Re: Units?

But the orange is Terry's! And since this is information we might term it a Terry's byte. So Mz Mazkouri downloaded one Terry's byte of data.

_{Sorry. So sorry. I vote for the mop as the official El Reg unit.}

Re: Catch 42 ... You cannot Successfully Defend what you don't know how to Stealthily Attack

The AI behind aManFromMars1 is more sophisticated than the one runs Eadon.

Party like its the 1910s

It's okay, they're still living in the "second decade of the 20th century." [Maybe Ed was too distracted writing sarky comments?]

The trick is to do it very occasionally. If you're trying to understand some complicated process, working through lots of dry, matter-of-fact comments, and then encounter something puerile or silly - it can be hilarious. Done to death it becomes a PITA.

Re: Cunning Stunts

"...Work out a reasonable and rational rate for the service charged and then tax the difference at 100%"

The lawyers will have a field day arguing what is reasonable, and Big Business can afford lawyers. A hard and fast rule would quash legitimate businesses or make the situation even more exploitable. I'm not apologist for business. I would advocate taxing them for every penny. But I don't see how to fix these shenanigans. (Although I would start by raising corporation tax - the Americans have it at 35% FFS)

My superpower is being in TWO places at once. (Or possibly evidence of time travel.)

Re: All this cooperation with NASA

"Clearly, the sales are fulfilled on the moon."

Re: Shirley...

But if you are using IE, and it's defaulting to debug mode, then it's probably not you main browser.

Re: Can't agree that printing it out works

IANAL But when an ASCII STL or PLY file is printed out, it would surely fall under the First Amendment in the same way that the source to PGP did.

Re: "not be able to open my old files"

Illustrator's .ai files are PDFs, and Adobe's PDF viewer can produce a workable approximation of them.

Some editing packages can understand the private meta information Illustrator inserts into the stream. But no other package has the the same filters (and bugs).

Re: Alternating Succuess @anon Coward 09:59 GMT

Yeah, the service packs are critical to the successes. OSR2 was the only version of Win95 that was good; it was Win98 without the crud. And, as you say, XP didn't get good until after a couple of service packs had been applied, and the obscure "point" releases were the best versions of 16-bit Windows. You can even track that behaviour back into DOS. In ten years time we could all be eulogising Windows 8.11. Microsoft have got just enough of a clue to get there in the end, 50% of the time.

Re: Bloody luxury. @graham

Ahh, the joys childhood with a leaky roof, "You know we have to keep the beans in the bath because if we put them in the loft they start rusting, and then it gets so hot in summer that they burst."

Bulk buying meat "wholesale" from the guy on the market was something we did when young. Then there's freezing "forage" while it's in season. (And if your traps catch a deer...) And, as people have said, making up several lots and freezing them is vital to economising when living on your own. It's been many years since I bought frozen meat (the joys of not having to run a car) but that used to be cheaper than fresh, too.

I don't doubt you could make it work. But it's another of those subtle assumptions: you need storage, even for dry food, which can be a problem in a cramped terrace. And the middle class don't realise some people are stuck with a 1U freezer compartment on the top of a fridge which should be in a museum.

I'm not having to live off anything like £1/day and don't have to worry about these things. But if I were:

I don't have a car so I can't go to the "local" cash'n'carry. (Aldi, too, is in another town - £5 return bus fair.) Bulk buying from local supermarkets is limited for similar reasons. I'm fit and can carry quite a bit; but if I wasn't, it would be harder.

Bulk buying also demands you have storage space (freezer capacity) and the capital for the initial outlay (on £1/day, how long would it have taken Lester to save up for his frying pan?)

It certainly can be done, if you are smart and know how. But should we be asking people "to survive" "not thrive"? Should we look down on people who are chucked into this situation without the knowledge of how to do it? (I make an exception for Ian Duncan Smith.) Our whole system is set up for "smart" (well shrewd) people.

And if I was in a tight spot, I would sacrifice diet to keep the internet - because the internet would be the way out.

Re: What doesn't help with Adobe..

"...vendors all want to have control over the updating experience, and won't produce proper MSI installers that actually use Windows Installer properly..."

*splutter* Have you tried to use the MSI installer "properly"? I'm not sure even Microsoft use it "properly".

Re: Suggested a Chromebook for my mother

But it won't play Heroes of Might and Magic, so that's my mum out the picture.

And then there' s

"...technology will never have the position it merits at the heart of our society and economy if it remains the preserve of such a narrow section of society." (my emphasis)

Narrow? Last time I checked men were O(50%) of society.

Okay, I've rechecked, men are only 49% of the population. (Some sexist bollocks about women living longer.) So her point stands.

Re: What did you fry the eggs in?

Non-stick as in "having a special coating"? Because the teflon tends to wear away, and I can't see it lasting fifteen years. The pans are perfectly serviceable, once the coating has gone, but it's back to fat. Conservatively, I'd say three years, which is still good value.

PS I notice Tesco do bars of chocolate for 30p. Three bars a day would fill up anyone! White for breakfast; milk for lunch; dark for supper.

Re: Inconsistencies with quantum mechanics.

You can "go the other way" and merge the other forces with gravity. The EM field works fine (Kaluza-Klein) and then the program begins to struggle. However it would require extra (really tiny) dimensions and IIRC LHC is close to ruling that out.

Supposing that you are right, how much would that level of in depth training cost? It's not affordable to give every data entry clerk a "true understanding of how the Internet actually works." (And they probably don't want to know, even if they have the ability to comprehend it.)

Re: Come clean on funny money

An economist might talk about the "lost output" as a result the breach - all the things you could have produced if you hadn't been cleaning up.

But you seem to be saying it was funded through unpaid overtime and productivity gains (less facebooking and shorter lunches).

Re: Perhaps you can point us in the direction of this magic software @Steve Todd

"...mass searching by machine causes too much manually cross-checking."

For now. With today's technology.

Sounds like a good time to get some safe guards in place.

Re: Where's the justice here?

I've got a judge on record as saying, "Keeping the cost and delays down (for the state) is more important than getting to the truth." So I concur that judges have a difference notion of "justice" to the naive one.

Re: re: biggest problems faced by architects... @Joefish

This...

If a business process can't or won't play by those rules, it's never going to work as software.

...should be framed.

People still think computers are "logical". (And by "logical" they mean something that can use Aristotlean logic, not something that incorporates a smattering of boolean logic.)

I have to explain to them that computers are "algorithmic": they just manipulate numbers by following a laundry list of rules. A line of code is just a box in a flow chart (effectively).