Posts by Named coward

EU ends anonymity and rules open Wi-Fi hotspots need passwords

Re: Let's step back for a second

No. The German court from where this originated actually asked if this would be a solution, but this ruling actually rejected such a proposal since it violates some other EU directive

Re: Erm @ 2+2=5

The ruling is self-contradicting. In one place it says that monitoring information has to be excluded as an option since that breaks some other EU law. The it says that it should require a password...so make a password, and have people show you their ID to give them the password. This, according to the judgement, "may dissuade the users of that connection from infringing copyright or related rights". But you still won't be able to pinpoint who did what and according to the ruling you are then not liable.

Re: Erm

The ruling is partially positive for Germany, where this case started, and where businesses are liable for whatever is downloaded or uploaded from their WiFi - which effectively makes running an open WiFi a very risky business.

EU verdict: Apple received €13bn in illegal tax benefits from Ireland

Re: that I should ever say anything in support of Apple...

"They either broke the law or they didn't. "..according to the EC commission Ireland broke the law (state aid) and have to recover the owed money from apple. The case wasn't about the tax policies.

Re: What I don't get...

The difficult part on taxing at point of sale is in determining how much to tax. Some items have very low margins per item, other have huge margins. That's why tax is done on profit, but profit is moved around through other companies etc..

Re: Of course, Ireland has already protested

Considering one of them holds their IP...that would be fun

Excel hell messes up ~20 per cent of genetic science papers

Re: Doesn't happen with Google

I use google for convenience but the automatic conversion of what I want to be strings, to dates, happens there as well, and is annoying as hell

Chocolate Factory exudes Nougat as Android 7 begins rollout

Re: I hope Nexii is a troll, but anyway...

if the proper latin plural is not desired, just use nexuses

NASA to begin first asteroid sample mission: Seeks 'pristine' specimen

security-regolith? For a moment I thought they went really really overboard with the backronym. But it's actually "...Security. REgolith eXplorer"...which is still overdone, but only to the usual standards

VMware survives GPL breach case, but plaintiff promises appeal

Even the most permissive BSD license requires acknowledgement (reproduction of the copyright notice). So if the GNU'd code was "inspired" by BSD it should be appropriately acknowledged.

Italian MP threatens parents forcing veggie diets on kids with jail

Re: "on the advice of a naturopath"

(Some?) Doctors have an M.D. Guess what that D stands for.

Re: Criminal offence to impose a diet lacking in essential elements ?

Do vegan diets allow human baby milk?

Bing web searches may reveal you have cancer (so, er, don't use Bing?)

Re: No. Just No.

but binged is already a word (to binge)

Google Chrome deletes Backspace

I just found out that I can use backspace to navigate back from this article...

Google asks the public to name the forthcoming Android N operating system

cue in "no internet connectivity" messages from apps if they can't fetch their ads

Re: If they want more sponors...

Maybe one of them didn't like the price

GM crops are good for you and the planet, reckon boffins

Re: Why all the negativity to GM foods?

A higher yield means reduced pressure to turn current un-farmed land into yet more farmland

-

The added resilience means we can also grow some of these crops in areas that are currently unsuitable

so which one is it?

Chaps make working 6502 CPU by hand. Because why not?

Re: Because why not indeed

40x40x50 is almost 32 olympic-sized swimming pools. I bet you'd need even more space to cool things down (unless you submerge it in said swimming pools)

Archaeologists find oldest ever ground-edge stone axe

Re: Question ...

"The flake is small: 0.16 g in weight, 10.9 mm long (percussion length), 5.17 mm width (at mid-point of length), and 1.4 mm thick (at intersection of length and width)."

boffin: "we found a fragment from an axe (which took a few hours to grind)"

journalist: "they found an axe (which took hundreds of hours to grind)"

One black hole, three galaxies, four BEELION solar masses – found by accident

Re: Simple question

"I'm suggesting N universes from N big bangs at N times and N locations"

as long as 0 < N <= infinity. The part that you seem to be missing is that we cannot observe/verify/prove either way. We can only "see" up to a certain distance, beyond that it could be all unicorns and dragons.

"I'm further suggesting that the big bang is the end game for a black hole." - That's called a "big bounce" scenario

Zero. Zilch. Nada. That's how much Netflix uses its own data centres now

Re: Single Source

Some business sense says you wouldn't want your single supplier to be your direct rival but in some very unscientific single-sample tests Netflix streaming is somehow better than Amazon prime (no buffering, ever vs from none to too much depending on time, as well as possibly on weather patterns and phase of the moon)

Microsoft sinks to new depths with underwater data centre experiment

Re: Why put it all below water?

I might be wrong, but if the servers are in the sea there is no need to pump any water anywhere so they save even more energy.

There is also the issue of saving costs on renting/buying and developing coastal real estate vs marine "real estate".

Boffins baffled by record-smashing supernova that shouldn't exist

"570 billion times brighter than our sun's output" ...Our sun's output over what time? 1 second? 1 year? its lifetime?

Microsoft’s Get Windows 10 nagware shows signs of sentience

Re: My parents have been having problems with this

My solution to an analog problem was to install windows 10 for them, and turn off all the call-home functionality that can be turned off. Linux mint is also a good alternative, as long as nothing goes wrong.

IT bloke: Crooks stole my bikes after cycling app blabbed my address

additional fail:

"where there were lots of other valuable items in the garage"...

UK says wider National Insurance number use no longer a no-no

Re: PRIMARY KEY (nino)

I have no idea how they are assigned but guaranteeing uniqueness is easy, so if it is not guaranteed, the implementation is wrong.

Lower video resolution can deliver better quality, says Netflix

Re: CRF?

It's a bit more than that but it's related. They calculate, "At each QP point, for every title, ...the resulting bitrate in kbps, ...and PSNR (Peak Signal-To-Noise Ratio) in dB, "...and from that they calculate, for a given bandwidth, which resolution is best for a particular movie.

Eurocrats deserve to watch domestic telly EU-wide, say Eurocrats

Re: Or the better way

"However once you purchase that piece of media, you can watch it however and whenever you want."

Conratulations! You've just reinvented the DVD ( / bluray / VHS )

Obama calls out encryption in terror strategy speech

While I agree with you, the reality is that the "how do we know the authorities won't abuse their power?" argument is a non-starter since you are pretty much guaranteed that 1) they will 2) they won't admit it 3) you will get the "if you don't have anything to hide..." response.

The "if you leave a backdoor open then others will be able to use it as well and there is no way to prevent that" argument is probably better at convincing laypeople/politicians that it's not the right path.

Big Bang left us with a perfect random number generator

WIth de-tuned FM radio all you need is someone transmitting on the same frequency and suddenly your radio is not de-tuned any longer. I suspect that transmitting in the required microwave bands to poison the CMB readings from radio telescopes would get noticed.

Team MIPS tries to spoil ARM's party with new 64-bit Warrior, 32-bit microcontroller brains

Re: Optimistic?

Many modern processors use OoOE, including mainstream x86s and many from ARM (A72,A57,A15 A9, etc). It does require more logic (==silicon) but apparently, using current designs, the advantages are greater than the disadvantages

Re: Optimistic?

Current x86 processors have about 14-20 stages., Cortex-A72 have up to 16. The P4 had up to 31 stages (Prescott).

Ice volcanoes just part of Plutonic pandemonium

Tritan?

Is that a hybrid between Triton and Titan?

Exam board in 'send all' fail: Hands up who knows what the BCC button is for?

Re: I can one-up this.

There's no such limit that would make the email malformed (but the SMTP server can have built in limits which are supposed to return an error). You might have encountered the bug which also caused this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx

Sennheiser announces €50,000 headphones (we checked, no typos)

Re: 2.4 µ thick

2.4 microns...someone missed the bulletin from 1967

Has Voyager 1 escaped the Sun yet? Yes, but also no, say boffins

replacement

So this 80 year old guy has been working for almost a couple of decades into retirement age and a "replacement" was only brought in 1 year ago (linked article)

Google publishes crypto mandate for Android 6.0

encrypted with a default passphrase...what could go wrong?

Our intuitive AI outperforms (most) puny humans, claims MIT

In other news: "computers can crunch numbers faster than humans" (by all means a very interesting paper, especially the part where the autotuning worked better than the initial manual parameters)

BBC bypasses Linux kernel to make streaming videos flow

Re: Smells funny

When you're trying to send loads of data over a network copying memory is usually the worst thing you can do. A "couple" of memory copies is actually a few million per second when you're in the Gigabit domain.

Herbie Goes Under Investigation: German prosecutors probe ex-VW CEO Winterkorn

Re: he was unaware of the "defeat device"

"You buy the vehicle because testing shows it does 70mpg, but in reality you never get more than 40 or 50 out of it." - No, it does do 70mpg, but it spews out a lot more stuff than you were made to believe. VED Bands and most EU-type regluations are based on CO2 so presumably they're not affected.

11 MILLION VW cars used Dieselgate cheatware – what the clutch, Volkswagen?

Some poor sap will be given the task to develop software that can keep emissions within the legal limits without reducing fuel efficiency below the advertised amount - cue in "hey maybe we can do things differently according to what the car is doing"...oh wait...

Re: GBP £

for consumer prices it's usually 1€ = 1$ = 1£

Ich nicht bin Charlie: Facebook must crack down on racists, says Germany's Merkel

Re: That's "Ich bin kein Charlie"

If Charlie is a proper noun (a specific person) then "nicht" (I'm not Charlie), if you consider Charlie as a generic noun then "kein" (I'm not a Charlie)

The UK doesn't have "free speech" either...there are laws that prohibit hate speech...In Germany, Nazi Propaganda == Hate speech.

The remote control from HELL: Driverless cars slam on brakes for LASER POINTER

Re: "A.I. is hard."

presumably a googly-car could completely ignore that since it is only an optical illusion (no real object above the road's surface)

Re: Not in my lifetime... or yours, probably

Traffic lights: the car can 'see' the lights, it doesn't just detect other cars. If it sees red it stops. If the lights are off it uses the alternate signage, if available, otherwise it uses the rules for unmarked crossing - just as a human driver would. How can a car overtaking you from the right look like a car going around a roundabout (unless the car is drifting round the roundabout but even then...)? The autonomous car must detect the direction of travel of other cars so it will know that one is coming up from behind and the other one from the side (not to mention possibly knowing when it is on a roundabout and when on a highway - be it from stored maps, or from road detection mechanisms) - again, just like a human.

What is really difficult is purposeful mischief like fake signs, but those can confuse real drivers as well. Totally unmarked roads in heavy rain or snow are difficult to drive in for humans as well, but just as is it not insurmountable to humans it should not be for an autonomous car

Turn-by-turn directions coming to Ordnance Survey Maps

If you're off wild camping for a few days common sense requires a real printed map and a real compass.

Now India probes Google, threatens $1bn fine over 'biased' search

Re: Soooo.

too young to remember Microsoft pushing its own browser through the OS?

All pixels go: World's biggest sky-gazing camera gets final sign-off

Re: 3.2 gigapixel camera

and then they will patent it and sue the US Department of Energy for having similarly rounded lenses!

Oh no Wikiwon't: Russians plan own version of 'distorted' Wikiland

Re: Delusional or deluded?

Setting up their own version of WIkipedia is easy...they just have to copy wikipedia then modify the articles they want to.