" for radiation. (A sensible level might be the background levels in naturally high-background areas such as Cornwall, where people have thrived for centuries) (cue Cornish jokes). Instead, we have "ALARA" and the "Linear No-Threshold Model" which make the assumption that any release of radioactivity, however small (even 100s of times below the background level) is going to harm *something*, and that ANY measure to reduce it, however expensive, is *legally* mandated. This only applies to the "nuclear" sector of course, and if the fossil fuels sector were held to the same standard then they would be just as expensive as Nuclear.

I find it odd that people are more afraid of "safe" things going wrong than "unsafe" things operating normally (i.e. killing people every day). "So&So was killed in a plane crash? OMG WTF I WILL NEVER FLY AGAIN!!!1" "So&So died in a car accident? MEH! Cars Do That."

I can only assume it's a "fear of the unknown" thing, and that until the general population become nuclear physicists, everyone who isn't will always fear this invisible yet eminently detectable poison.

The nice thing about nuclear power is that all the waste is nicely contained in one place, which makes it easy to clean up (contrast to fossil fuels where its spread all over the flipping atmosphere). And the nice thing about radioactive waste is that it is detectable from a mile off, making it easy to spot. But therefore a nightmare for OCD sufferers perhaps?

** DISCLAIMER: I DO work in the nuclear sector, although not in Fission Power. I work on Remote Handling robots that clean up all the Sperm Germs that everyone is so afraid of **

F-35s failed 'scramble test' because of buggy software

Stability Event

> I think this translates to "on average, one blue-screen-of-death every 15 hours".

Funny.. The way I read it was "on average, one BSOD-free bootup every 15 hours"

I thought the whole idea of super-expensive "military grade" (lol) software was that it is supposed to be deterministic!

Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

Re: Perhaps you were downvoted

Blarg. I knew that Ubuntu were the reason that systemd got forced into Debian, but I wasn't aware they were part of the whole LSB madness. I'd have thought that would be shooting themselves in the foot, given that their strength comes from Debian. If they really threw their weight behind LSB, then they would have to ditch APT/DPKG in favour of Yum/RPM.

But I wouldn't put that past Shuttleworth & co.

Personally I've only ever used Debian, since before Ubuntu was a thing, but neither my beard nor my hair are grey (yet).

Hard-core anti red-hat not just for systemd, but for LSB as a whole. The money from free-software thing only partially - everyone has to make a living - but I tend to distrust those with an axe to grind, especially when it has negative impacts on MY software @:

And that applies just as much to Canonical too.

"systemd isn't just popular because of Red Hat...."

Actually, it's popular because of the so-called "Linux Standards Base", which was a circlejerk between RedHat, Intel, and Microsoft.

The intention was to create "binary-compatibility" within Linux, so that proprietary, closed-source software (and, presumably, malware) would have an easier time. It's completely contrary to what GNU are trying to do, and for this reason, Debian was late (or not invited) to the party.

LSB standardised a lot of things, and it all came from RedHat.

This is why, for example, that MeeGo (which is the abomination that replaced Nokia's Maemo OS) went with RPM instead of DPKG (deb/apt) for package-management, because RPM is specified by the LSB.

That doesn't mean that RPM/Yum is better than DPKG/Apt. It just got standardised by the LSB.

Consequently, Debian and Ubuntu are "non-compliant" until they adopt RPM format. They are fudging it with 'Alien', but eventually Debian will die thanks to the LSB.

Personally, I would love to go back to a time before Systemd. It has given me nothing but problems.

I also, for a while, used Trinity - a backport of KDE 3.5 onto QT4. I stopped using it when KDE4 became stable and usable.

Now that Plasma5 is being forced down my throat, with a shedload of bugs, I would love a backport of KDE4!

Next you'll be telling me to move from X11 to Wayland.

The case for ethical ad-blocking

Just block JavaScript

Use NoScript (firefox), ScriptNo (chrome), etc.

None of the "bad" ads work, including all that jump-in-your-face noisy pop-over bollocks, and the insidious mouse-pointer-tracking shite. Most of the "normal" ones are gone too, but they were all surreptitiously tracking your activity.

The only ads that remain, are plain HTML images with HREFs.

I call this kind of ad-blocking "ethical" because if a website owner honestly wants to promote someone else's product, without using some parasitic ad-network with a shedload of ulterior data-mining motives, then he still can. He or the ad-network just has to take all the crap out and it'll work fine.

The problem is that the ad-networks pay websites more because they are making money out of slurping and mining user's data (perhaps more than they are paid by advertisers for marketing their products). THAT's what's unethical if you ask me.

The downside is that some badly-designed most websites break until you whitelist their javascript (but not their ad-network's). But it's pretty easy to spot which scripts are legit and which are ad-networks just by the domain they are coming from. And pages load faster too.

More and more Brits are using ad-blockers, says survey

I don't use an ad blocker

But I still don't see those nasty flashy-background ads on The Register (unless i'm on someone else's computer, in which case my first reaction is 'eww').

The reason I don't see them is purely *because* the ads are so intrusive - they are running a whole load of javascript either to jump in your face or to slurp up your data (Mouse pointer tracking, anyone? Where's my tinfoil hat?)

As I say, I don't use adblock. But I DO use a whitelist Javascript blocker (ScriptSafe for Chrome). This *breaks* most bad ads (including those on El Reg, and of course Google's innocuous-looking but data-slurping ones) but lets the "good" ads through. I.e. those which are a simple HTML image with a hyperlink. Those nasty ones that slow this site down just don't load, because they are pulled in by a script that doesn't get run. So the page loads much faster too.

The only downside is that it breaks functionality on some websites (especially badly written ones) until I whitelist a whole domain. I often have to hunt a bit for the "functionality" scripts on a page, avoiding those which are "anti-functionality". But it's a small price to pay IMO for avoiding having my data slurped, and not seeing intrusive ads.

What a bum note: Violin's shares perform financial diminuendo

Cue...

The violins.

Terror in the Chernobyl dead zone: Life - of a wild kind - burgeons

Re: Chernobyl was a weapons reactor

I'm not sure where the link between positive void coefficient and weapons has been made..

TBH my best guess is that Mr. Pournelle is mistaken, having made the assumption that because it's a banned design, then it must have been for weapons.

Positive Void Coefficient means that when the coolant inside a reactor boils away (creating "voids" of steam), then the power output actually goes UP, because the coolant was also a neutron absorber, which regulates the speed of the reaction. It is fundamentally a Bad Thing To Do, whether you are making weapons OR power. It is one of the main reasons why the reaction at Chernobyl went out of control.

All modern reactors are specifically designed so that the coolant forms part of the neutron *moderator* rather than *absorber* - (a neutron moderator speeds up the reaction by slowing down neutrons without absorbing them, bringing them to the correct energy level where they are most likely to collide with a U235 atom and continue the chain reaction) - thus a loss of coolant in a modern reactor intrinsically results in a slowing down of the chain reaction. This is called a Negative Void Coefficient.

That's the reason Positive Void Coefficients are banned in the US. Nothing to do with weapons.

Oracle and Xamarin flutter eyelashes at suits with native app deal

Were you reading the article?

Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?

El Reg really needs to quit with all these worthless clickb.. no nevermind forget it.

Mine's the leather trenchcoat with twice my weight in guns in the pockets..

Smart meters set to cost Blighty as much as replacing Trident

Re: Never mind Nuclear Weapons

Yes - I do still work in the nuclear industry - although in the public sector, so I don't have a 'commercial' interest as such.. I'm actually in robotics rather than nuclear power/physics itself - the robots which go inside the radioactive areas - "so You don't have to".

Olkiluoto, Flamanville etc as I'm sure you know are hugely over budget, but I think they will succeed.

As for fusion - it's a nice idea - but if you ask my personal opinion, I think if the money we have invested in fusion were to have been put into testing better fission reactor designs (MSRs for example) then we would be a LOT better off. Fusion is safer than fission for sure (if the safest thing is to stop producing power forthwith, at the smallest opportunity) but there is still "low level" waste, e.g. the gloves and overalls that workers have worn when they have been in an area which has undetectably, low but unprovably nonexistent contamination. That is because of the ridiculous state the legislation is in, and it is precisely WHY nuclear is so expensive. Imagine if the fossil fuel and chemical industries had the same limitations on emissions: Where every last atom of heavy metals, nanoparticles etc they pump out, must be accounted for. But since a mass spectrometer is a hell of a lot more expensive per atom detected than a Geiger counter, nobody bothers.

In all honesty, I think fission is a LOT safer than most people believe. Those posters above, for example, advocating the construction of more nuclear subs: What do you suppose happens when a nuclear sub gets hit by a torpedo? If the same amount of radioactive material were released by a civilian power plant, then there would be a nuclear incident with the scale and cost of Chernobyl. Everybody panics, people DIE due to the evacuation (not because of the radiation), and the planet suffers, because we now need more fossil fuels to replace all the nuclear plants we just closed on a knee-jerk.

As for a policy on declaration of interest? Well I could always have gone AC like yourself!

RE: "Too Cheap To Meter"

You're right that it doesn't work in the current political and regulatory climate - but there's nothing to say it COULDN'T happen. If, for example, we were allowed to build nuclear power stations underwater (like nuclear subs!) and put the waste at very, very deep parts of the sea (subduction zones perhaps?) then nuclear would certainly be "Too Cheap to Meter". But of course, humanity would rather choke to death than pay any thought to that bogeyman.. At least not until they are *actually* choking to death.

When the world gets so hot that people start to need air conditioning to survive, then you can bet there will be de-regulation of nuclear power. But of course that will be too late. Most of our species will be extinct, and most of civilisation will have collapsed.

Never mind Nuclear Weapons

What we need is Nuclear Power!

If people would come to their senses about nuclear power (that it is cleaner, 'greener', and safer than basically everything else) then we would hardly need meters, let alone 'smart' ones!

Yes I know nuclear is expensive - but is a lot more expensive than it needs to be - Nuclear companies are forced by law to keep emissions "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA) that is to say, they are forced to lower emissions even when there is absolutely no reason to. They set themselves stupid targets like 100GBq tritium per year (for scale, 1GBq tritium is found inside one of those glow-in-the-dark keyfobs - tritium is basically harmless) so when they find something unexpected and go over their arbitrary target, people think there has been a major incident when in fact there hasn't.

Nuclear installations are forced to go to ridiculous lengths (like quadruple-redundant dosimetry of personnel) to keep already insignificantly low doses of radiation even lower.

All this when there is no evidence at all to say that low doses of radiation are actually harmful - there are even some scientists that think low doses are beneficial ("hormesis" effect) and nobody has been able to prove them wrong.

Meanwhile coal, oil and biomass plants are belching out tonne after tonne of carcinogens, nanoparticles, even radiation (more than nuclear plants), and that's when they are operating NORMALLY!

I think there is a big case for relaxing the rules around nuclear power to make it less expensive, but it seems to be something of a taboo subject!

All of this irrational fear of radiation is just going to allow the fossil fuel barons, climate change denialists, and biomass bandits to destroy the planet.

Whopping 10TB disks spin out of HGST – plus 3.2TB flash slabs

The trouble with Helium..

Is it has a tendency to seep through *anything* - even solid steel / aluminum..

A balloon lasts a day or two - a foil one a week or two, while an 80 litre dewar flask of liquid helium will noticeably ebb away over the course of a few months. Granted this is primarily via the oil film seal around the stainless steel ball valve once it has been opened and closed again (rather than the metal itself, though that does happen), but I suspect the slightest knock/vibration could disturb the seal on a helium-filled hard drive, enough for the helium to gradually percolate through the seams of the case and up to the heavens - and your data soon follows it!

LG unfurls flexible SEE-THROUGH 18-inch display

Re: What about Folded Displays

Actually if you ask me - the folded display will be the death of the roll-up display.

Because too many plebs will try to fold them!

Who loves office space? Dell does: Virtualization to banish workstations from under desks

Anxiety

"having all of a workgroup's valuable files in a central location — architectural models, feature films, automotive designs, whatever – can significantly reduce that aforementioned IT admin's anxiety."

I suspect the only admin whose anxiety is reduced will be the HR admin.

The "aformentioned IT admin" will be very anxious indeed, right before he ceases to be an IT admin @:

Fukushima radioactivity a complete non-issue on West Coast: Also for Fukushima locals, in fact

Financial disasaters..

Maybe, just maybe, the "financial disaster" is caused more by "'Elf and Safety" parasites (and the hysterical individuals who they brainwash in the name of profit) than the disaster itself?

Other examples include Asbestos, Electricity, Whiplash and PPI.

The nuclear industry is especially vulnerable to these kinds of parasites, because nobody understands it, lots of people are scared of it, and nobody can see it except for the 'Elf & Safety brigade with their geiger counters and smear tests for whom it is highly profitable to inflate its risks.

Especially when you have concepts like ALARA - that is, the whole UK nuclear industry is LEGALLY BOUND to keeping radiation emissions "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (despite what the safe or background levels may be..) That gives a massive bonus to the ambulance chasers, because all they have to do is present some new (and very expensive) way to reduce exposure to a new, even more hilarious low.

I work for an experimental fusion facility, and the rules there are that any area where there is more than 1 Bq/cm^2 Tritium (beta emission, one measly electron per second) detected on any surface then that area must be designated as a controlled area that nobody is allowed to enter without a pile of paperwork and five days of brainw^H^H^H^H^H^Htraining courses. (To put that into perspective, a Tritium-filled luminescent keyring that you can buy in high street shops for £10 contains about 1 Giga-Bequerel of Tritium) Anyone who comes out of these areas then has to dispose of their overalls, mask, and three layers of gloves straight into the contaminated bin which then becomes.. Nuclear Waste!

Yes - most of that zillion tonnes of low-level nuclear waste that you hear about is just gloves and overalls that "might" be contaminated.

They had to evacuate the whole site at Sellafield recently, until they found the cause of their "radiation leak" - As I understand it someone dug a hole for some roadworks and released some radon from the granite bedrock. For your "financial disaster", Imagine how much that little incident must have cost. Then think about the Nuclear Decomissioning Authority as a whole, and how much money it must be plowing into parasite industries for no good reason..

In reality, there is far more cancer caused by the chemical and OMG Nanoparticles!! emissions from cars, than nuclear war never mind nuclear power, ever caused.

And if we could have nuclear power, maybe we could have enough of it to charge everyone's electric car!

By the way, anyone who mentions Chernobyl should be reminded of Bhopal.

Fukushima fearmongers: It's your fault Japan dumped CO2 targets

Re: The elephant in the room

>So current power generation digs something out of the ground and uses it to heat its surroundings. The heating might be local, but do enough of it for long enough, over large area of the planet and one has to ask if there is a better definition of "Global Warming". What we are doing is systematically overloading the planet's ability to dump excess heat. The other "bad" things simply add to the problem.

Hmm.

Given that total global solar heating is around 100 petawatts, and total global power generation is about 15 terawatts, that means power generation contributes around 0.015% of global heating.

I get that the climate is a sensitive balance, but I'd be very surprised if we could influence it by heating, in the absence of any gas emissions.

Solar power would be nice, if it didn't need so much resources to make the panels. And in many cases the land used would be better off growing crops (the same applies to all biofuels - you are effectively burning food)

This debate both amuses and depresses me. We have hippies (climate) versus hippies (anti-nuclear), with us scientists caught in the crossfire.

Google's Wi-Fi not good enough for its home town

Re: The problem is WiFi not Google

And the TLDR award for 2013 goes to.. btrower!

I keep reading your name as btrowel.. which is ironic since you always seem to be laying it on with one!

Wanna run someone over in your next Ford? No dice, it won't let you

Self-driving cars are never going to take off

One word: Lawsuit.

No matter how good they are, the whole concept of the self-driving car is doomed in today's society.

The average person (apparently) makes about 1000 road journeys per year. Therefore, even if a self-driving car were "nine-nines" safe, i.e. 99.9999999% certain to get you from A to B without killing you, that's still one death per year per million customers as a result of product imperfections, each with the likelihood of a nasty lawsuit or even a corporate manslaughter charge.

On top of that, 1% of the entire population every year are killed on the roads (730k in the UK, apparently), with a significant proportion i'm sure where the wrong person (or robot) gets the blame.

Even if the robot car were 100% perfect, humans are idiots, and there will be plenty of them ready to hurl themselves in front of the robot cars if there is even the remotest possibility of a big fat payout.

The nice thing about human-driven cars of course, is that there's a fleshy meat sack behind the wheel who assumes (nearly) all legal responsibility for its use.

Call me a cynical git, but I don't really see a way around it.

Radiation snatched from leaky microwave ovens to power gadgets

This is about as daft..

as putting solar panels on your ceiling to collect the 'wasted energy' from your energy-saving lightbulb!

As for "1.8V, enough for most gadgets", this reporter clearly hasn't heard of electric current. In particular, that old relation P=IV!

Wait, forget I said anything - I hear another clueless mug, er I mean EPSRC executive on his way!

Facebook Frankenphoto morgue will store your cold, dead selfies FOREVER

Facebook are not storing YOUR data for YOUR benefit

They are storing THEIR data for the benefit of THEIR data-mining!

Meet the Unmagnificent Seven: The critical holes plugged in Firefox update

Re: Lamentable

Nope. No extensions.. The last time I used it was on a University PC with Firefox installed as part of their standard build. Whenever I tried to use it for literature surveys and the like, it would crash after about half an hour of heavy use.

I wouldn't be surprised if the culprit was the Adobe PDF plugin (the kind of steaming pile that Adobe is)

But then again, why should ANY plugin or extension be able to crash the entire browser? Surely there are catch statements to prevent that sort of thing?

Lamentable

Firefox used to be a really good browser, but I'm really not sure what happened to make it what it is today: Frankly a pile of cack.

It's still miles better than IE of course, but it's a shame that I now have to choose between a browser that is probably tracking my every move (Chrome) and a browser that crashes all the time, eats all my memory, and just generally plain sucks (Firefox). Regrettably I choose the former.

It was around version 3 when things started getting bad. I can't entirely remember why. Then they changed the menus, broke all the extensions, and started doing silly version numbers and it was all downhill from there.

Redmond slips out temporary emergency fix for IE 0-day

Re: The reason it is still in use IMHO

Ewww.

This dongle enumerates as what, a USB Network interface? Then you take the dongle and plug it into the meter?

Could be an interesting hack!

Btw, what happens if you run out of funds and the meter turns off. How do you put more funds in it then?

ActiveX?!

I thought that died in 1997!

Why the hell is ActiveX even allowed AT ALL in a modern iteration of Internet Exploder?

If anyone is unfortunate/lazy enough to need such an abomination they should have to confirm exactly which HTTPS certificates are allowed to run it, a bit like what Java is doing.

Telstra scrambles to fix voice

Faulty wiretap, perhaps?

Maybe a certain black box has spewed out some blue smoke.

Chap unrolls 'USB condom' to protect against viruses

Rubbish!

Those who are saying this device fakes negotiation to grab power are (probably) wrong.

I'd bet it just shorts the two data lines together so the device thinks its plugged into a dumb wall charger and draws the full whack.

I could even claim prior art on this one myself - I modified my n900's USB cable to include a simple switch between the two data lines to short them. Now I can plug it into a PC to charge at full speed (albeit completely flaunting the USB spec), with the added advantage that this also prevents the data lines from being used if I plug the cable into anything untrusted.

Tencent offers 10TB of free cloud storage for all

Mobile required?

Has anyone managed to sign up for this yet?

I made an account, but when I try to get the free storage I get this:

Does not meet all the conditions for obtaining

Conditions for obtaining:

1 Log micro cloud phone 1.6 version

2 registered handsets are not involved in this activity

3 your QQ number is not involved in this activity

* If you are already logged in before the start of Mobile try to log in again after logging out

It would suggest they want me to install something on either an Android or iOS device.

Even if I had either of those, they can sod right off!

Microsoft Xbox One to be powered by ginormous system-on-chip

Maybe I'm just cynical..

This seems to me like an effort to foil the mod-chippers.

Putting it all on a SoC with custom silicon could make it pretty much unhackable..

I'm sure a lot of managers at Microsoft would love it to be a black box filled with epoxy and only ethernet in one end and HDMI out the other, with a couple of antennas inside for controllers etc.

If it weren't for the small issues of cooling, and those pesky soldiers in their disconnected army bases kicking up a fuss about always-on connectivity, they'd probably have done that already!

'Hand of Thief' banking Trojan reaches for Linux – for only $2K

Re: Problem with this idea...

Quite right. Basic Safe Surfing practice means you avoid the vast majority of malware. (I personally advise against antivirus software. It is more trouble than it's worth and tends to lull users into a false sense of security)

Mind you, there is a lot of malware that can get in via javascript exploits in browsers, and there are quite a few privelege escalation exploits running around.

Javascript remote code execution exploit + privelege escalation + rootkit = one pwned box, with no permission boxes to click through.

The most effective defence per unit of user inconvenience, IMO, is to turn off javascript by default (only for selected domains), using something like NoScript (or NotScripts in Chrome). It has an added bonus of blocking almost all adverts and invasive trackers, whilst leaving non-intrusive HTML-only adverts alone.

Re: will the Linux Trojan have the same value as its Windows counterparts?

Or even just install the vboxaddons package, say, on your physical machine, and it'll probably think it's a virtual machine anyway!

You still reading us? Not for long! Summer is THE IT meltdown hot spot

Servers don't like heat

In other news, cats discovered to dislike baths, the pope announces that he is in fact catholic.

Asperger's and IT

Re: Aspergers and IT

Speaking of Eadon, Aspergers, and prejudices, perhaps Aaron Milne could put a word in with the editors?

Eadon's basically been banned and all his posts deleted because he didn't know when to shut up. (he has Aspergers)

I miss him, I actually do!

France's 'three strikes' anti-piracy law shot down

Typical quango...

12m over 60 employees. That's a €100k _average_ salary taking into account the standard overheads formula..

Microsoft to switch off MSN TV

Quite. It has to be a complete write-off, surely.

In fact it's probably been losing money hand over fist for 16 years and only just now they have decided to write it off??

Maybe Steve Ballmer's mother still uses it or something.

What happened to Eadon??

I hope it's not permanent though. El Reg just won't be the same without him.

Plus it's not really fair to permaban him simply for not recognising when we have had enough of him:

http://smart-aspergers.blogspot.co.uk/ Recognise that guy?

What happened to Eadon??

Every last post of his seems to have been deleted:

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/user/34672/

Is he banned? Wtf did he do?

I know everyone loved to hate him, but he wasn't THAT bad. I quite liked him really, he made me laugh.

3-2-1... BOOM: Russian rocket launches, explodes into TOXIC FIREBALL

You are having a bad problem

you will not go to space today.

Eww! What have you done to the layout?

.....Don't fix it!

Wtf.. You've done the same for "Your Topics" in the sidebar. Why?

Needlessly adding clicks to a user interface is a waste of my time.

If it aint broke....

Why have icons been moved to a tab in the post comment box?

I am very unhappy and wish to express my discontent. ----------------------------------------------->

Snowden speaks from Moscow: 'Obama lies'

So basically..

If you want to be a human rights activist, then get out of Russia. Those kind of people are not welcome here!

(plus since you told us everything you know - we made sure of that - you are of no further use to us)

Unix luminary among seven missing at sea

Fneh

Is there some villain going round assassinating ancient computer science geniuses or what?

It was only two days ago that James Martin turned up dead off of Bermuda.

'Do the right thing and tell on a pirate' - software bods

Watch it! They'll start doing people for "Incitement to commit copyright infringement" next!

That Microsoft-Nokia merger you've been predicting? It's no go

Maemo

Personally, I think the best thing Nokia could do is resurrect their brilliant Debian-based phone OS Maemo.

There's still a huge community surrounding the n900, despite it being nearly 4 years old. It'd be brilliant if Nokia could take that and put it on a modern phone (a Huawei one, perhaps, if Nokia haven't got the cash to be making their own phones anymore)

Despite its age, the n900 is still the most powerful (in terms of things you can make it do) phone I have ever known. (mobile SSH terminal complete with agent, port and X11 forwarding, anyone?)

Absolute brilliance by Nokia, but it was exactly what the trojan horse Elop was (successfully) deployed to assassinate.

So, Windows 8.1 to give PC sales a shot in arm? BZZZZT, wrong answer

Re: +1 avoiding an upgrade

I was going to say you could yank the HDD out of your old machine and put it in the new one and it won't notice the difference

But this being Windows, it'd probably BSOD because the SATA chipset had changed, or you'd lose all your software licenses because the CPU serial number had changed.

This is one of the of the many reasons I avoid Windows when I can.

SK Hynix coughs $240m to settle Rambus IP case

Great.

Does that set a precedent for RAMBUS to start patent-trolling everyone else now?

I remember when they had a product. It was expensive, slow, and got extremely hot.

I guess they decided that if they can't innovate, they'd better get under the bridge and wait for some billy-goats.

How NSA spooks spaffed my DAD'S DATA ALL OVER THE WEB

Shurely not THE Adam Hart-Davis?

Of BBC TV presenting fame?

Google to punish sloppy mobile webmasters

Re: Great!

If they insist on making a touch optimised version, then they should make it ONLY for multitouch phones. My n900 works much better on desktop sites with its old-style resistive touchscreen (the touch resolution actually comes somewhere near the screen resolution, unlike with Jesus Phones etc)

Or better yet, just implement the "mobile-optimised" bit in jQuery or the like, so we can turn it off. Saves the cost of parallel maintenance of two sites, and avoids the problem of "special versions" being forgotten about too.

MacBook Air now uses PCIe flash... but who'd Apple buy it from?

Re: it's a chimney

It'll look even more like a chimney after someone mistakes it for a waste-paper basket!