Posts by JassMan
94 posts • joined Wednesday 26th March 2008 18:23 GMT
Re: It is scary week all right
but not as scary as meeting a box jellyfish which although smaller can pack as much punch as a shark armed with a laser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chironex_fleckeri
Will nobody think of the programmers
While most sane people agree that monopolies are a bad thing, fragmentation by forking cannot be good for the market. Testing apps for a smartphones/tablets will be so involved that developers will be forced out of the market or end up prducing software that only mostly works some of the time.
@Stuart Moore
If they mean what they say, they must be unique on the internet. ... Or their definition of spam is the original and they are saying no one has ever sent them a tin of processed meat - which could well be true.
Tempting fate a bit
naming your OS after the famous BSOD of previous versions. If as claimed, the new version is more stable than previous, the last thing you want to do is remind your customers of its pedigree.
Also waiting for a lawsuit from IBM who have surely trademarked the word blue in relation to computing.
I can't imagine it will do much for aerodynamics
Putting a giant fishnet on the outside of your super sleek stealth bomber may make it radar invisible but would absolutely ruin your coefficient of drag.
Still I don't suppose it will dissolve in the rain like that magic radar absorbing paint.
@Larry F54
IMHO radiation generated random numbers are only suitable for a small batch produced in a relatively short time. OK many isotopes have an extremely long half life but they all have a half life. By definition this means that the output of the generator is "coloured" and therefore not truely random.
Someone else who's missed the point about privacy and GG
"The people who talk about privacy issues are being silly," Howell said. "When you're walking down a public street, you have no expectation of privacy there."
Someone who knows Mr.Howell should point out that the privacy problem is not what Google know about the wearer's movements and viewing habits but the what Google know about all the people in view of the camera when the wearer is not in a public place. I bet he thinks that being in a bar is also a public place.
Just need a squad of Ho' dolphins
to give the battle dolphins their nookie BEFORE sending them out on their missions.
Posted in France demands Skype register as telco
The french may have some strange ideas at times
but you have to admit that with the convergence of telecoms and IP, taxing Skype the same as all other telecom operators makes a lot of sense. In my holiday home in France I have a FreeBox and the telephone is a VOIP service provided by the box. Sort of like Skype without the out of sync pictures. The best bit is that "free" calls to mobiles are bundled in with the adsl line.
I would say FFS, Visa are a financial institution so what do Genesco expect them to do, except rip them off for any excuse.
BUT... any fines imposed should be in direct relation to potentional loss.
13M sounds like one hell of a fine for a security breach with no proven victims. A couple of K per day may be reasonable for a large customer base with full reparation for all proven cases of identity theft plus actual costs for contacting customers who may or may not have be subject to fraud.
Why no mention of the DeathStar project
Surprised that the article didn't mention the DeathStar why has had 300K pledged even though they state that the entire project is totally frivolous.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/461687407/kickstarter-open-source-death-star
@Curly4
Amazing as it may seem, there are still places in the world where your neighbours will put the $100 greenback back through your letterbox to stop it going soggy in the rain. The question for the philosophers and psychiatrists is what makes city dwellers think they have a right to steal things which aren't locked down?
The real question is...
how much the politicians involved "earned" for their their services to the choclate factory.
The big Gs motto should not be "do no evil" but "make sure you aren't seen to pay too much when you are caught".
On the other hand, I am sure they are no more evil than another other global corporation who find it cheaper to buy the law makers than to have a conscience.
@ MGale Re: Billy Bob Gates and Microsoft
You are obviously forgetting the recent heavy fine for "accidenally" failing to comply with an EU court order.
What they really need is software that will tell them who is likely to smash them in the face for wearing GGs.
I can see some interesting lawsuits coming up when people in a bar for instance request the wearer to remove their GGs, only for the wearer to refuse on the grounds that the bar doesn't have a warning sign, as in http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/09/seattle_bar_bans_google_glass/.
IMHO there doesn't need to be a sign, the fact that it is not in the street is sufficient for anyone to expect a right of privacy.
Re: Tousers of time
I belive the problem is that modern jeans have a fly (buttons or zips) which is much shorter than when I was a lad. Or maybe bits just hang lower as you get older. Either way the problem is getting the todger over the top of the lowest part of the opening requires dropping the trowsers a bit. Given the fad of so many youth wearing their jeans pre-lowered, I supect the problem is of the first mentioned rather than second.
Personally I have resolved the problem by wearing braces which allows me to drop the keks slightly without fear of them dropping to the floor.
The real problem is,
that it takes both parties to settle amicably out of court. The moment one party takes the line that they are not going to pay for a SEP because other manufacturers get it for "free" when they cross-licence is what brings the system to its knees. I am thinking here of a fruity company who have decided that the R of R&D is optional and spend all their money on lawyers instead.
Posted in Dotcom plans Mega IPO as case grinds on
Re: Copyright my arse
Except that if any of the "secret" evidence becomes public it will show that it came from FBI, CIA and other agencies who should only be involved in crimes against the state. The reality is that the US state is owned by the global corporations and the the people who live there.
Posted in Dotcom plans Mega IPO as case grinds on
@ Rippy Re: Welcome to the new order
I think many would that UK and other countries with common law were reasonably "just" and had little corruption, with a reasonably good record on human rights. Sadly this is no longer the case.
Posted in Dotcom plans Mega IPO as case grinds on
Welcome to the new order
The same is happening all over the deevelopped world. <sarcasm>Obviously if you have done nothing wrong you have no need to fear that you will be falsely imprisoned on evidence that you can't contest. </sarcasm>
We in the west no longer have the moral high ground in terms of human rights.
Another excuse to give themselves a bonus
By not giving customers access to their own money, they get to make more money on the interst. The only only surprising thing is that they haven't embezzled all the funds, bought themselves some third world country and buggered off to live there. Especially now the EC is limiting their bonuses to a paltry 2 times their salary. FFS how come any of them can justify a bonus for anything in the last 15 years.
Life skills
Having been caught at his original game, he will now undoubtedly be offered a course in accountancy with specialisation in money laundering.
Bring back the good old days, when you were taught how to sew a mailbag - a much more useful skill for staying away from crime.
A rose by any other name.
"Apple is refusing to hand over certain documents which might prove this one way or the other, because that would amount to an attempt to discover harm rather than an actual investigation of harm caused."
And their grandmothers never sucked eggs when using negative pressure to remove the contents of ovoids.
Have a read of http://creativegood.com/blog/the-google-glass-feature-no-one-is-talking-about/ and you'll be even less convinced of their benefits. Not just for yourself but all your friends.
Re: Two identical computers??
Yeah. And next time they could save a load of dosh by making the second one a RasPi.
Obviously full hardening would make the Pi more expensive than the original, but, add a depleted boron shield and Bob's your uncle.
With 256MB RAM, there is no way they were running Windows so no trolling from Eadon on this one.
@stragen001 - Re: contingency plans
I think if you read the text, its NASA and the ISS who have contingency plans for every situation. Admittedly SpaceX did get things running again but they may or may not have had a plan in place beforehand.
I can just imagine the fuss...
when someone waves their arm in a moment of excitement and immediately slashes their wrist on the broken fragments.
@ Jan 0 - Re: Stopping crap
Its needs to be much more subtle.
Perhaps comments by known trolls should fade out like the bottom of long comments once they have been up longer than 10 minutes. If they get an up vote in that time, the comment stays up. Even Eadon occasionaly makes a valid comment. Although, I am struggling to remember when the last one was.
Re: That must smart...
Most likely they have tried as much as possible to make it different enough that their patent claims don't get thrown out for prior art. Not everyone has Apple's startegy of wiating for prior art then lodging a patent anyway.
Mine's the one without an iPhone in the pocket.
So much for all those pundits who thought Koh was on Apple's side at the beginning of the trial. Its starting to look like she is one of the most independent judges in the good ole US of A.
'nuff said.
Call me squeamish but I can't say I am looking forward to the day when a bunch of self aware linked primate brains decides that it has more intellect than the humans who put it together and that it should be the ruler of the entire planet. Especially if it takes offence at the way it has been treated.
I hope someone is ensuring there are failsafes in place here.
Re: If we are to be fussy about acronyms....
As a pendant (since there are lots about today), I would like to point out that all real acronyms are intended to be pronounced. It is only the merkins that seem to think that all abbreviations are called acronyms.
Regardless of the ethics of Dotcom himself, the whole thing is starting to look like a case of US imperialism. If you aren't a US entity, you aren't allowed to setup a service which remotely resembles cloud.
copyright...
is a pretty good example of prior art. All they need to do is present a copy of Python for Unix/C Programmers Copyright 1993 Guido van Rossum as referenced at:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.38.2023
Posted in Microsoft brings Azure back online
Roll on Feb 2014. Obviously they will be going for 16 hours next time.
A good place to start
would be to ensure that prior art and non-obvious mean exactly what it says on the tin. Far too often corporations are allowed patents on devices etc that have been brought to public attention in scifi novels & films. i.e. the "art" is prior and everything is obvious in hindsight. In fact, many cases of trolling stem from the trolls patenting a device which already exists, but where the original inventor thought the device was too obvious.
Patents involving computing devices should also be limited to 7years. If you can't make a profit from a monopoly in the computing world before everything moves on, you should never have been granted the patent in the first place. To offset the short life, you should be allowed a longer time (say 30 months) before commercialisation to reflect the lead time and complexity involved.
Not that careful with the dates
If it is 26000 LY away, and the event "appears" to have happened 1000 years ago, then surely the actual event was 24087 BC. If it happend in 1013 as stated in the artical (unless someone edits it), we are not going to get the picture shown for another 25K years.
Prior art
Maybe the merkins have to propose a high tech answer to a simple problem so they can patent it. Obviously any attempt to patent a mirror solution would fail with prior art, because Archimedes aleady did the same thing in 214–212 BC at Syracuse ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Heat_ray )
Never use a simple solution when an expensive high tech one will do.
Surely mirrors are cheaper than solar cells. If you can get enough solar panels into orbit to drive a powerfull enough laser to fullfil the requirement, surely a buch of mirrrors with independent targeting would be cheaper and more effective. OK, so coherent light is more effective at delivering a lot of punch at a concentrated point, but I remain to be convinced that after all the conversion losses that it can be more effecting than using the sunlight directly.
A quick look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_furnace shows what can be achieved with a relatively small array whith the much diminished light that arrives at the earths surface. A visit to the smaller prototype (now a museum) at Mont-Louis-Font-Romeu has demonstrations of rocks, bricks and steel bursting into flames after several seconds in concentrated sunlight.
Calling it a drop BEAR is a clue
Stating that the Drop bear is closely related to a Koala makes it obvious that the psudoscientific articles are a blag. Koalas are more closely related to wombats and kangaroos than they are to any bear.
Posted in Squillions of bytes in one cup of DNA
Has nobody thoughtof the children?
Using DNA sounds like an incredibly dangerous thing to do. It only needs a gene splicing virus from some GMO experiment to accidently insert a DNA stored copy of Wikipedia into a cell and next thing it will become self aware and takeover the world.
Frivolity aside, couldn't they have used some other protein sequence to achieve the same effect? Using GNA, PNA would have less chance of accidentally becoming entangled with DNA. TNA may also be useful but the ability to create hybrid DNA-TNA may come with its own problems.
A different batmobile fo me
Surely the batmobile to buy is the Tumbler from Dark Knight. Not very pedestrian friendly though.
Re: Rick Champagne (@TeeCee)
The restriction is only for wine makers. There are several areas in France called Champagne, for example in the Cher, Eure-et-Loir. Ardeche and another in Charente. In fact many Cognacs and Eau-de-Vie from the Charente are entitled to add "Fine-Champagne", "Grande-Champagne" or "Petite-Champagne" to their labels on the grounds that no one could confuse them with bubbly. There is also an village in Switzerland called Champagne where the french winemakers took them to court over Champange biscuits - and lost.
Fine the companies who pay the spammers
If governments around the world set up registers for people to send their spam/email texts to, then fine the sponsoring company a tenner for each text collected, those companies would soon run out of money to pay to the spammers. Spammers only set up botnets on any platform because companies are unethical enough to pay for what they regard as just another advertising channel.
They don't need experts to tell them
that its not a good idea putting pesticides on GMOs which already have pesticides spliced into them, as was recently reported in the papers on this side of the manche. Eat too much of that and the man milk is bound to turn a bit sour.
Obviously didn't read the disclamer in the small print
Remember! The value of your shares can go down as well as up.
Re: “looking at pixels in the air without a screen” - will be the “next big thing”
WRONG - the fact that you have suggested a patent for hand gestures in thin air, means there is prior art. As we all know, the fruity firm are the masters of patenting someone else's ideas. MS just wait for others to invent, then buy the company.
Simple solution
...set the "Calling Features" of every MP's phone to forward to the CTO for BT (http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayTopic.do?topicId=28921).
Not only will the MPs be pissed that BT allow this to happen (probably have a public enquiry) BT will certainly realise that the problem is slightly more serious than they think. Indeed there appears to be no bar to stop me changing any customers services while sittting here at my laptop in the south of France.
Tax problem fixed
If you are a multinational claiming that you don't make a profit in UK and therefore don't need to pay tax, you get to choose:
* paying a rate based on your UK turnover as a fraction of GDP and average tax paid by the rest of the country.
If you can't provide UK turnover, HMRC uses European turnover but still a a fraction of UK GDP - you decide pretty quickly to get some figures for UK turnover.
or
* paying tax based on your global profits but scaled by UK turnover vs global turnover. If you can't provide figures for UK turnover, European turnover again applies.
Then you either:
* go bust because it was true and you could only trade because of the massive subsidy obtained by not paying taxes,
or
* you change your business model so that you are no longer paying excessive royalties to yourself, excessive international management fess, excessive profits on external transactions etc.
This doesn't need international agreement as the politicians keep claiming but I wouldn't mind betting that other countries would follow suit pretty quickly.
