Occam
Perhaps he just panicked and had a heart attack. Or farted and the gas got him.
331 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Dec 2010
I think the net would be a safer place if people had a certain skill level before being allowed on. For starters, spambots and viruses would not be so prevalent. But the only way to ensure that is to require people to have a licence to use the Net ... and then we would need some mechanism, presumably enforced by the ISPs, and dependent on them knowing exactly who you are, to implement it.
I'm not wild about the idea myself, but I think it will come ...
Um, as far as I know patents are on "a method" of doing XXX. Not "all" methods of doing XXX. So surely they claimants need to prove that the devs are using THEIR particular method, and said method has some unique characteristic which is not obvious or 'the only way of doing it', like making wheels round?
So my kid likes Angry Birds and I decide to buy it, after seeing it on Amazon for around a dollar or a pound / whatever.
However Amazon only sells to Yanks, and I could not find the paid version on Google's Market.
I have since rooted the phone and installed Adfree, which dealt with the problem.
However I remember reading somewhere that Rio was making a million dollars a day from ads in Angry Birds ... why would they bother trying to sell it with that sort of income?
And so comparing sales of Apple and Android apps is misleading.... they should instead look at the total revenue stream to devs.
Of course OBL is alive (assuming he didn't actually die of kidney failure/whatever back around 2001). If you caught the world's most wanted terrorist/CIA asset and knew you would be interrogating him to death, it would be much more convenient to announce that he is already dead, wouldn't it? We'll use the old "man overboard" excuse to explain the missing body ....
Funny you should mention that, I've been expecting Windows X to be more-or-less gnu based entirely ... Microsoft stole their networking code from BSD, and have been drifting ever-closer with each release to the linux/BSD way of doing things ... that gawd-awful "Documents and Settings" (aka /home) folder, adding multiple users and the concept of Admin (aka root), and the remarkable similarity between a modern KDE 4 desktop and Win 7 is rather amazing ... I no longer know who is copying who... All they basically need to do is to get rid of that registry, support ELF and let KDE run as front end.... oh, and get a decent file system. Lots to choose from. :-)
What about the bandwidth implications? Many people here in Sunny South Africa are still on default 3 GB/month cap ... and often with only a 500 Mb/s connection (theoretical, YMMV). Watching a movie or three will soon deplete that. Even in the UK won't your Acceptable Use policies (ie illegal Caps and throttles) make these online rentals non-viable?
It's quite clear what this lawsuit is really about. Mr Nosy Neighbour is upset that Mr Sprigg is better endowed than he, and his wife has found a new photographic hobby dedicated to one subject (or should that be, One Member), and the only way to save face (or should that be Head) is to sue ...
So I go and stare at the photo.
http://moobreak.blogspot.com/2010/08/apple-iphone-4-versus-samsung-galaxy-s.html
Which takes me back to 1978/79 when the VW Golf was launched, followed very quickly by the Mazda 3 hatchback. Since Golf was basically inventing a new shape of car, how come they didn't sue Mazda for taking their shape and rounding all the corners? (or industrial espionage, for that matter ...)
I merely interpret Google's stance as "we built this thing in a hurry and suspect there are gaping security holes, which we would like to fix before releasing the source code."
Oh, and the stuff was written in six different coding styles so we need to polish that too....
Sometimes I think The Register wants to be The Sun, making up stories where none exist.
Yet plucks up the strength to respond...
@John Robson: "irradiating the land you aim to occupy is such a good plan."
Refer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do not assume attacker wants to occupy your land.
(If I remember correctly, Quark, in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, when told of the attacks, said words to the effect of "They irradiated their own planet?!!" ... Yes, humans are idiots.)
Nuke may be designed to withstand quakes and tsunamis, but how about Bunker Buster and similar bombs? Or next year's version?
Your solutions for waste have, I think, all being considered, but none implemented. Why is that?
@Peter Gathercole and others: apologies re the use of the term 'critical', I'm just a programmer and observer of international affairs, not a nuclear scientist. I thought I was using the correct term for 'something bad will happen'.
@Andydaws: See above. Poohbear is pretty sharp, don't confuse intelligence with familiarity with nuclear terminology.
@The Other Steve: I've read a few of the author's pieces on the situation in Japan. He mixes propaganda with reporting. Is it a sin to point this out?
@Anonymous Coward (21 March, 14:58): see
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23710 for some info on just how responsible these companies are.
The writer comes across as a shill for the nuclear power industry. Basically his recent articles have been attempts to sell the party line that "nuclear power is safe", look it even withstood an earthquake and tsunami.
However, the reactors did not survive undamaged. It has taken major efforts by humans to keep them from going critical.
Lets ponder what would have happened if the aftermath of the disaster had been a little different, and humans were NOT able to rush to the rescue? Then what?
What many proponents of nuke power fail to realise is the short-lived nature of human society. How many communities have not been attacked in war for more than 100 years? Nuke reactors are a prime target for any enemy.
If they Romans had built nukes, would they have been able to ensure continuity of "due care" for their projects, and the resulting highly toxic waste, for the last 1500 years?
What makes anyone think modern warlike humans will be any better?
There is still no safe permanent disposal for nuclear waste. Who is going to look after it for the next 100k years?
“He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelation 13:16-17
Between this, and Google's NFC technology, I'm getting worried ;-)
Next thing we'll all be getting barcodes on our arm .... that should speed up supermarket queues considerably...
Sony lost with Betamax simply because the US Porn industry grew weary of putting everything out in 2 formats, and picked one (the wrong one, but that's another debate). And that's why VHS 'won', and why Sony vowed never to fall for a stunt like that again.
So unless the porn industry is going to decide to back Apple and accept payment by Apple only, there isn't really any comparison between these two examples.
(wipe that image of yourself waving your iPhone over a naked women out of your head now ...)
Windows dominated the desktop because MS 'forced' the hardware makers to bundle it with the PC. MS has missed the boat on the new wave of computing (smartphones, tablets) and is now desperate to find someone, anyone, where they can stick their OS in a bid to remain relevant. They're being squeezed by small-form-factor hardware outside the office, and by cloud-computing inside the office, leaving them without a market. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Bill was canny enough to get out at the top.
The day when MS releases Office to run on Android/whatever is drawing closer... and Linus will have won.
1997? Don't be silly. Try 95/96.
And don't forget Netscape was a leading fighter in the game.
Report from a friend of a friend way back then:
http://web.archive.org/web/20001003002647/users.lia.net/iandoug/computer/future.htm
A head honcho from IBM, who read the report, expected the vision to materialise around 2005. Guess things took a bit longer (.com bust got in the way I guess...)
Oddly enough, a week after this report was given to management, Bill Gates went off by himself for a week and came back with the "Kill Netscape" strategy for IE. So I often wonder if he read it too ...
hi
Once again the masses can't see the forest for the trees. The problem is not .xxx. The problem is that the 3-letter domains are not restricted to US owners/sites which was originally implied (just like every other country except UK prints their name on postage stamps, the UK does not because they invented them...)
Every other country in the world has their own domains under their country code except for the US, and that is where the problem is. (Yes I know there is a .us but there is no .com.us or .co.us as .co.uk etc)
If the US had to restrict their activities to .us domains then this problem would largely go away... if they wanted a .xxx.us then let them have it, it would not affect the rest of the world.