Posts by arrbee

Not unlike a major music label supplying copyright material for others to download without any licence to do so - except in that case the company gets money as well.

If you bother to look around your local high street on a Saturday morning you'll see that shopping is as much a social activity as a commercial one. Replacing shared experiences with asocial ones tends not to end well (except for the large corporates).

data may go up as well as down

No point talking about cloud storage without giving the upload speed available.

If they really want to tax these companies then surely it would be simpler to charge them on a per-local-user basis, e.g. 10 euro per bod per year. Then if they wished the companies could recover this by charging a fee.

Maybe add an exemption for smaller organisations with fewer than x thousand users.

If they're quick there is one passing conveniently close (~ geosync orbit distance) in just over 3 weeks.

I think the funniest thing is the idea that a university is spending their own money to provide students with something for free.

This could explain why a BOF like me is always bemused by the fuss about the latest high street phenomenon - it turns out that fashion trends are 15 years out of date !

Firstly...

So the first thing to do with this is to get a list of all the photos in which you've been tagged and remove said tag ( ok, not first thing, more like thing to do once a week ).

No, the first thing to do is to ensure all your (correct) personal info is either private to yourself or visible to 'real' friends only, i.e. not to friends of friends or to 'likers' or 'likees'.

No, the first thing to do is to check if the search restrictions are real, e.g. contractual, or are just by convention, i.e. may vary depending on a user's financial or legal status. Could give a whole new meaning to "guilt by association".

Incidentally, is there any word on whether the search queries themselves will be stored for future use ?

I thought this was standard practice for how the law works in the US ?

i.e. the prosecution threaten the accused until they agree to some kind of guilty plea.

My impression was that the members of juries in the US tend to award higher damages to improve their chances of appearing on tv.

Perhaps certain media companies are in favour of this because they can see how useful all this new data will be when looking for juicy stories on celebs, MPs, or people challenging their behaviour. Its not as though they wont have access, one way or another.

The main thing I remember about OS/2 is IBM trying to stop anyone else using the "/2" suffix in product names.

Err

"red-hot loops of plasma" that were "captured in the 304 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light"

I'm obviously still a bit confused about this cloud stuff - I'd have expected 5 9s availability to be the starting point for commercial contracts. I assume data is stored in multiple locations, so that a data centre failing doesn't cause more than a short pause in service ? I mean, thats 1980s technology.

In the UK the Inland Revenue now has powers to declare an existing tax avoidance scheme "ineffective", upon which those using said scheme must cough up all the unpaid tax - not that the IR would ever do this where a large corporate was involved.

ancient

I think I may be getting old... I remember writing one of my first ever programs in Forth in, err, 1976

- it was for something called an isodensitracer [ well, something like that ] which was used to measure images on photographic glass plates. IIRC it was using some kind of Honeywell minicomputer.

Climate change is *the* big thing in academia at the moment, i.e. it provides the best way to add value in terms of increasing your chances of publicity and gaining further grants for your work. Consequently many academics are looking for ways to include references to climate change in their published work, whatever the actual subject they may be studying. Its no different to the recent rash of references to the Olympics in the UK from public and private organisations with no real connection to that event.

Might I suggest...

a. build a large number of large wind turbines distributed evenly around the UK

b. use extensive fracking to provide the fuel needed to power the construction of a.

c. having hence weakened the geological foundations and attached significant lifting power, move the UK to wherever we can get a decent bloody summer

looks familiar

I've been looking at that start screen trying to think what it reminded me of - its Lotus Notes.

mounting the engines directly above the passenger section could make it a tad noisy

how about...

Never mind about pop songs, what we want is a remote-controlled model Curiosity with all the bits, including a laser zapper !

Or, slightly more boringly, maybe a remote-controlled model linked to your tablet/smart phone of choice(*) with the various experimental packages mostly modelled in software.

Or, an app that tracks the rover, updates you with which experiment(s) are active, and provides a close-to-realtime view from the cameras (and maybe sound if it has a decent microphone); oh, and a current map of the local terrain.

(*) as determined by your local jurisdiction

Even now the Martians are sneaking up behind the rover and placing interesting looking "rocks" packed full of high explosive...

- roll out broadband to all but the most isolated rural areas

- move all broadcast TV & radio to the internet

- complain about access speed everywhere

Surely this part of the ongoing program at IBM to move jobs to low-wage countries; they've been doing this for at least a couple of years now.

One day someone will explain to organisations in both the private and public sectors the difference between 'effective' and 'efficient' - and that 'efficiency' is an engineering measurement with no real meaning in a financial context (but then I'm sure most people in finance know that).

oh great, open your fridge or cupboard and get a babel of competing talking adverts