Wonder if it's feasible to...

...power a gym by the users expended energy.

Well, at least the lights & music, I imagine heated showers would consume far too much energy.

And for bonus points you could make it a ridiculously up market gym catering to rich people who like to feel like they're doing something for the environment, to counter balance the ridiculously oversized vehicles they drive 500m down the road to the local school to pick up the kids.

Oh crap, already been done.

Seriously.

Why is it news that a product in a new market segment shows more growth than a product in an old crowded market segment.

Worrying...

... that they seem to be more concerned about having their website defaced than private data stolen from it.

The Cloud Formerly Known As Azure

You sir, owe me a new keyboard.

This would make a lot of crackpot astrologers right, I hope it doesn't go to their head.

So it's basically Sealand on a boat in a more useful location.

The fail is strong with this one.

So the question is: do VCs deliberately help the companies they invest in inflate their valuation so that they can be sold on for a profit?

Isn't that a bit like "Do bears shit in the woods?"

The bans there because PR firms don't seem to know the difference between factual and fanciful.

To Sum Up

Digital distribution platforms need to pay more attention to pleasing prospective customers and much less on making retailers and rights holders happy. What a piece of shit.

I'd never say nature is fragile, but I'm not happy with the opinion that humans can't twist nature to serve them without unintended consequences. It's a very complicated and poorly understood system, and changing it often results in unforeseen consequences which often have a direct, negative impact on man:

Salination of crop land in Egypt.

Salination of crop land in California.

Dust bowl in the US and Canada in the 30s.

Soil erosion in the amazon rain forest due to deforestation.

Soil erosion in southwest China due to human activities.

I'd agree that nature will balance itself out in the end, but lets not forget that humans are a part of nature and we might be subject to balancing out.

"Then, disaster, as annoying British people worked out ways to turn burning fuel into useful energy wholesale."

Whilst I've nothing against blaming the British for everything, I think you're giving them too much credit here.

If they moderate 3rd party content in any way (and they do) then they are liable. You either serve as a blank slate for all comers or become liable for your content, there is no way out of this.

If there's anything that's going to invoke national pride and piss off a lot of people it's something directed against the service men and women of the country on a personal level, who are getting paid pretty badly to do a fairly crappy job*. It's a pretty stupid thing for LuLSec or people claiming to carry on their work to do from a publicity point of view.

However labeling it "terrorism" is silly, I think childish and stupid is more appropriate.

Regards the security risk - I suspect this sort of website counts as 'low hanging fruit' in the cyber espionage game, and they either already have the data, are incompetent or most likely don't care.

And in other news...

...in 2012 Gartner will continue to produce studies that have less credibility than some of the more 'out there' articles on the register, and get paid more for it.

Common practice for severe security bugs to 'vanish' to a developer only section of the bug tracker, though not notifying the poster privately is stupid and far too common. Happened to me before.

Unlikely they just deleted the ticket, more likely to languish at the bottom of the bug queue for years if they didn't see it, so both versions of events are perfectly plausible.

Banning the account was over the top when he did something innocuous for a bug which could be used for many nefarious purposes, irrespective of EULA crap.

Flabberghasted.

By the same logic, because I refuse to use windows because it's a broken operating system, and LIbre Office does everything I need, everyone will switch to Linux and Windows and Office are both going to die.

Unfortunately not everyone chooses their operating system on the same criteria as me, nor Matt, and making that assumption, even in an opinion piece on the register is ridiculous.

"He said companies including Microsoft, Motorola Mobility and others had made a pact to make such patents available on fair and reasonable terms."

Isn't this known as price fixing and fairly illegal?

I wonder if these guys have somehow all moved into an alternate reality where Ubuntu Unity is anything other than unusable and people actually want to use Windows Phone.

Oh dear, someone made a specification whereby websites are trusted to communicate their privacy policy correctly to the user agent? What sort of idiots would come up with such an idea, it's no wonder it never got any traction.

http://www.w3.org/2002/p3p-ws/registrants.html

Were I a shareholder in Google I would be calling them idiots for not making use of this to enable 3rd party cookies in IE and Safari with default settings (every other browser allows them).

Probably also worth a mention - how to disable third party cookies in most browsers:

http://www.bobulous.org.uk/misc/third-party-cookies.html

Personally I think Microsoft are the fools in this for including half baked browser privacy protections and then blaming other people for bypassing them.

RIP Political Satire

Paris Hilton icon, since it'd probably fall foul of this law, where it to ever come to pass.

Single sign on.

I'm finding Google's single sign on, and ability to switch between accounts a time saving feature. I actually don't really care how much they know about me, since I block the vast majority of their ads anyway. However I'm not very happy that by extension the DHS knows all about me.

Storm in a teacup, not newsworthy.

Most people don't care what someone uses for source control as long as it works for them. The only really major bonus of git over subversion is working offline, git is significantly more difficult to use.

As far as ASF forcing people to use subversion, maybe it's their source revision control of choice, but I'm fairly sure they don't force all their projects to use it, couchdb being an example. Sure they'll always be resistance from people familiar with one technology to using a new one, but I don't think it's some organized top down policy.

Author not qualified.

Lewis, if you want anyone to listen to you you'll have to stop quoting the most conservative estimates of deaths, even the WHO quotes (an eventual) 4000 deaths from Chernobyl as a result of cancer related deaths.

It would also have helped if your articles about "Don't panic there hasn't been a meltdown, and even if there was the containment wouldn't fail" regards Fukushima had turned out to be correct at any of the running reactors.

This is the first thing for a long time I've heard about Nokia that hasn't made me think 'omg wtf are they doing'.

Maybe the positive reception for the N9 in the few places it has shipped has helped some people see the light.

It will take me more than a few Microsoft sponsored gartner studies to make me believe windows phone will ever be anything but a flop.