Posts by druck 4199 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
Already most of our precious TV frequencies are being sold off against our will, instead of being used to deliver more HD channels on Freeview. Now the yank schisters are coming over to attempt to fuck up what frequencies we are left with, using their faith-rather-than-physics based congnative radio shite.
What is the point of saving the planet (as is the bogus climate change mantra), if the cost is to concrete over one of Britain's most beautiful estuaries and destroy all the associated wildlife habitats, including the world renowned Slimbridge bird sanctuary. All for a massively expensive way of generating a tiny fraction of the country's electricity demand. Just as with the wind white elephant, it is an oft overestimated fraction ignoring the several hours of slack water every day.
Worse still affects the viability of two prime nuclear sites at Oldbury and Berkeley, which could generate far more electricity at a lower cost (including decommissioning) without destroying the estuary and generating massive amounts of CO2 from the construction of concrete barrages.
Any sane person would suggest this is a wake up call and time to get that Windows crap wiped off these systems, and some verifiably trustworthy open source OS and applications installed instead. But no doubt they'll just buy some more system crippling anti-virus parasitic-ware to dump on top of the Microsoft insecure bloat-ware.
My school wasn't involved in the Doomsday project, so I didn't get to see the BBC and Laser Disc player until they started turning up second hand years later.
However, I first used a Laser Disc player in a university project back in the late 80s to create an interactive training system for nurses. The idea was they would answer on screen questions, and be shown video clips of the right and wrong way to do things, such transferring a patient from a stretcher or how to make hospital corners on a bed.
We had a lovely system to develop on, it had a full 768x576 PAL resolution video overlay with 4MB of video memory, 24bit colour and 8bit alpha channel transparency (compared the 4 colour CGA graphics of a typical PC at the time). The laser disc of video clips hadn't been shot at that point, and the only disc we had was of the history of steam trains. The video was fantastic quality I got a bit board after a while of the endless clips of trains going in and out of tunnels that we used to test the system!
I can't believe anyone with enough upstairs to get a pilots licence would have made such a pathetic attempt at faking their own death. The two fundamental requirements are to install a vagrant of approximately the same build and appearance in the left hand seat, and make sure the plane is in a steep drive from altitude before bailing out.
The unelected and unaccountable IWF and the like, have no place in a supposed democratic country and should be disbanded immediately. No web page should be censored without a court order, and the page it is replaced with should refer to the case number so reason for the verdict can be discovered, and an appeal launched if inappropriate.
No matter what the cost of any termination clauses, even if they matched the projected cost of completion, it would be worth breaking these contracts. The ID Card/NIR and communications database fundamentally change the character of this nation for the worse, and have no place in a a free and democratic Britiain.
Not only am I fully in agreement with Eddie about the money making scam of additional gTLDs, but I'd like to see the end of gTLDs altogether by sticking a .us on the end of the current ones, as they should have all along. Then all domains are country specific, there is no problem with jurisdiction over disputes, and if Russia wants Cyrillic and China wants Chinese characters, then they are free to do so within .ru and .cn
"The implication is that Samsung had to use Nano in order to use a 12in display. Sounds like cobblers to us. Intel seems to have had no problem with Dell's 12in Inspiron Mini 12 using an Atom CPU - and one for handheld internet tablets, at that"
Might that be because they aren't allowed to use the N270 netbook Atom on a 12"?
As its a bit of a strange decision, seeing every other other netbook has gone with the N270 rather than the Z530.
I'm never going to use the download client even if it wasn't DRM infested p2p nonsense, for a start there's not enough storage on the EEE to download anything, and Flash works fine (well just a little bit jerky on this 701 unless I wind the clock speed up to 900MHz).
What I want is the other channels to follow the BBC's lead on Flash not the download element. Channel 4 is still Windows only despite having a streaming capability - why?
ITV use bloody Silverlight for god knows what reason, but then I haven't found anything worth watching on ITV since the last millennium in any case.
Those in government and the civil service have no idea of what the real cost of the money they are wasting in this case and countless others.
It is the equivalent of taking the tax paid by everyone in my company over their entire working lives, and setting fire to it, just for the hell of it.
You'd like to think that your taxes go to pay for hospitals, schools and even defence of the realm, but in reality a good proportion of us struggle throughout our lives to pay taxes only to fund gross incompetence and corruption.
"since the whole point of the web is universal interop"
I see the words, but the actions say something completely different. There isn't even "universal interop" with 100% end to end Microsoft. Even skipping over the blatant sins of IE5,6 & 7, the lastest IE8 shows that Microsoft still just doesn't understand web standards, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/04/interent_explorer_8_list/
"much better than a WAP phone" WAP? Who even remembers that? It sounds like it isn't even as good as a high end phone with a decent browser. For only slightly more than that ridiculous 200 quid price tag you can get a Netbook for a fast full internet experience on a larger screen.
It attempts to fill a non existent niche between phone and SCC and is a complete fail. It looks like the sort of tat you get in one of those gift catalogues that keep falling out of magazines at this time of the year.
Google earth didn't give them much more than any tourist street map in locating targets and the time taken to travel between them. What was instrumental in the attack was the detailed knowledge of the buildings internal layout, which they could only have gained from on the ground reconnaissance, not google earth.
Leap seconds are under threat and may be abolished in future years, allowing UTC shown by your clock to drift away from UT which the the time of the day according to where the sun is over the future centuries.
This is being proposed because the earth's rotation is slowing, so soon we'll need one leap second a year, and next century we will need 2 leap seconds a year, later still one a month and eventually one a day. Even in the sort term that means too many changes to clocks in precision systems such as GPS.
However I see it as being a victory for numbers and a defeat for humans. In the past we defined units from practical observations such as a second being 1/86400th of a day, now it is based caesum atoms and cant be changed to reflect the world as we find it.
It was absolute madness to by flying in that area without having personal Emergency Locator Beacons attached to their survival suits. Even if the plane has an installed ELB, it wont be much use if the plane sinks. Decent personal ELBs with GPS, which can drastically reduce search times, are under $1000.
If anyone does have an ELB, make sure it's one which operates on 406MHz as 121.5MHz will no longer be monitored by satellite after 1st February 2009.
Ted is talking out of his arse again, most of the people I know with netbooks, and myself included, spend the entire time in the web browser. Open the lid, there's Firefox, shut the lid and it turns off. I don't even want to know what OS it is using, but I think you can guess it isn't Windows.
"The operator of a PAM system will be just as vulnerable to the same counter-tactics as the Sagger operators were in 1973 - even more vulnerable as it sounds like the flight time will be even longer, giving more time for the targeted tank to find and eliminate the guider."
But as it's GPS guided in flight, you only have to paint the dot at the last possible moment, rather than the entire flight time of a slower moving in field PAM.
My main concern would be the network, the Israeli's managed to punch a hole in Syria's networked air defence system on their recent excursion.
"HP's new 300GB SFF drive will have, it says, 75 per cent power savings over comparable 3.5 inch 300GB capacity drives ... The 75 per cent power saving becomes a 50 per cent power saving when compared to a 3.5-inch 15K drive."
Shouldn't that be; uses 75% of the power of comparable 3.5 inch 300GB (10K) capacity drives, and 50% of the power when compared to a 3.5-inch 15K drive? Otherwise it makes no sense at all.
Who cares about open? Macs are something you choose to buy, Windows PCs are something you are forced to use. At least from what I've seen as I'am not a MAC user, Apple tries to make their closed ecosystem something different and better, where as Microsoft are quite open about screwing over any competition and delivering third rate product following on from second rate product.
"You can not say that it is not a disturbing proclamation, given that the only countries in the world where there are filters or restrictions against internet are countries ruled by dictatorial regimes: those between China, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia."
What is disturbing is how all the western so called democracies are so eager to become more like those dictatorial regimes, implementing mass surveillance, extending detention without trail, and now wanting all encompassing censorship of the internet.
The fact that this is even being considered shows that the intelligence services are buried under the torrent of crap resulting from unwarranted mass surveillance, and completely incapable of making any use of it. So instead of going back to the only affective method of feet on the ground hum-int, they are instead looking to hand out yet more pork funding for a fairy tail generator.
I can just see how it works now; some IT vendor tweaks a data warehouse application designed to spot the relationship between purchases of washing power and chocolate biscuits, to look the NIR all the other intrusive databases. It adds 2 and 2 to make 5127 and spits out a list of foreign sounding names. The next day mass dawn raids by anti-terror police are all over the news, and handily leaked briefings indicate an imminent terror plot and dozens of arrests of highly dangerous individuals. 42 days later a couple of detainees are charged for immigration offences, and possession of extreme porn, while the rest are quickly booted out the back door of the police station at 3am in the morning.
Do people really have such little brain capacity that when using hands free kit which allows them to keep both hands on the steering wheel and look straight ahead, they can't talk and drive at the same time?
It really surprises me that this is claimed to be worse than having a conversation with someone in the car, where it is a natural human reaction to keep turning to look at the person, to see their facial expressions while talking, thus not paying full attention to the road.
I read that there as traffic police for a second, my experience of whom was "I know you weren't going any faster than other cars in lane 3, but we've got targets, here's your fine". But then again, I'm expect a similar reasoned and fair result to an enquiry of the police by other police, of whatever flavour.
As the FCC have just approved the use of whitespace with religious zeal, relying on faith rather than any working physical proof of concept, it should come as no surprise they are backing a puritanical service which also wont work in the way they are expecting and cause considerable difficulties to legitimate users.
When the Berlin wall came down we thought that democracy and freedom would spread eastwards, and indeed in most parts it has done. What we weren't expecting was the wall would be put back up in the west, with a virtual cloning of the invasive security and mass surveillance culture of the freedom hating former regimes of the east.
Even if there wasn't a strong possibility of a conviction in this case, it still achieved the desired repression of a journalist, trying to do her duty of bringing abuses of the state to the attention of the public. Her life has been ruined, spending 18 months fearing conviction, and is seriously considering giving up Journalism according to the BBC. Of course if she does, the enhanced CRB check will ensure she is barred from ever holding a responsible job again.
So the advice still comes down to whether it would be offensive to a bitter old woman who's judgement is so poor she sees nothing wrong with roughing up opposition MPs with anti-terror police, and an angry grieving mother who clings to the belief that murderous tendencies must be the fault of pornography rather than sick individuals.
Oh, clause 21 means my defence is void, as I'm the author of a disc repair tool, which has the limited ability to recover to deleted data. So if I ever get any extreme porn spam, I have to wipe my hard disc. I better go an add a safe delete feature.
