Two mistakes here

1) Getting caught

&

2) Using a pentester from his own IP address. Get off your arse and walk to a cafe with free wifi.

Scriptkiddie sounds about right.

Those damn universities...

Teaching their CompSci's about UNIX, BSD (I wonder how many won't get the joke?) and the use of GCC...

Looks like some of the comments were written without reading the article, MS doesn't have a problem recruiting good people (they pay well and they're a big name), their industry partners do. To be perfectly honest, I would want Universities to teach the fundamentals of programming - it seems every time I need to write something new I'm hitting the relevant O'Reilly, even in a language I'm familiar with but the fundamentals of solving a given problem with a relevant algorithm stay in memory. If I'd been taught solely how to program in Java or Python, I'd be royally fsked if asked to code for an embedded device in C or some obscure assembler where memory management is a spreadsheet listing all the shorts, ints and longs in the program.

Even better if you run it through Google Translate into Latin!

Could only be improved by...

...two robots sitting in the smoking ruins of the building trying to decide which one of them is "The Thing"

Best in a long time

SkyNZ must be showing repeats of Robot Wars...

Ah, Microsoft.

What next, inviting the Rolling Stones to the launch party to perform 'Start me up' (again) but letting Keith and Ronnie go to the bar first?

Or is Richard Stallman doing a keynote speech?

Freakonomics

There's a whole chapter in Freakonomics about the relationship between names and success in life. And it really only produces two results. If you get a shit start in life, you usually don't make it all that far. And peer pressure makes you name your children like the aforementioned list.

Fossil fuel, what fossil fuel?

I like the implication that building a power grid that relies on sources other than fossil fuels is an option. Simple scarcity of resource will crank gas, oil and coal prices through the roof. A KWh of Welsh/Scottish wind or a KWh of comrade Putin's most precious gas, which is cheaper in the long run?

Cocking

I live just up the road from Cocking in West Sussex. Handily Google informs me that the road is called the 'Cocking Causeway' as powerful a piece of alliteration as you could want. I'm not a million miles from Balls Cross either.

I for one...

welcome new government funding for our technology industry overlords. Shame the education system in this country gives me a headache when it comes to recruiting decent people to the kind of work the report suggests.

How poor (by US standards) do you have to be?

This is the land of the $5 all you can eat buffet, is it not?

ChromeOS is just OS X for netbooks

Totally incompatible with windows? Check.

Much more secure? Check.

Runs perfectly on manufacturer certified hardware? Check.

Comes bundled with basic productivity apps? Check.

Surprising amount of hardware support? Check.

Limited support for other OS apps? Check.

Forgetting the merits of the software, how it is marketed will be the real deal breaker.

Have multimedia capabilties, will deliver smut

Basically if a platform can serve video or pictures, somehow pr0n will get onto it. It's not so much getting the genie back in the bottle put persuading him/her not to insert it and use the camera...

@Trevor 3

Try A+E on a Friday/Saturday night in a big city in the UK. Epic fail for your 'respect for medics' theory.

Oh and that would be Fahrenheit that hits triple digits, some people dislike SI units.

If it gets released...

Anyone want to bet that the exploit is ridiculously simple? Buffer overflow in the card reader perhaps? I think that one has been done before to crash ATMs in the past.

OPA

Could it not be construed that by drawing attention to the work of fiction cited the Daily Star, IWF, CPS etc. are acting in the role of a publisher and therefore also liable for prosecution under the OPA? Although a civil prosecution of the CPS could be rather difficult.

I for one...

...salute our money grubbing BBC executive overlords for their ingenuity.

BTW Dr Who has been genuinely scary for a few years now. If you have rampant homophobia...

Androids

Piss poor marketing is the main problem. Whenever I explain my original EEE 701 I tell them it's like a PC in the same way a Mac is like a PC. An Android based laptop would have to be marketed like a Mac, with an instant snob factor coming from owning one. No point in saying it's a PC that won't run applications marked as PC compatible.

Whether anyone is brave enough to do so is another matter.

What, no honours for Martin Bennett and Stephen Hardman?

Of course you have to know Christchurch to understand why.

If Google made TV shows...

They'd make hard core SciFi shows and sell the advertising slots at a huge markup to consumer electronics companies. The advertising slots in the middle of America Lacks Perspective or whatever reality crap is flavour of the month are worthless in comparison, despite their huge ratings. People who watch that sort of thing can't even afford to go out of an evening!

Fox and other TV companies are comparatively terrible at selling advertising space, hence why ITV is going down the toilet faster than the excrement they commission.

Black helicopters because they know full well we lap that sort of TV show up.

@John Smith

"I'd hoped UK civil servants might have learned from the German experience. Obviously not."

They're talking about quantitative easing, which in Germany lead to Nazism and over here will probably lead to Thatcherism. In the mind of a Guardian reader these are one and the same of course!

@Pheet

1) Actually, it's the people who produce value who produce value for the company, their position on the ladder has nothing to do with it. HR, Accounts, PR etc don't produce value in of themselves and yet these are 'growth industries'. If salesman X can bring in several multi-million pound contracts, increasing profits by £10 million, then a salary of £1 million a year seems quite reasonable. More reasonable than paying salesman Y £500k for an increase of £4 million.

2) Our employment laws make it rather hard to reward the good whilst punishing the bad. Anyone who's ever employed more than one person for the same basic role will tell you that some people are worth at least £5.85/hour and some aren't worth the trouble of unbuttoning your flies if their teeth are on fire.

Tux because it's friday.

YouTube

If passive resistance worked in India, imagine what live updates to a streaming video website from a mobile phone being waved at a Police officer wielding a baton can do?

Cause some good laughs in offices across the world most likely.

Numbers Game

I still have my original Eee 701 4G around somewhere, sadly it sees nowhere near as much use as my N800. Aside from issues it has with certain websites (BBC, I'm looking at you) a version of the N800/N810 with twice the battery capacity and an 8.4" screen would be ideal. Funnily enough, that's Linux on ARM with proper industrial design and it basically 'just works'.

@John Loader

Erm, given that my experience is the exact opposite, I can only conclude that you moved from a shit area in the South to a nice area in the North and that I don't get out to the nice parts of the North nearly enough.

I for one salute our new Dr Who lead screenwriter

Let's face it, all the best episodes recently have been written by Steven Moffat and Coupling was bloody funny, but not the US version.

As for RTD, I think the only reason we've not seen Gay Daleks is because Victor Lewis-Smith would have sued.

The more you tighten your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers

It's highly unlikely that the NSA can break random gibberish, which means nested encryption will always get the better of them, you just have to keep layering it on until the paranoia goes away. Even worse, using TrueCrypt style multiple encrypted volumes in the same container and a 'weaker' password/algorithm on the soft data will foil key guessing and brute force attacks. The research from Cambridge which proved that humans can guess words just from the first and last letter just makes life even harder as it breaks the easier statistical analysis of 'plain text' to find the positive match.

The other issue is that in terrorism cases, the information only needs to remain hidden till it's too late to prevent an incident.

Bergerac

Last I heard he was helping Jersey Police with their enquiries into child abuse at his offices...

Sounds like a laxative

Ass purgers...

Though if I was the boss then the BOFH would probably make me 5h1t myself.

The delivery company known as 'Parcelfarce'

Spectacular own goal. Who on earth would write their web app to specifically exclude Linux users? What possible motivation could they have for doing something like that. And crucially, is it hosted on LAMP etc?

15 Minutes, you lucky...

A clean XP install might take 90 seconds, but a corporate XP install I've seen takes over 30 minutes to boot and I can't imagine Vista being any quicker.

Sits somewhere between

an Eee 701 and an U2E. It's neither cheap nor particularly 'luxury'.

110 Comments

So there have allegedly been 500 complaints about Clarkson and on one site there have been 110 comments on an article about a slightly misguided bandwagon jumper?

The conclusion we should draw is that if this person is allowed on TV to defend their views, THEN WE SHOULD ALL COMPLAIN TO OFCOM!

Quite clearly he's offending the entire population by implying that because 500 people are thick enough to complain about Jezza's limited sense of humour, we're all that thick.

Forklift Truck

Given that Wright was working as a fork-lift truck driver at the time of his arrest, though he does hold an HGV license (apparently) surely the media are actually libelling truck drivers by perpetuating the implication that truckers murder prostitutes, by linking Clarkson's remarks with the Ipswich murders, when unlike Sutcliffe, his holding a HGV license had nothing to do with the deaths.

Deniable Encryption

"Yes officer, you may look at my hard drive. Yes officer, here is 'the' encryption key."

And this quote springs to mind

"The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your grasp"

Paris, as well, err, IT angle?

Faecal fan interface

You can see from MS' perspective that making netbooks back into 'real' PCs again is a good thing. From a manufacturers perspective it is a disaster waiting to happen. After a few weeks of constant XP updates and an ever swelling registry, your once nimble XP netbook is nothing more than an old, underpowered, slow loading craptop. One which isn't easily upgraded. Cue customer backlash and a sharp fall in sales. If PCs are appliances, then PCs have to behave like a cooker/fridge/TV, not like some 1970s eastern european car.

If MS can produce a piece of software that maintains the performance of an underpowered PC until it dies, then there is hope for MS yet.

What exactly consitutes a TV?

Back in the good old days, a TV was an analogue tuner and a CRT. Picking either/both of them up from a few yards (we are talking pre-metric) away whilst not exactly trivial, was possible. A TV composed of a LCD and a UHF ADC is a lot harder. Proving that the two components are in fact a working TV is harder still, whereas formerly any CRT in a domestic situation was almost certainly a TV tube.

Shooting tricks

Most precision shooting relies on controlled breathing, which is always the first thing to go when someone is shooting at you!

I also think for a police officer in a tense situation, being tazered is very low on their list of worries. IIRC a frankly ridiculous number of American police officers are shot with their personal weapon (either through negligence or dropped during confusion), so perhaps an effective safety and a wrist lanyard would sell better than a tin-foil vest?

DRM

Jobs is probably referring to the infamous AACS strictures that Vista operates under. Presumably forcing this kind of crap into the Unix derived OS X is not trivial.

Things like SACD/DVD-A, BR and HD-DVD are for discerning people who care. We're a minority and yes, we can easily tell the difference.

Far better

The wiki-cognoscenti (if such a thing were possible) edit articles on practices that might be termed NSFW by hyper-linking to articles where the suggested combination would be amusing. The one on 'gigolos' pointing to the evangelical preacher under 'See Also' for instance...

Or creating empty categories or articles such as 'List of French Military Victories'.

There's also the circular logic reference. Make an unsubstantiated claim. Reference a blog/feed etc that you can edit to point back at the article on Wikipedia. Job done.

Paris, because according to a blog I'm about to reference she is a world expert on the written language of Easter Island.

If WPA-Enterprise actually worked

More companies might use it. As it stands, for the majority of corporations doesn't PSK + a VPN work a whole lot better.

Operations per watt

The rather trite IBM commercial aside, if you drive up the cost per watt of computing power, eventually people will want to make energy savings. That's where Linux ought to win the next chunk of market share. Somehow I doubt Macrosoft can compete, unless they bring out versions of Server 2010 (or whatever) specifically designed to run whatever server app the box is hosting.

Inaccuracies aside...

It does dovetail quite nicely with an interested outsiders view that people with a firm grasp of economics have no place working in the financial sector.

Shiver me pension funds...

Aren't we...

,,,mostly the type of people for whom spelling and indeed all forms of 'logical' consistent behaviour are very important.

'Press any key' means something quite different to 'press ANY key' to most IT workers but not to your average person.

For those not in the know, one is an instruction to press any key you like, the other is an instruction to press a specific named key.