Posts by Magnus_Pym

Sod what Byrne says...

The idea of naked shorting sounds wrong to the man in the street. It sounds like it side steps the supply-and-demand roots of capitalism. It sounds like the fat cats are getting away with criminal acts. In that way it offends both capitalists and non-capitalists. It makes the law look like it only penalises those who can't afford to buy it. In the end no-one trusts a nominal market economy. No-one trusts the legal system. No-one has every trusted politicians. Perhaps putting 'in God we trust' on US currency is just an act of desperation. There is no-one else.

So clouds may reign..

I just liked the pun that's all.

I suggest spending the money on university research grants to design secure and implementable protocols for sharing medical data, database implementations of the protocols and proof of concept clients. Then publish the whole lot and let the private sector get on with it. That way when it fails it won't be a total right-off because we may get some computer graduates with big system experience and universities with some decent bloody facilities and the big-brains of the future may not bugger off to the US.

Where does the £21bn figure come from?

Like all government 'estimates' it has made up. It works like this:

Minister: What sort figure balance te books and/or justify what we are going to spend?

Civil Servant: We calculate you would need to be for about £21bn.

Minister: Perfect, get the dept. of press leakage.

If they want people to buy tellies...

... they aught to throw some money at the content providers. It's hardly worth buying a new telly for a couple of hours watch-able programming in a month.

Overpriced?

Before saying that Apple products are overpriced do take into account the retained value. How much is that Dell laptop that bought two years ago worth now?

Get a Job?

There are no jobs*. What do people expect the unemployed to do. Go round knocking on each others doors trying to sell each other double glazing? Move to where the jobs are? Where the fuck are these jobs? Should all the unemployed from Liverpool move to Manchester to find work?

*Yes there are jobs that employers struggle to fill. This is because they only want qualified and experienced workers. Qualifications are expensive and, like work experience, get out of date very quickly these days.

Eh!

As an attack vector does 'Downloading to a different folder' seem a bit easy not to have been used before?

It all depends...

.. on whether you think he would get a fair trial in the USA. That is why all the US commentards say' extradite him' and the rest of the world says 'no'.

One size fits all?

A lot of the criticism here is based on the 'it isn't better in some cases so it isn't better at all' type reasoning. The days of having a uniform user base are over, if they ever existed at all. The best option is surely a mix of all these technologies. Heavy graphics users need a specific kind of work station but the typist/secretarial have different needs. Why look for a single answer to all these needs. It's like the transport dept saying 'The reps can't have BMW's because the lorry drivers need to able to carry 20 Tonnes at a drop'.

It's got to be about the IP hasn't it?

See title.

Agian with the FUD-ometer

One just cannot take USA based science seriously. Especially in areas where big business operates.Too many eminent people have compromised themselves for the corporate Dollar. This could be genuine or it could be Microsoft backed FUD. There is no way of knowing.

They should leave it in space

Attach it to the ISS as the basis of the upcoming manned (peopled?) Mars mission. Bring the astronauts home on the scheduled ISS supply trips. Take up fuel, additional components, inflatable living spaces expendonauts(tm) etc and there you go.

Radio-cassette recorders

Didn't the law find that although radio-cassette records where almost always used for copyright infringement that was not there only purpose so it was OK to sell them and that the user was to blame for any wrong doing? How is this different?

MPG

The urban cycle (or equivalent) fuel consumption is the figure most often quoted. That is supposedly and average spread of driving conditions. Cars used for commuting spend a much larger proportion of the time in the rush hour crawl than that. That is where hybrids are (supposed) to excel. Averages are no good here.

Hold your horses!

But loads of people love their 'location aware' apps. They are a very popular section of both apple and android app stores. Most users don't care how much information is gathered, they just love to say, Hey, look at this. I can .... (whatever the latest gizmo thingy does). They just bloody love 'em and don't care.

Just let me...

... fix that.

A future startup in the US with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. They will, therefore, choose to start up outside the US and wait until they have established a position that they can defend before attempting to sell there.

HTML5 is not native

but interpreting HTML5 and rendering it to screen can use native OS code rather than a separate layer. You can do that if you make both the browser and the OS. I bet it opens up some security holes though.

What??!

He asked a supplier to pay a third party's invoice for him for which they would later be reimbursed? Lending money to pay outstanding debts is the job of a bank not a supplier. They should have twigged straight away.

The excuse that Microsoft takes a long time to get money out is so typical of big businesses run by accountants. Simply not paying invoices on time may temporarily increase the cash flow but the creative accounting required to actually make the company work lays them open to all kinds of scams $450,000 dollars for f**k's sake. Ballmer is the money man, The blame rests with him.

4 point plan

"The retailer has laid out a four-point response plan to turn trading around."

Increase staff sales targets.

Increase staff extended guarantee targets

Tell staff to sell more or get out

Put prices up

tainted US science

Science funded by the pro-smoking lobby over many decades managed not only to hold back corporate damages claims but also to taint the whole US science community. Anything published is always countered by counter claims of industry bias. This piece (together with Japanese nuclear meltdown ravings and the Gulf coast "US Oil good British Oil bad" rhetoric) sound like the outpourings of the powerful US oil lobby.

Maybe it is maybe it ain't but it's difficult to take at face value.

Any engineers answer this?

Would it be possible to site it in the Bristol channel next to a specially built pier and use the motion relative to the pier due to the tides for power generation? Surely 22,000 tons moving up and down by around 10 metres twice a day must be able to do something.