Posts by Tel 70 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2007
This same France is the one that wanted to decimalise the clock to show 10 hours in a cycle... and yet cannot come up with a decimal way of speaking numbers above 69... At least English only does the numbers 11-19 weirdly. 99 in French on the other hand.... eight twenties ten nine. No wonder they can't tell their terrorists from their cheshire cats!
Welcome to Trump's America, where the rich are paid by the government to get richer at the expense of anyone in the bottom 9 deciles, but most specifically anyone in the bottom 2 or 3 deciles.
Not that Trump would understand the word 'decile' of course. He considers both knowledge and the people in those deciles as beneath contempt.
I wonder if it will make any difference to the robocall woman who incessantly calls me with the "Hello, I'm [made up name] from [made up company] calling about the accident that wasn't your fault".
Tip: if you've got time to waste, answer yes / plausibly to get round the IVR system they use to screen out swearing. Sometimes there are two layers of IVR. Then you can go to town on the fake accident details. I once managed to waste about half an hour of their time (and phone bill) until I ran out of implausible ways I could have been injured in an accident where I had been driving my non existent offspring's car from the back seat when it hit a bus that braked suddenly and consequently sustained damage to the rear of the car and 'my ribs'. When they asked for details of my ephemeral offspring, they only twigged when I told them offspring's middle name was unusual and needed spelling phonetically... i.e Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo Oscar Foxtrot Foxtrot... Short pause... Click.. Brr... and the sound of me cackling.
Actually 'Lego' is simply the brand name - therefore it is a Proper Noun. We just customarily - and incorrectly - drop 'bricks' or 'pieces' when talking about Lego.
You don't play with your Hornby do you? (Unless you use the name for something else, but that would just be wrong).
I'm off to play with my Meccanoes.
To the question regarding the relative economics of fracking versus traditional oil wells, it can at least be said that fracking does introduce a ceiling to the oil price, all other things being equal, since when the oil price goes high enough for it to be a viable business proposition, the increased supply will choke off a price rise simply due to supply and demand economics.
Or they could be using the patent application for something relatively novel but which they have no intention to use as a means of misdirection or simply closing off an avenue of tech that a competitor might want to use.
In the US, at least, patents aren't about what a company might be about to release as a product in their own right.
I have long since lost any trust in black cab drivers since the day when I had to get from the West End to my dying mother in Enfield. The cab driver took a route so circuitous I'm pretty sure it went via Mars and certainly it took at least twice as long as any time I had driven (roughly) the same journey when I had access to a car... On top of that, the driver had no 'knowledge' of the area much outside the North Circular, and when he finally crossed that particular Rubicon, I had to direct him!
Oh, and I arrived 20 minutes late for my mother's death.
Black cab drivers can go f*ck themselves.
There's a significant difference between (supposedly) forcing other people to keep their prices high everywhere if they want to use your e-commerce platform and setting your retail pricing for your own products. Apple can charge whatever they like for stuff they manufacture and sell themselves. You clearly don't seem to understand the difference though.
Why do people think the 5C is somehow a failure?
All the market surveys I've read (and not sourced from Apple) suggest the 5C has been roundly outselling the Galaxy 4S. And considering that the 5C is essentially a repackaged plain old '5, that means it's 2012's tech and yet nobody seems to be interested in hearing about how much of a 'fail' the Galaxy 4S has been.
It's inconsistent with facts and illogical to call the 5C a 'failure'. It sells less than the 5S, yes... being essentially last year's model, and all, but if it sold more, than the 5S would be the 'failure' instead... How can Apple 'win' (or even draw!) if people and, more particularly, journalists who should have some sort of obligation towards truth, keep insisting that black is white?
It's not his private life though, is it?
I don't vote for politicians whose views I detest.
I won't support a company led by someone whose views I similarly detest.
When that company/organisation has avowed equality policies that its CEO flies in the face of, then they either admit they're hypocrites and their equality policies aren't worth the paper they're written on, or they live up to their ideals.
Mozilla were on the cusp of being judged and found wanting. They realised this. Just in time.
When you think about the numbers of nuclear bombs that were exploded in the Pacific on various (poor defenceless!) atolls, Fukushima pales into insignificance. If the alarmists were to be believed, the Pacific would be utterly dead through irradiation by now.
When I had a minor issue with my 2008 Mac Pro (noisy graphics card, since upgraded) I took it to my local Apple store. All I had to do was get it into my car. They sent one of their staff with me to the car park to get it as I'd done my wrist in and had trouble carrying it.
Not many other shops would let their staff go on a half mile schlep to a car park for a customer, and I only had to ask, no need to fight for it. That alone won loyalty from me.
Frankly I don't care... it's not as if anyone would ask Siri to do anything with their bank account number.
Basically all Apple has is a bunch of different voices asking about the weather, reminders to pick up shopping and asking the most important questions of all, namely "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" and "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"...
Apple are hardly going to be equipping a fifth column with that useless information!
And they want us to subscribe to Office 365 and store all our documents that run our businesses in the cloud if we don't want to pay through the nose for a licence to use only once and then throw away a physical local install of Office?
Just who do Microsoft think they are and just how f***ed up is their business model these days?
I've *never* trusted cloud computing and I never will. At least I can get at the culprits if my network goes down.
How did Microsoft get this big of a deathwish without anybody in their corporate structure noticing?
While it might be a bit difficult to place a mobile device into the category of 'computer', a computer is, indeed, what a smartphone is, these days. Certainly the processing power on these gadgets is far in excess of what was available on desktops when a certain Computer Misuse Act was written - you know, the one that criminalises access to a user's computing device by a third party without the knowledge or permission of the owner of the device.
It seem to me that were Google to remotely remove any software installed on any UK phone that they would be breaking the law.
I seriously doubt the VAT rise will do much, if anything, to sales of games. It'll add exactly 85p to a £39.99 game. Not exactly bank breaking. I'm sure most gamers have enough readies to cover that. And the money to fill in Labour's gargantuan black hole has to come from somewhere...
"Steve Jobs is no match for British broadcasters"?
I don't think so... I'm pretty sure Apple is sitting on enough dosh to be able to buy Britain's ITV outright, and that doesn't take into account Jobs' humungously vast wealth elsewhere (Disney, Pixar, etc).
Personally, given the crap that ITV tends to broadcast, I'd be very glad if it got bought out by Jobs... a bit of Apple's style rubbing off on it would improve it immensely. Mind you, a bit of napalm would improve it as well, so that wouldn't be a hard ask!
So not only do the muppets of the Slovakian security authorities put at risk a plane and its passengers, but then the poor beggar who they accidentally fit up gets arrested. And anyone who's ever taken a trip to America on the Visa Waiver programme will know that by simple fact of being arrested he'd never be able to travel there visa-free ever again. And, given the nature of the arrest, despite the massive extenuating circumstances, you can bet your last euro that the US visa people will take one look at the record - "explosives, aeroplane, arrest" - and he'll be on a no-fly list before he can blink.
Poor bloke will never be able to travel anywhere ever again! If that were me I'd be reaching for the nearest high-powered lawyer.
It looks like wishful thinking if Nokia think they're going to get away with this legal jiggerypokery...
From simply reading the descriptions of the patents in the article I can think of plenty of examples of the technology in use before the date of the patent.
What this shows is the ludicrous way patents are managed in the USA. That situation certainly needs urgent reform, because the only people winning in all this are the lawyers and in the meantime business innovation is stifled and smaller outfits trying to develop new products essentially risk their entire worlds on the basis that someone somewhere doesn't have a spurious patent so broadly drawn as to prevent them even putting pencil to drawing board...
Of course, should this all turn bad for Apple, they can always resort to their war-chest. Earlier today I looked up Nokia's market capitalisation - Apple reportedly has enough of a mountain of cash (yes, ready cash) to buy Nokia outright: mind you, is Nokia actually worth it that sort of money?
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