Posts by TeeCee 9436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
no pan-Europe licensing or the Americans will take over
U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A!
'Cos somebody needs to open that can of worms and tip out the contents and if this bunch of pillocks won't......
Proof, as if it were required, that the EU regards the original Treaty of Rome as something of an inconvenience these days: 'Free movement of goods and services' remember?
Except of course that there used to be a "Where's the IT angle" icon.
The Paris icon was introduced for Paris related stuff and of course the "Jesus, even bloody Paris would get that" option, now a path less well trodden due to the slaphead icon.
Not to mention it's also handy just about anything internet / sex / leak related.....
there would be no continuous monitoring under this system
Yes of course. Some sort of additional statutory rubber stamp will be required to implement that later.
As for disabling / pulling bats / whatever, watch for that being a test failure as soon as possible. Or "yet another complicated bit of mandatory and expensive cruft[1] to fail and ensure that the car fails to exceed its planned 7 year life by too much" as we like to call such.
[1] Incidently, the German car manufacturers just love expensive mandatory cruft. It ensures that small cars are significantly more expensive than they should be, while big ones are only slightly more expensive (%age of cost), This levels the playing field for large and profitable Krautwagen. Guess who dictates EU auto policy.....?
<Ker-thwack!> (nail on head sound).
Good old-fashioned Gaullist dogma. Send a "screw you" message to the Americans, whatever the cost to you.
Terribly nice of us all to pay for this monumental bureaucratic white elephant while already having our pips squeezed due to massive fiscal incompetence by the EU.
The rest of the article would seem to suggest that what it's actually reached is an orbit that sort of does well enough in a pinch but is nowhere near what was wanted.
The Galileo project is to rocket science[1] what the Keystone Kops are to law enforcement.
[1] Bugger all science value, bugger all commercial drive and now they can't get the things in the right place. Still the chair warming coterie of gravy train riders in Brussels feel more important, so it meets its core goal.
partly because many drivers now navigate using smart phones
I hear that some people like to burn their own nipples with lit cigarettes as well, presumably there's a correlation somewhere in there.
I reckon the "car comes with it built in" reason is the real one, as even the crappiest built in beats peering at a phone screen on a wobbly generic mount, only to find that your 3G connection has died for the 50th time in the last ten minutes and the turning three back was the one you wanted.
Ah. You must have missed it a few years ago when Her Majesty's Government shipped a load of redacted docs as PDFs.
Copy 'n paste as text sans formatting into your Word Processor of choice and presto, instant de-redaction. None of yer fancy fannying around with contrast 'n such required there. The example in this article is, by comparison to the efforts of our Civil Servants, the work of intellectual colossi.
Paris, someone else who knows all about secrets getting out over teh intatoobs.
Renault + Loads of complicated and expensive electrical gizmos = Disaster looking for a place to happen. Not the sort of thing you'd want to go near once the warranty has expired.
Even today on the generic auto forums you'll find that about one post in four is along the lines of "electrical fault in ${French_car}".
Since the EU forced the move from pump timing to electronic injection, even the diesels aren't the reliable workhorses they used to be. Kiss of death was making electrical cruft like airbags, motorised seats and electronic stability control an MOT failure.
It is sort of their job, after all.....
If they really have managed to nab the things without anyone noticing[1], that's a bloody good day's work in that business.
If you don't like the idea of being spied on, probably best not to have a shedload of spies on the public payroll[2]. As for the "Aha, but they broke the rules" complaint, breaking rules is also an important part of the job, so don't act all surprised when you find that some of the ones they broke weren't the ones you wanted them to.
[1] Also in the job description.
[2] Also, now it's open knowledge that this can be and has been done, anyone thinking that only the US and UK have this information should probably have their bumps felt.
Not just government, happens everywhere.
If you let individual units build web bits for themselves, you end up with a lot of cheapish, simple, yet highly functional pages[1] that are tailored to individual requirements. Trouble is they don't match and integrate seamlessly, which the web guru and PR types really hate.
If you put all your web shit under one unit you end up with something that has consistant look 'n feel, navigation and such throughout, is very pretty to look at, but costs a bomb and is utterly f***ing useless.
The government does seem to have wasted more cash doing the latter than most do though.
[1] In all the documents used in the second strategy, these are now called "portals".
Ever seen a test of eyewitness identification? (Fake crime, take statements from unsuspecting witnesses, use those who reckon they got a good look for lineup / mugshot ID).
Makes automated facial recognition look ruddy infallible by comparison. If you really must have a fucked up method of identifying people, the one that's not admissible as evidence strikes me as preferable.
As you might have guessed I do not like the new "Mini"
Hear hear!
For a start it's not a Mini. It's a fairly ordinary small/medium car that happens to be vaguely Mini shaped[1]. If you want to have a look at what Alex Issigonis would have probably built as a replacement, have a look at a Daithatsu Cuore VII. It's like a roadgoing TARDIS for use of space.
Also, if you look at what Daihatsu did to that later to make the Trevis (Europe only, not UK) you'll see that they were perfectly well aware of what they were doing.
[1] Apart from most of the sinfully fugly niche models developed from it, which have even given that up.
Rather amusingly, the one set of taxes that are pretty much designed for the rich to avoid are the cuddly climate ones. It's the rich who can afford that new hybrid or electric vehicle (or both for that matter), it's the rich who can afford to cover their mansions with solar panels to the extent that the rest of us pay for their power use, etc ad nauseum.
You have to suspect that it's the usual suspects behind all this crap and it's the eco-Nazis dancing to their tune rather than the sceptics.
claimed it was testing out an alleged zero-day vulnerability in the Tor service
So it's all a cunning plan then:
1) Run a load of DDOS scripts to screw over a couple of high-profile services.
2) Wait until tabloid press / TV screams about "hackers".
3) Talk cryptic bollocks about scary vulns wot only you know about.
Presto, script kiddy to l33t hax0r in three simple steps. It's what every sad little wanker wants for Christmas.
No, no, no. That way you'd end up with a bronze Assange(tm) mould.
The correct way is to immerse Assange(tm) head down in a big vat of plaster and wait for it to set. Then, after a few weeks, bake the whole arrangement at high temperature to burn out the putrefying remains and then pour in molten bronze. Finally, break the plaster off.
a directive gives choice of how to implement.
Correct, so the way to go is with what much of the continent is doing.
Advertise the things and get your power companies to badger their customers about having one installed. Eventually 2020 will come round and there'll still be nigh-on bugger all of the things out there. At that point two things can happen.
The most likely outcome is that by 2020 the goalposts will have moved and nobody at the EU will give a shit anyway. Result!
The second possibility is that the target remains in place. At this point you turn round, detail the actions taken and point out it's not your fault if nobody wanted one. The EU then backs down rather than instruct the country concerned to override the wishes of its people, as this damages the fig-leaf of democracy that serves to disguise the Stalinist oligarchy of the EU.
Surely to be an actual Nerd Carriage, in order to be able to get a ticket you should need to do at least four of:
1) Write a quick "Hello World" in at least three languages, at least one of which should be generally regarded as "niche" and/or obscure.
2) Name at least three characters from Escaflowne.
3) Deliver a plot synopsis of Star Wars in under 2 minutes (not by leaving stuff out, just by talking very quickly).
4) Explain the difference between "dwarfs" and "dwarves".
5) Present your smartphone with NFC capability and refuse to pay with it on security grounds.
6) Name every Marvel film considered canon in reverse order of release date.
etc.
Real horror story in that vein is the WW1 Morane "Parasol".
Rotary engine for maximum torque effect, coupled with barely adequate aileron area. The net effect was that if the pilot didn't have full left stick on as soon as the tail wheel left the floor, the right wing would bury itself in the turf, flipping the aircraft and usually killing the crew.
With full left stick, the right wing would only dip alarmingly and then return to level veeerrrryyyyy gradually......!
Once we have AI control, the AIs concerned will decide: "It doesn't matter what we do, we'll be sued to next Christmas one way or the other" and both drive off the cliff together.
What we need to do is address the root cause of the problem. This will be a most satisfying solution as it basically involves shooting lawyers.....
You mean that people in the UK are more interested in UK football then those in other countries and are thus prepared to pay more for it and that this, in turn, leads to domestic broadcasters being prepared to bid higher for the rights than their continental counterparts?
Who could possibly have seen that coming?
Presumably the next revelation will be that the rights to Serie A sell for more in Italy than they do here.
I'm guessing that nobody on there was related to, screwing or employed as gardener / decorator / dentist by a European Commissioner. Thus they didn't have a Scooby who to vote for.
Hmm. If we had a "hotbed of nepotism and graft" icon, what would it look like?
Not registered? Well, then you cant apply for a refund anyway.
Aaaannnnnndddd there it is.
Somewhere in this lot there had to be a trick to force you to register your details, so the evil fuckers can flog all that juicy data off to the marketing vultures[1].
[1] No offence.
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