Posts by Pen-y-gors 3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010
only fifteen? I think that means that you are guilty of making/transmitting naughtiness, worthy of years in chokey followed by life on the naughty person's register, and that all the readers of El Reg are now guilty of possessing such evil stuff. I think we should all go en masse to Cannon Row police station and turn ourselves in.
> How much in the world of medicine has its roots in military R&D do you think?
Quite a lot I suspect, particularly the techniques dealing with the effects of injuries caused by all those clever gadgets developed by DARPA and the rest of the world's Merchants of Death (TM)
1) Can we use it to kill people, preferably enemies (i.e. any foreigner)?
2) Will it cost at least $1 billion for each person we kill with it?
3) Will the cost be at least 100 times the amount of campaign contributions needed to get it approved?
4) Could the money be better spent on more socially useful projects?
If the answers to the above are all YES then go ahead and build it.
...I think I'm getting a wee bit cynical
Good point, let's have a complete inventory. It's being done in our name, with our money, why shouldn't we know that it's money well spent?
And of course, they're asking about what WAS done, not about who might be targetted tomorrow or next week, so there's no possible risk to troops or 'security'.
Okay, it'll piss off the loony "Kill everyone in the world" warmongers in the White House and the Pentagon, but that's not actually a problem for most normal human beings.
I have an old Shuttle box that originally had XP on it. A few years ago I switched it to Ubuntu to see what it was like. Not at all bad. I upgraded and got to 11.10, and then took their advice and upgraded to 12.04 - which died totally. It seems that the necessary graphics drivers to support the embedded graphics (GeForce 4 MX if I remember rightly) aren't available for 12.04 and upwards. 11.10 is no longer supported.
I always thought Linux was meant to work on a wide range of older hardware? It seems I was wrong, and many of the good burghers of Munich may have the same problem.
You really think TalkTalk give a better service than BT?
Based on experience over many years, most ISPs have problems at times, some more than others. To be honest, most work fine most of the time. The important thing is how they react when things go wrong. Do they try and fix things asap or do they deny it's anything to do with them? I use BT Business now and have found them pretty good on the whole - there have been cock-ups, but the Business support bods seem to be able to resolve things a lot quicker than some call-centre drone in Bangalore.
Having been on the receiving end of an ISP saying it's a problem with the phone line (provided by BT domestic) and BT domestic saying it's a problem with the ISP, it's actually handy having a setup where one part or other of BT is responsible from end to end. And the Business bods do seem to have a bit more clout when it comes to shouting at Openreach.
The one that will clean up is whoever can get something set up which is located, operated, controlled and legally located somewhere with working data protection and privacy laws and that is beyond the reach of the US and UK governments (although it would still be liable to drone attack of course - better add bombproof to the list of features)
"But the number of entry refusals for people, forgery detections and seizures of cigarettes and counterfeit goods all came in below targets"
How can they have targets for this sort of thing? A target for refusing people entry? "This month you must refuse entry to 100 people - it doesn't matter if there's any reason, just refuse 100 people at random" - and how can you hit a target for detecting forgeries if everyone happens to have genuine documents?
This is bean-counter inspired madness!
Seems a bit heavy-handed - it may well be that they have indulged in a bit of unprofessional plagiarism, but how does that affect their medical skills? Personally I don't give a damn if my GP is regularly downloading 'pirate' music, or parks his car on a double yellow line, so long as he's medically competent.
or interrupt to say there's someone at the door and you'll be back in a moment
or say the person they asked for is just coming to the phone in a moment
and then switch your internet radio to an obscure chinese radio station and leave it - I usually manage to get 5-6 mins of wasting their time before they hang up.
or just use Google Translate to read out the Hindi translation of FOAD.
...simple pleasures
I've had a 3 data only SIM on a monthly contract for a while, which gives me 2GB/month for a fiver. Not a bad deal, but I never get anywhere near 2GB, even when I'm on holiday.
I've just got myself one of their new 3-2-1 PAYG SIMs - claims to be 3p/min voice, 2p/text, 1p per MB data - and that looks like being a lot cheaper than the 12p/min I pay EE for voice.
Anyone know if this new roaming thing covers PAYG?
How 'real world' will their test environment be? Stone buildings are all very well, but what about stray doggies crossing the road. Idiots crossing while zonked out on loud music from their iThing. Kiddies rushing across the road to the ice-cream van - will they invite the local primary school to visit to provide test material? Will they have nice deep potholes that can make the car swerve? Two men crossing the road with a giant pane of glass?
Nice idea on a motorway, but urban areas? Nah...
I think I've found a bug in Google translate - it reckoned that was English. Although it did suggest:
Did you mean: Long the roadz him bin pimping hiz P'eye, lak, to make a blingin flight computer, narteyemen?
I have no idea what it means....
at this appaling cruelty to a defenceless bear. How could he? Surely the electronic gee-whizery could have been put in a little backpack, with the webcam in a helmet? There is no need at all for this brutal disemboweling and disemocularising in an attempt to turn Ted into some bionic half-borg, half bear.
Shame on you sir, SHAME! The Ursine Defence League know where you live!
Google translate is pretty damn impressive. Yes, it's not a perfect translation, but you can usually get the gist. The days of 'Out of sight, out of mind' = 'Blind idiot' are long gone. And if you are going to use it to do a quick translation of something you're writing, then you can use short clear phrases which often do come out 100%.
When you stop and think what it's doing to translate an entire webpage in a second my mind does boggle slightly. Tie it in to speech recognition/synthesis and the babelfish will be with us very soon.
So prisoners could have a phone disguised as a car key fob, which the screws apparantly wouldn't notice - errrm...why would a convict need a car key while in chokey? I'm sure it's not THAT easy to come and go. Traditionally one hides in the luggage space of a visiting bus, rather than driving ones own BMW.
Hopefully some of them will be putting some serious thought into developing a truly secure e-mail replacement (for hosting outside US and UK jurisdiction)
Thankfully GCHQ don't employ brilliant technical minds - or they would be aware that it's possible to make copies of data on hard drives.
would that be grounds for stopping him anyway? It isn't.
As the thugs in the security forces obviously can't be trusted to use the laws properly, the only solution would appear to be to repeal all the 'Terror' legislation, and make them fall back on the good old wishy washy laws that forbid murder, assault, conspiracy etc.
I admit I use Gmail (in a Firefox private wondow though!) but I've been experimenting with 1and1. I host a number of sites with them, and they're not too bad - particularly for the price. £10 a month for the Business package gets a lot of webspace and bandwidth, a pretty good webmail client with about 2GB per inbox. I'm not sure where the servers live as 1and1 are german, but if you have a .co.uk a/c they may still be in the uk. Might be worth signing up for a .de a/c and then it will be a bit harder for GCHQ/NSA to get at your stuff.
Nope, looks like the judge relied on 'evidence' from FAPL, which was wrong, so it's FAPL's fault and they are the ones to provide redress:
from the judgement: " First, the orders require IP address blocking of the IP address for FirstRow's domain name firstrow1.eu . FAPL's evidence is that this will not result in over-blocking since that IP address is not shared. The orders also require IP address re-routing and URL blocking for URLs at any shared IP addresses. "
From the judgement:
"FAPL's expert witness Dr David Price estimates that FirstRow is likely to be generating between £5,360,680 and £9,505,564 in annual revenue"
That is one incredibly 'expert' witness. How does he get such remarkably precise numbers? I wish I could estimate my annual google adsense income with that level of precision. How do these people get away with it, and why does opposing council not label it a clear case of 'excrementum bovum'?
It does look rather wonderful, do they have a UK importer?
But why does it need Bluetooth to recognise when the owner approaches? And does the typical owner have his smartphone in his pajamas at 3am when he/she needs a whiz? Given that there's a control panel next to it, surely what is needed is a simple proximity sensor so that it opens when anyone approaches, whether or not they're the owner? Who wants guests peeing in the washbasin because the toilet seat refuses to open.
this seems a very odd 'experiment'. Given the astronomical(sic) cost of shifting mass from the ground to the ISS, couldn't something more useful have been sent up? And why would the ISS be a good place to investigate 'loneliness'? I wouldn't think anyone spending weeks locked up in a large tin can with several other people, and with excellent Skype links to family and friends back home, is really likely to experience 'loneliness'. Perhaps they could lend one to Bradley Manning?
I discovered last week that the brand new till/stock management system that was sold to our village shop three months ago actually runs on XP! We discovered this when rebooting after a powercut - it looks like there's some sort of Windows POS system as well, but really! How can they have the cheek to sell XP based systems only months before support is stopped?
Don't get me wrong, I like XP, but only on old machines. New machines should run Win 7 (obviously)
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