And a solution to the traffic problem

There was some other politician that forced all the unemployed to build lots of those newly invented fast express roads. He thought it was a good way to regenerate a f***ed country with a worthless currency.

Shouty little guy with a mustache.

Wonder whatever happened to him ?

Once they have the shovels

I know where there is a couple of hundred years supply of coal - just waiting to be dug out of the ground.

We can put the unemployed onto digging it and save our dependency on Russia for energy - another example of tory forward thinking !

Pretend Japanese

Didn't dixons get nicked years ago for saisho - for conning people that the stuff was Japanese not British ?

There was a big fuss in the papers at the time, claims we were going to rename Sheffield to Japan to put made in Japan on stuff

Passive 3D

In 3D mode if you aren't wearing glasses the image is displaced on odd and even rows to the left or right. A true 3D image, most of the background would look perfectly normal with the foreground objects smeared - in Holywood 3D everything is given a huge offset to make it look more 3D.

There is a resolution loss in the vertical with passive 3D, but it isn't necessarily noticable - the raw Bayer image from the camera only has 1/2 the horizontal and vertical resolution in the red and blue but you don't care about that.

The nice thing about passive, apart from not having to wear heavy glasses that you paid $200 for is that they use circular polarisers and so are a lot less sensitive to the angle of your head.

We use JVC passive TVs to do 3D editing on, they are pro-range so cost the best part of $10k, would be nice to have something a bit more affordable

@yawn

Cos somebody could copy your number plate if they have a car the same make and model - eg to get around the congestion charge. Of course they could also just make one up or copy one from the local tesco carpark.

What really happens is that there was a meeting where some HR minion hadn't said much and so desperate to sound important came up with the idea; "shouldn't we disguise number plates, for security reasons". Everybody else wanted to go home so said - yeah, fine, whatever.

And somehow this became corporate policy - then big corp company thought, if they are doing it then we had better do it at aswell, then everybody else decided that if big corp are doing it then we must. Then it became that the industry standard was to blur number plates you would be negligent for not doing.

Schengen vs laughed at

One of the reasons for the Schengen agreement was that it was slightly bloody ridiculous to have a concrete checkpoint on the autobahn staffed with lots of customs officials and a stripey pole - if you also had 600miles of unmarked border with the country next door.

Although the USA does spend $Bns patrolling it's border with the dreaded threat to the north - so far they arrested a Canadian going for pizza and a couple of kids getting their ball back.

Copyright is not the same as patent

There is no prior-art for copyright, it becomes yours when you register it - or even just through use. It's also surprisingly easy to lose.

Do you think McDonalds was the first store to be owned by anyone of that name? Finding a previous restaurant owned by a Mr McDonald does not change their copyright claim.

You can also get copyright purely by somebody associating something with your product - a sound, smell or (in europe) the way something moves. If people think appstore=apple in the same way that they think PC=windows then it's valid.

@Not only GLBT

>Anyone in the USA that can speak Arabic has already been locked up as a "terrorist

Not so far from the truth - back in the day MI5 screened BBC recruits for security risks.

One of the factors for potential enemies of the state was studying an enemy language (or given that this is England - possibly any foreign language). It all came out when they listed an historian as having possible links to communism because they had a PhD in medieval Chinese.

And ....

The new contract will go to IBM, CapGemini, whoever is next in line.

It will have exactly the same loose changing spec, lack of management and accountability. Every new toy, passing fad and political initiative will be added on to it , or it's budget.

It will be be budgeted to cost more, since it has to handle all the crap from the last contract - but will strangely overrun while still not doing what the current broken system does.

And the actual work will be done by exactly the same outsourced programmers as did this lot.

@A Pod Of

Trouble is the same pod on a merchant ship parked in Long Beach or New Jersey would also pretty much end civil aviation in the USA

Must remember put a check box on the website that they aren't to be sold to naughty people.

You would think that page one on the DARPA procurement powerpoint would be something like "could this weapon be best used by an untrained hidden enemy against very expensive modern armies?" if so don't make it.

Heatseeker vs low thermal emissivity target

Unlike the cartoons, uncooled thermal heatseekers don't wait behind doors for somebody to walk past - they can pretty much only target something significantly hotter than the background, and even then it has to be black (at least in the IR)

An expensive cooled thermal imaging camera can pick out a person in a desert at night under good conditions. But this is going to have real problems if your enemy is walking around in a body temperature desert during the day and insists on using donkeys instead of Humvees.

@let me guess

So in future if you throw away anything - you have to write "not a bomb" on it

Non-microsoft software

Balmer wanted people to be able to make Skype calls on winmobile7.

Nobody has been brave enough to explain to him that you can run non-MS software on Windows, so he assumed they had to buy the company

Ok ... but...

If this is vital information to catch terrorists then it's treated like any other military secret.

Anyone selling this to marketing companies, sending it to be processed in some cheap 3rd world country or leaving it on a usb key on a bus is treat like they are a terrorist - no trial, no evidence, no lawyer, just straight to some third world prison for the old electrodes on the testicles.

@GPL

There is no requirement to offer a free download, they only have to point you at the source code for each of the GPL apps they include.

Combining them together is not in the GPL

@Interesting stat

$8Bn divided by 7.5M PAYING users is $1000/head - and most of those users are using skype for the odd cheap call home from abroad

Need some re-education

Had a meeting with a bunch of senior MSFT people last week and the first hour was about how crap Skype was compared to MS-live and how everybody in MSFT used MS-live all the time because Skype was so crap.

Do they just get a service pack download to their brains or do they all have to be strapped into chairs with their eyes held open and shown pictures of kittens while people chant "skype is good" at them

Do you have a description of the bees

Or at least their serial numbers? That's the advantage of bees - they come with built in bar codes

Worse if Google had bought Skype

It would be available for free everywhere - but only in the USA

It would listen in on your conversations and play 'appropriate' ads in the background (although for some reason they would all be about Russian brides)

Then after a couple of years they would abandon it because it wasn't cool anymore

At least with MS you know exactly how they will screw it up.

@Seriously though

Python - easy to get started, no complex IDE needed. SImple programs are very simple - there is no boiler plate header stuff. Has built in very good help on all the commands.

You can use it for procedural, object orientated and function (sort of) programming.

And you can write real world apps with it.

And there are lots of free, learn programming with python books

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers

Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2

@How dare they

On the contrary - the US bases on the North York moors are a necessary and proportionate response to the problem of American tourist being attacked by werewolves in the area.

Holywood Version

In the new Holywood version, the American demand a backdoor into Enigma, the Germans issue a DMCA take down notice against Bletchley claiming that it has copyright on the Enigma messages and Turing is arrested on made up charges of having sex with Swedish women

I should think so

If they want an base of their own on the other side of the world they should send a gunboat, kick the natives out and build it themselves - like civilised people.

@Tin cans and string

Because most businesses don't use it to call customers - they use it to talk to other bits of the business.

Your programmers in London wanting to talk to your programmers in Seattle - could request a PO to buy a video conference system and then book the room and the call in advance and get a budget to bill it to. Or they could just have regular SKYPE meetings without even bothering to tell you.

We mostly use it for checking if someone else is in the office before calling them - but we have a global VOIP system that is also free and has worse call quality than skype.

@Weddings and AK47

So expect a few cruise missiles inbound to Risley in 2012 ?

Great toy but

Can't exactly see the educational point of this

If the idea is one computer/kid to learn programming - they are still going to need monitors/storage etc. Not sure this saves much on just using simple old PCs with linux.

If the idea is how do computers work, then something like Arduino/Stamp and reading key presses, making LEDs flash seems better.

@A bit confused

Remember armies are always prepared to fight the previous war.

America had seen Zeppelins bombing London in WWI and didn't want the same thing happening again - the invention of the fighter aeroplane having apparently escaped them.

For the same reason the British are blocking the export of longbows to France - just in case

Balance

Security, usability, cheap - pick one. The problem is you have to balance security against usability.

I've worked in places where computers were only allowed inside locked metal rooms - you opened the door to the room and all the monitors turned off. Great for security but not much good if the ambulance driver needs your address.

Most of these cases were people taking data home to work on, or forwarding emails to external addresses, Not best practice - but would you rather wait another month for your results because the consultant had to visit some data bunker to see your x-rays?

There is going to be a lot of bandwagon jumping about security - which will involve a few minions being fired for taking work home - while the entire confidential data will still be transferred on-mass to the US company's data processing center in India anyway.

And you will have to wait for an extra 12 hours in casualty because they don't have access to your records.

Really?

Damn and after those Natalie Portman nude pictures in the .exe turned out to be a scam as well - what are the odss?

Pot Kettle 0x000000

And Apple is currently suing Samsung for copying their technical breakthrough of rounded corners and a screen on the front?

@Police admins

The admins at the police dept probably had nothing to do with this. The systems were bought by some official and installed in the cars - probably by the vehicle maintenance dept.

Think about how much computer kit there is in your building that the sysadmins aren't in charge of. Do you security audit the phone system, CCTV, fire alarm, photocopiers, HVAC?

What about your CEO's cell phone, or the hands free kit in his company car?

Explanation

Can somebody explain to me how we are better off without Thalidomide - some goody-goody reporters try and make a name for themselves by reporting a few problems with a drug and we suddenly have to run around finding a replacement.

I mean does everybody really need arms anyway?

Ironically the medical are fighting to allow Thalidomide to be used again - it's a very useful drug.

Doctors have now discovered a large part of the population who are unlikely to suffer any pregnancy related side effects..

@Chemical film

It's a lot harder to fake the original negative, especially if you have the entire film - it's easy to detect layers of copies from the grain and you can do microscopic analysis of lens aberrations to see that an image was re-shot on a different lens.

@Independent watermarking.

But how do you prove that you didn't manipulate the image between downloading it from the camera and watermarking it?

Desktop is surprisingly good

Have been running it on a netbook for a week - it's excellent for small screens.

Annoying as hell for a workstation - but if you are using a big hairy Linux workstation with big screens you are using KDE anyway ;-)

@Is all so backwards in many respects

Yes the police are unlikely to get a speeding conviction on the basis of this.

Of course they might add a little note to your file about you being in London on the same day as protest, or your car regularly going slowly around King's Cross late at night - just in case they ever want to 'have a word with you'

And when Tom Tom sell it to your insurance company your rates might go up a bit.

not much cash for so many CPUs

That's their advantage - why would Samsung bother to develop their own 32bit CPU when they can buy an Arm licence for a few cents?

ARM have the advantage that selling an extra CPU costs them precisely nothing - if you want to buy a billion licenses they can offer you a very good rate!

@So files stored on dropbox are protected only by their hash

Yes, note from our legal dept this morning - we aren't allowed to store anything financial/legal/patentable on Dropbox anymore

According to them the stock exchange could regard anything on Dropbox as published and so had to be told to investors first.

@I'm too stupid to comprehend this

You can already allow anybody to download a file from your public folder - you just send them the dropbox generated link, what this software did was work out the secret link that dropbox uses to refer to any file on the system. So no big deal really

What is interesting/important is:

1, Dropbox sent a DMCA take down notice to scare the user with the threat of a major fine/federal crime. If he was using a university computer this was probably already enough to get him kicked out - whether it was true or not. Sending a threat-o-gram is easy, claiming you own the copyright on something that you shared (as he did) involves lawyers and official processes.

2, Dropbox checked inside the contents of the compressed tar file he was hosting to find his code. So dropbox routinely checks the contents of files you upload looking for things that damage their business model. You don't know what their business model is, who their shareholders are, or who they partner with. Out of general paranoia you should assume in business that all your cloud content is delivered directly to your worst enemy - but in this case it seems to be valid.

3, Anything you upload to Dropbox that is to do with business should be encrypted - this will cost dropbox money since they rely on being able to identify identical files from different users and use hashing to only store a single copy (they use Amazon S3 for their backend)

Other useful functionality

Since they have all these sensors and CPU to burn I'm sure reg readers can think of other features we could add.

1, If a certain proportion of Burberry is detected it locks the doors and drives to the nearest cop shop?

@NTFS

There is already a better system for NTFS - it hides data in the partially unused blocks at the end of files. So if you have a 17k file the disk uses 4 full 4K blocks and a final block with 1K used and 3K free. NTFS can be set to preserve/copy/etc the unused parts of blocks so your 'secret' data gets kept safe.

NTFS has a lot of out-of-band functionality so it can do lots of clever filesystem stuff that nobody ever implemented (cos like NT it was written by someone clever)

Downward spiral

The downward spiral is more common - you price your copy at 1c less than the cheapest and it appears as the lowest price. Some sellers were using this to drive down competitors prices on textbooks to 1c - then buying those copies and reselling them at the $ real price.

Basically what Wall St does with stocks but without the 000,000,000 on the end.

BMW version

It detects an amber light and automatically accelerates

We need one for the office

Need to address an envelope

1, Put in type writer

2, Type address

Alternative

1, Buy sheet of sticky labels that are supported in Word's list (which seems to only do US sizes even in the UK)

2, Type address

3, Print

4, Print again with labels correct way up in tray

5, Print again because somebody sent another job to the printer and their first page got printed on your labels

6, Discover that you had the margins set wrong and the address starts off the label

7, Manually put a few spaces at the start of the address

8 goto 3

catch: Write the address by hand

Then you have the 99% of forms that aren't fillable PDFs

re: The Guardian a bit hypocritical

If only there was some alternative to holding someone forever without trial - like perhaps having a trial, with evidence and juries and stuff.

Then you can lock them up forever when you find them guilty.

Am I missing something ?

> Iron Mountain becoming a Real Estate Investment Trust... lowering its tax burden.

So Iron Mountain is a secure document storage/shredding/etc company?

Who I'm supposed trust to securely store/shred/etc my documents

And their strategy is to pretend to be real estate vendors as a tax dodge - that sounds very trustworthy!

@braw photys

A bit of both, this was shot in three broad band filters, UV, blue and red - so it's a bit faked to show the UV bit still sort of realistic colour

Age not effective

What we need is a governemnt issued ID to be used for all online activities then Facebook etal could check your age - simple, I don't know why we didn't think of it before.

Linux

The method is used in the Linux kernel

Interestingly they have decided to go after a Linux user - with lots of money = Google, rather than the person who wrote the infringing code.