Posts by TeeCee

"The Uberpop app connects private, non-professional drivers with passengers..."

Well that has to be the dumbest idea in the history of dumb ideas.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Ah yes, I know. 90+% of people wouldn't know their car had a serious, even life-threatening, fault unless the car said; "I have a serious, even life-threatening, fault" as they approached it (and even then, they'd probably drive it anyway). The sort of people who are trying to scrounge a few extra quid by moonlighting as a fake taxi are by definition not the sort who will drop the necessary quiddage to keep their car professionally maintained and in top-top condition. You'd need your bumps felt to use this system.

Most countries with any degree of common sense force licensed taxis to be inspected rather more frequently and seriously than the cursory[1] once-over most vehicles get for this reason.

[1] I've seen a few things with a new MOT that have "Death Trap" written all over them. Likewise I've seen failures for no good reason. It's Lucky Lotto out there.

"Delphi's prototype was an Audi Q5 SUV"

Obviously[1] the Googlemobile assumed the driver was a cunt and cut it up deliberately.

The shortcoming in Google's system is the lack of an arm with which to flick two fingers.

[1] As in you'd hard-code this.

Get yer skates on Argentina!

We're building some new aircraft carriers you know.

When those are finished you'll be properly .fk'd for nicking any islands you fancy the look of.

'The region currently declares itself "rat-free"'

Yeah, right.

How's the flying pig infestation working out for them?

Ah. Adobe. Again.

Not for the first time do I wish that Windows had ceased support for Adobe fonts when TrueType was introduced.

I suppose that, with the benefit of hindsight, embedding Adobe's crapware in your O/S and giving it kernel privilege always was a one-way ticket to fuckup city.

When caught, did he say......

Now this is podracing.

Hmm.

Lifetime warranties

pledged to replace a PC's hard drive and CPU after two years

Aha! That's Gordon Brown economics that is, borrowing money from the good times in the future to generate sales / public goodwill now. The idea being you'll have cashed in your shares / brownie points / made enough to retire / whatever and be off doing something more lucrative before the good times fail to turn up and the company / country / whatever goes inevitably titsup when those liabilities you've stored up for your successors really bite.

Say what you like about Microsoft, but with strategies like that the management should get the lion's share of the blame for it all going pear-shaped.

Hang on a tick....

I thought this whole "cloud" idea's biggest selling point was the combination of scalability and redundancy?

We seem to have got the first bit, but the second continues to elude us. Now we have these "hybrid", multi-cloud, clouds attempting to ensure continuity. Presumably we need more than one of those too......

HiFi.

Of course being a Parrott unit, it'll be the absolute dog's bollocks at Bluetooth handsfree phone and audio streaming, unlike the Alpine system as theirs are usually pig-awful in this area.

A far more useful feature than bloody DAB, which is to in-car music what welding gloves are to brain surgeons.

Oops!

"PeopleThe drooling idiots that use our services love auto-playing video ads – Twitter"

Now it makes sense.

Does anyone listen?

I don't know which likelihood is worse here:

1) He genuinely believes that and people still listen to him.

2) He's a piece of shit-stirring scum and people still listen to him.

Next week: Having realised that this makes him look even more of a twat than usual, he claims that Mossad hacked his Faceberk account and posted that to discredit him....

Bloodhound.

I was standing next to that the other day when some chap came up to me and said it was the loudest thing he'd ever heard.

He was on base for a test, back in the day. He said at "go" time, the thing just vanished to all intents and purposes. By the time his eyes found it again, it was several miles away and at about that moment the godawful noise of it departing on rockets hit. Having just got used to that, the fact that it had fired its ramjets and gone supersonic as it cleared the airfield perimeter fence made itself felt and heard.

Acceleration figures of 0-->holyshitthat'squick in nothing flat. I take it that the car comes second best as it is incapable of achieving supersonic speeds in a standing quarter mile drag?

Ah!

Some time ago I summed up BB's current state and opined that their best move would be to ditch hardware (low-margin, competing with world+dog) and concentrate on software (high-margin, market leading, etc).

I also opined that the daft move would be to provide their services on other platforms without ditching the hardware business.

I never even dreamed they'd be this bloody stupid.

Presumably the share recommendation on BB has just moved from "sell" to "GTFON!".

Translation.

"We would also welcome their participation in our upcoming Vulnerability Bounty Program...."

Translates as:

"Everything else we've tried has failed, so we're going to bribe these bastards to STFU..."

Dear France.

You lost.

Get over it.

Words fail me.

Not at the DVLA, at the fucking British in general!

1) All countries in the EU use the same Driving licence format.

2) Britain is the only country that ever had a ruddy paper bit.

3) It's never caused any problem to any other European license holder anywhere in the world to hire a car with only the placcy bit. No codes, no online site, no nothing.

4) The only place on the entire bleedin' planet that I've ever been asked for the paper section when hiring a car with a UK license is, er, the UK. (This was slightly embarrassing as, since I'd never needed it before, I didn't bloody have it with me in the country!).

Why the fuck do we always have to overcomplicate everything?

Must be a government hack.

Obviously a "black bag" operation.....

Obvious much?

He's got beeelions of dollars[1].

He's a tycoon of industry (auto manufacturing).

He's got his own spaceships.

He's even called Elon Musk FFS! Come on, let's face it; If you were reading a book and it had a billionaire tycoon character called "Elon Musk" in it, you'd be pretty bloody sure you'd worked out who it was behind the plot to take over the world using humungous space-based laser weapons.

You just know there's an island sporting fetching volcanic secret base accessories somewhere in his property portfolio.

[1] The maniacal laugh is implicit in that.

"X as a Service"

I suppose that if this cobblers were to be successful, porn had to be in there somewhere.

Next week: Sony implicated in assassination of Kim Jong Un.

World fails to give a shit....

Eventually the big corporates will grow tired of the failure of their governments to protect them in an environment where international borders mean sod all and take action to solve these problems their own way.

We're sleepwalking into the demise of national governments as meaningful entities, as pan-national enforcement (regardless of treaties, jurisdiction, diplomacy and other such cruft beloved of politicians) slowly becomes a "must have".

Why not fix the root cause of the problem?

Jamming devices are illegal because they can prevent people from calling emergency services, posing a public safety hazard.

Make jammers legal and tell anyone too mind-numbingly stupid to work it out for themselves to move out of jamming range if they really, really need to make a call.

The Guardian?

Really?

That paper that respects free speech so much that they roll over to have their tummy tickled when so much as threatened with a bullshit libel suit?

I detect a botnet in the voting process. It's difficult to think of a news site that didn't cover Snowden in exhaustive and mind-numbingly tedious detail. It was one of the biggest stories of the year....

Aha!

Presumably something like this is the reason that the date of the alleged "Peak Oil" keeps moving into the future like a donkey following a carrot on a stick.

"move between applications with a flick of the wrist."

And there was I thinking that it was the Apple product that had been designed for wankers.