This is stupidity on AceCAD's part

Having worked in CAD design for a while i have to say that this is stupidity on AceCAD's behalf. As mentioned already, the people buying off ebay are not companies that would be buying this product normally so therefore no losses occur for AceCAD.

The people buying this would be people wanting to have a go at home in their bedroom and/or students in their industry. If you look at programs like ProEngineer and Catia V5 you will find multitudes of copies floating around any university with an engineering department. Do Dassault or PTC go after them? Of course not! They realise that by students and future prospective workers gaining experience in their packages theyre more likely to gain sales in the future as companies obtain extra staff with experience in their programs.

The only way AceCAD have lost money from this is if they run an exclusive training system (at high costs to their customers) and they were worried that people learning at home would mean they would lose their training cash cow! Aceholes!

PS

PS Yes he's an idiot for selling on ebay. Nuff said!

Life in Prison & Chemical Carstration

Thats the penalty people like this should receive. Remove them from the gene pool by removing their ability to procreate.

Actually i would happily extend this to anyone sentenced to a crime for 10 years+. If you've done something so bad as to be imprisoned for 10 years you really have no right procreating!

Perhaps it could be used as a deterrent for things like chavs who steal cars - be caught stealing cars, b&e, assault, etc 3 times and have your ability to have kids removed for ever. Crime might drop and we'd also prevent a whole new generations of chavs! Win-Win!

Oh and the death penalty has been proven not too be a deterrent so why lower ourselves to their level by commiting (state-sanctioned) murder. Were not animals, even if they are!

@Anon Coward - Good idea is it - you stupid F*****ers

I will happily live right next door to any modern (read post 1980) nuclear reactor in any Western Country you want! I would prefer this any day to living within 100km of even the newest, most efficient fossil fuel burning powerplant. And if you want i'll also live next door to the nuclear waste depot with its stringent protection measures.

I would happily live next to a reactor and waste depot where outputs are heavily monitored and controlled then within 100km of a coal powerstation pumping its dangerous/poisonous/polluting waste straight into the air we breath!

So here's the deal you go live next door to the coal plant, i'll live next to the nuclear plant and lets see which one of us end up with the health problems, yeah?

The real question

is simple: Is it (in whatever state of the US this lady is from) murder or a similar crime to bully/harass a person who then goes on to commit suicide? If it is then this is the exact same. If not, then no crime has been committed. It's sad and the woman is obviously a bitch of the highest order, but whether the harassment was physical or electronic should make no difference...

Physical harassment cant always be escaped (kids need to go to school!) but electronic harassment is easy to escape from - its called the ban button! Kids need to learn that...

real reason for the divorce

Maybe after realising hubby would pay for sex, she started charging him for it at home too!

civilian uses

The V22 would have a multitude of uses in civil life. It would have greater range and speed then a helicopter (so beats a helicopter when these things are a requirement) and doesn't need a landing strip like an aircraft.

Imagine emergency rescue for one use - the V22 (or civilian offspring) could take off from a hospital landing pad in a city, rotate to plane mode, fly at high speed to crash/emergency site, rotate to helicopter mode, land. Do whatever needs to happen (pick up hurt people, etc.) take off helicopter style, fly back high speed plane style, and land back at the hospital landing pad!

Another use is aerial surveying, the ability to hover is not something that your average surveying plane can do, and the ability to get to the survey site at high speed means you save money on fuel compared to a conventional helicopter!

Only problem with a system like this is the really high maintenance cost from the mechanical rotation. That and it does look a bit larger then a standard helicopter but i imagine a civilian version would be a bit smaller...

spiritual leader of the project?!

Translation: The guy who provided the coffee from Day 1 but actually accomplished nothing that can be considered useful or usable content/coding. ie. A Twat!

Every kids dream

To hold up Santa and steal ALL of his presents! Thats all these drug traffickers were doing - it had nothing to do with them thinking he was a cop!

@ lets Face It

Anon Coward - I cannot begin to disagree with you enough!!!

All those people saying that we should be using regular versions of other aircraft for carrier duty do not understand the design requirements of carrier life. The landing and takings do not actually apply that much of a problem to the aircraft. The biggest issue is the motion of the ship on water. A Seaharrier (designed for carrier landings) is 30% heavier then a regular land harrier because the wings and wing joints have to be strengthened by that much to accommodate the continual up and down flexing caused by waves when its sitting on the carrier deck. You "could" use a regular F-35A on a carrier but its life would be about a quarter of the life you were expecting because it is not reinforced for this continuous motion.

The comments made about making cheap, throw-away planes is incredibly stupid in that if you look at the biggest costs to any airforce you will find that it is pilots who cost the most so sending out lots of cheap planes with expensive pilots that get shots down will cost a lot more in the long run and after a few such sorties would leave you with a massive skills shortage. I suppose the alternative to this is unmanned aircraft but lets face it killbots arent yet at a level where they can do all our killing for us yet!

yes there are 3 versions of the F-35 they share about 40% commonality that is all. 60% of an aircraft allows specialisation, so on this point your incredibly wrong. All 3 have very distinct roles and have been designed in parallel which in itself is a great achievement as in most cases like this a single version is created then the variants begin off that basis. This does not allow anywhere near the degree of specialisation accomplished by the F-35.

Yes there have been substantial structural changes in the design process of the F-35. This happens in MOST fighter designs as new technologies and developments occur. However, most fighter programs are done in secret for one country and the public never hears about the problems faced. The transparency shown in this program is quite outstanding. Oh and on the delays front the majority of delays have been caused by the americans attempting to make the aircraft reverse-engineering proof, so that some other foreign power cant steal the american tech put inside it (stealth, etc.). This is completely and utterly fucked by the americans because if they want to sell a military product to another country they should accept the fact that that is now another country's product to do with as they wish. I must applaud the Uk MOD for threatening to pull out of the JSF program when the amercians initially refused to give them any technical data.

@ the dog fighting people - modern fighter aircraft dont dog fight. They fire Beyond Visual range Missiles at each other or when one notices a BVRM coming at them they fire a counter measure that (hopefully) distracts and misguides the missile, they then fire their BVRM and the other guy fires his counter measures. The person with the best counter measures wins if both exhaust missile supplies they call a draw and go home. That is modern fighter warfare. The days of the Red Baron are dead and gone...

At present, the 3 versions of the F-35 are all on target to meet their specs. yes there behind schedule and probably a bit overbudget there still a hell of a lot cheaper then developing your on inhouse british fighter!

PS As an aerospace engineer who has worked in both military and civilian aerospace design projects - i do have an idea what im talking about. Hence the boffin icon!

Its to convert

those heathen bacteria...

"and the lord said unto the ameoba "Take one of every bacterium and let them split into 2...""

@ Wayne

Not keeping up to date with current figures but happily quoting Bill Hicks:

"In the United States last year, we had 32,000 deaths from hand guns. In the UK, 13 deaths from hand guns. Let's look at those figures again because there a bit baffling at first. USA - and i think you know how we feel about guns, woot im getting a stiffy just saying the fucking word - 32,000 deaths from hand guns. In the UK where noone has hand guns, 13 deaths from hand guns.

But there's no connection and you'd be a fool and communist to make one..."

@ John

Helicopter blades are simply wings that are moving faster then the aircraft. If you stop the helicopter blades (in order to surf off the winds with your kite) your helicopter will fall out of the sky. As helicopters have a tendency to fall out of the sky anyway (even without a kite) your idea may not be the safest!

Quote: "If in your aircraft the wings are moving faster then the body - its a helicopter and therefore unstable"

@ ICBM's fly to high

It's not just the speed that they fly at that is a problem with ICBMs, which is the total of the vector of the initial forward velocity they were given combined with acceleration from gravity (which means that unless you hit them near the top of their arc they're travelling very bloody fast!) but most ICBM's carry large numbers of anti-counter measures. The most basic of which is a series of large decoys that fall around the ICBM which mean that the anti-ICBM missile has to pick out which one is the ICBM out of 10+ targets, thus decreasing the chance of the missile being intercepted.

On top of this by the time the ICBM has dropped in height enough to be targeted by a regular (non-space capable) missile then it is more then likely already well over your nation, so blowing it up will tend to cause an even greater amount of debris and explosive (possibly radioactive) material over a larger area. Its a lose-lose situation - defintely kill everybody in a certain radius by letting the missile through or kill 50% of people over twice to 3 times the original radius...

I like the idea of charging obviously bogus calls

Anyone making the really stupid obviously calls gets a £10 addition to their phone bill (rising by £10 per phone call per month!). Silent mobile phone calls get the same. This has 3 benefits -a) people wanting to ask REALLY stupid questions might learn that 999 ISN'T the best place to be asking about the nearest hairdressers; b) people who havent learnt to use the "lock phone" function on there keypad will learn a valuable lesson and c) the emergency service might finally get enough funding!

Mind you there would probably have to be a panel that decides when a call is stupid and deserves to be charged but the money form the charging should pay there salary easily! :)

A few things

Surely people realise that the alien killbots we are manufacturing here at home will stand a much greater chance of defeating any alien invaders and i for one welcome our future alien killing human kill bot overlords....

On a more serious note, no one seems to have taken into account the fact that power levels decrease via the inverse square law. So whatever the power we beam out, the power level will have decreased to an unidentifiable level before it gets too far!

@ P. Lee

Australia was founded as a convict settlement and we aren't this stupid! So no blaming the convict side of things!

@ Ground testing a helicopter??

*boffin hat on*

You ground test helicopters (and all aircraft) in order to test systems, engines, etc although these tests are usually done on aircraft that will be used later on in flight testing.

The helicopters/aircraft that are built PURELY for ground testing are your fatigue test helicopters/aircraft. Basically you simulate the pressure and load changes on an aircraft that it will experience throughout its life time and cycle it through thousands of cycles to find out at what point the structure will fail. At which point you cross your fingers, clench tight and hope like hell that its a larger number then what you've stated as your aircraft's expected working life!

*boffin hat off*

How does celebs changing details work?

I mean then when they go in to get some treatment they'll give there health insurance number or whatever but then the name on the file will be different to their name... Surely that would be reason to think that the insurance number they gave was either wrong or fraudulent?

Or can anyone walk in make up a number off the street and say "Oh those details i made them up as im a celebrity and didnt want people knowing the real details!"

Stupid idea...

Re: How about dropping redundant laws too?

They've already started working on the Data Protection Act. I mean once everyone's details are made available to the public by one government department or other "losing" them then there will be no need for the data Protection Act or the Privacy Act!

Think of the money saved when companies no longer have to worry about privacy or protecting your data! And think of the money the government will save not having to police the private sector or cover up the mistakes of the public sector!

It's Win-Win! Just wait for those ID cards to come...

£7 million... thats a bargain!

Come on folks, how much money did each of the government departments just lose over the last year - a hell of a lot more then £7 million im sure. At least for this £7 million were getting something out of it! Good on em for doing something right!

And a note for all the anti-nuclear campaigners - Uranium is radioactive when its in the ground. We're just lucky that it naturally forms a protective layer that stops the radiation from escaping. When we dig it out of the ground its still radioactive. When we use it in the reactor yep still radioactive. And when were finished with it, guess what? still radioactive! So why people dont like the idea of just burying it back underground is beyond me...

The funny thing

All of us with a bit of IT knowledge when confronted by a problem from a non-tech savvy luser have a tendency to tell them "Have you tried turning it off and on again..."

In this case, that might not work so well...

Eco friendly what?

I wonder how they will spin private jetting 600 people to a private island so that Branson and Page still come across as Eco-friendly to the mass media...

The problem with this

Is that from my way of reading the above article it says that scenes which MAY cause epileptic seizures for a very small minority would be removed from the game for ALL of us.

That is just a ridiculous idea. If it comes down to them testing the product and finding yep we might cause an epileptic fit, put an additional leaflet in the box saying "Not suitable for epileptics please return for a full refund", thats the way to handle it. But if their going to be forced to start cutting parts out of the game then thats just ridiculous and will ruin the experience for EVERYONE!

People need to start taking personal responsibility for their actions and get away from this americanisation of our culture!

I have to ask the question...

(and please dear El Reg readers enlighten a poor aussie lad)

Why on earth would a person or company donate money to a political party unless they were planning on receiving something in return?

What does £950 get someone? A street named after them? A thank you letter and a reduction in council tax? 50% off selected party merchandise?

@Heystoopid

This guy is from NEW ZEALAND.

ASIO is AUSTRALIAN.

I know the two country's are close together and get on pretty well but i dont think ASIO has the right to black bag kiwi's in New Zealand yet...

So a person who masterminded an operation to take over thousand's of computers and infect others with malware, etc "did not actively set out to get involved in cybercrime". Right...

Ban donations

Here's a novel idea - ban donations, loans and all the other methods of politcial party's getting money from the public/corporations! Have the party's receive a set amount from the government to fund their little campaigns and leave it at that.

That way, there's ZERO corruption. Because lets face facts, if someone is donating money to any fund/party they want to get something in exchange for it. When i donate to WWF or the Red Cross i expect to get something for my money (Whales being saved in the case of the WWF or people being fed/healed by the Red Cross).

When people donate to a political party nothing has changed, they still want something for their money - support for the (insert lobby group here) cause. This is usually not in the public interest. Remove a lobby group's ability to coerce the government by legal means and you remove a lot of corruption.

NOTE: there will always be corruption but any future corruption would be highly identifiable as illegal with this model...

Thoughts?

Proof that elections can make all the difference...

Take Aus's recent election. For the last 13 years we've been stuck with conservative Lil' Johnny but in the last term he refused to ratify Kyoto, he introduced an incredibly unpopular Industrial relations package which severely hurt many of Aus's poorer workers and kept us in Iraq despite the public's wishes against it. Then Kevin rudd came along and ran his whole political campaign as the "I'm the same as John Howard economically but ill change the unpopular things" mandate and guess what? He won in a landslide. He's already ratified Kyoto (on his first day as PM) and is moving to make the other changes.

So all you need to do in Britain is convince the opposition to make a flat out NO2ID stance and you can vote them in and kiss the ID card good bye... Although this does rely on you having an opposition party that opposes the ID cards...

british spelling

Actually something, i forgot to put it into my survey can you please for the love of all that is holy (i.e. The pub!) put a UK spell check on your .co.uk website!! Stop with these americanised spellings now!!

Bogan & Yobbo

Those are the Aussie terms, although we havent yet developed bogans to the level of the average chav, but there steadily getting worse!

In the immortal words of Bill Hicks

"If anyone in the audience is in marketing - Kill Yourself! There is no justification for what you do. Suck a tail pipe. Borrow a gun from an NRA buddy. Remove yourself from the planet, you soulless, blood sucking scumbag. Kill yourself!

But you know what anyone in the room who is in marketing is thinking? "wow bill's going for "the anti-marketing dollar" that's a huge market! Look at our research."

Please don't turn everything into a dollar sign...

"Ooh the plea for sanity dollar - huge market! Huge market!"

@ Damian Gabriel Moran

You obviously havent been walking around the Isle of Wight recently! You see LOTS of kids with children!!

Personally, i say turn high school teaching into a university style structure where if the kids fail a subject they have to repeat it until they pass it. Having a 16 year old still doing a year 7 course would quickly have them paying attention thanks to the huge amount of ridicule they would receive. And dont let them leave school till they've completed all the courses expected of a 15/16 year old...

@RK & Anon Coward

Actually Israel does respect human rights. Quite substantially.

All people arrested in Israel (Israeli's and Palestinian's) receive legal representation and due process under the law. They are not imprisoned indefinitely without charge, nor are they subject to torture or abuse whilst in custody. Freedom of political and religious belief are also protected by the Israeli constitution.

As opposed to every other nation in the middle east who wilfully imprison, torture and murder anyone who happens to get on the wrong side of those in power. But then we dont take any notice of that do we?

I suppose the reasons for your disparaging comments are based on the Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory where unfortunately Palestinian citizens are killed along with militants. However, if that is the reason then i propose that the US and the UK also do not respect Human rights - how many iraqi's and afghan's need to die before you will condemn them the same?

PS Im not Israeli or a jew but i did live in Israel for a time not too long ago...

Greenpeace aren't terrorists there just a bunch of sissies!

I wish they were bloody terrorists (or activists or however you want to call them) then maybe they'd do something about the Japanese whaling like they used to (ie ramming ships etc.) instead of the current thing of sailing along next to the whaling vessel with a banner saying save the whales. Yeah thats going to work!

As for this report, who gives a rats ass? Does anyone honestly think this will stop anybody from buying a Wii that was already going to buy one? Or make people buy PS3's instead? Nope... didnt think so...

Disgraceful scam!

Taking 419er's to a whole new level...

The keyboards look nothing alike, this is just a disgraceful attempt to obtain cash from a worthy attempt to improve worldwide education...

I sincerely hope this falls on its ass at the first hurdle...

the pilots can become stewardess's!

That way we get extra service out back whilst the plane controls itself and in the event of an emergency the plane can page the pilot to come and help out and can take over till the plane's computer corrects itself!

To be honest though even in an emergency id trust a computer to land an aircraft more safely then a lot of pilots!

hmmm...

Desalination is a great idea but the technologies to do it efficiently and well arent here yet. This plant will consume huge amounts of electricity (coal generated electricity), create huge amounts of hazardous waste products and is just a bad idea period.

Until the amounts of energy needed to conduct desalination are reduced and the ability to turn the waste products into usable items is achieved, desal is not a good idea!

Measuring the water level

1. Take all the land mass on the moon.

2. Squash it down till you get a sphere.

3. Add water.

Measurement - 11m.

On earth this would be a much larger value as if you took all of the himalayas and dumped them in the pacific none of them would even break the surface! Earth has a lot more water!

Britian already has a points based system

Its called the HSMP (Highly Skilled Migrants Programme) and its a right c*nt because the HMRC change the requirements every 3 months or so. Considering it takes 3-6 months for an application to be processed this leads to all sorts of fun! Stupid bloody HMRC...

(disgruntled Aussie given the boot from the UK after 2 years!)

Crazy idea

Maybe, just maybe there should be a law banning anyone involved in a civil service role (or their families) from purchasing shares in any company that their even remotely associated with the selling off of?

Perhaps that little law would stop a lot of these departments being sold off by senior civil servants who are looking to grease their wheels, so to speak...

Remove people's ability to gain from a corrupt act and you remove their desire to conduct it.

PS. Amanfrommars keep the comments coming!