* Posts by Pete

486 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007

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How the BBC plans to save your ISP

Pete Silver badge

let's see if I've understood this

The BBCbroadcasts programmes via TV signal, and then provides some content from it's internet servers for people who forgot to watch it the first time. OK so far.

Now,the ISPs are whinging that all this extra traffic is actually using their resources. Riiiight.

So the BBC are planning to put copies of their internet servers in (some) ISPs premises, to cache the content the viewers ask for. Thus effectively giving the ISPs some of our licence fee. Hmmm.

Here's a radical plan: why not put some hardware in people's houses? You could send the programmes to it using the TV signals the BBC already broadcasts. That way they'll have the data locally - so they won't have to stream it across the internet. You could call it a BBC programme recorder - no, too long. How about: BBC TV recorder - hmmm, not very snappy. Why not generalise it, to record programmes from *any* TV station? That's it! we'll call it a VIDEO RECORDER.

I wonder if such a device would catch on?

Sweet, sweet smell of comments in code?

Pete Silver badge

this argument was old and boring 20 years ago.

Code without comments is like a cartoon without speech-bubbles. You can work out what's going on, but you lose a great deal of detail - and it takes a lot longer, too.

No matter how you package it, there is no excuse for writing code without providing a commentary about what it does, why it does it, the assumptions the author makes, why a particular technique or construct was used.

Somewhere, you need to provide information about the state of each module (test, production, change-history etc.). This can either be in the code itself, or in a management system - either way, it still counts as comments and is part of the code-base.

This debate about commenting code crops up with each new generation of programmers - who don't have the experience to realise why, or the discipline to actually write clear, well constructed descriptions of their code. Luckily it's a good way to differentiate the hackers from the professionals: just look at the quality of their documentation.

Futurists predict a world of IT fairy tales

Pete Silver badge

drunks and lamp posts

not so much for illumination, as support.

Really! what a load of old tripe. Reports like this are generally produced to reinforce and add credibility to an existing point of view, rather than to change people's position and expectation of the future. You'll probably find there are other reports that take opposing positions - and a whole spectrum of reports that offer conclusions between the "everything will be GREAT" and the "we're DOOMED" extremes.

Just like with standards: there are so many to choose from, you can just pick the one you like the look of best.

No doubt some consultancy will make a lot of monkey from this. No doubt other will make just as much from their considered opinions. The good thing is they'll all be right in some ways, and completely wrong in others. However once we get to 2018 (when this one is set) no-one will particularly care what was said by a bunch of navel-gazers ten years previously.

Read, snigger, discard, move-on.

Plastic bag campaign falls apart at the seams

Pete Silver badge

the new scientific method

1.) find a report, no matter how obscure, that supports your pet theory

2.) don't validate it or weigh the balance of evidence - in case you get debunked

3.) send a press release to the media - the more hysterical the better

4.) form a lobby group from your equally credulous friends

5.) get a luvvy who knows nothing about science but looks good on TV to endorse your views

6.) use this endorsement as proof that you're right

7.) criticise your opponents as being in the pay of big business

8.) repeat steps 3 - 7 until your random opinions become accepted fact

9.) tell everyone that we're doomed unless we all give up whatever it was your pet theory requires

10.) get the government to slap a punitive tax on it

11.) (optional - points for style) get your new facts taught in schools

12.) find another random crusade. Start again at (1)

13.) wonder why no-one learns science at school any more

10 ways to improve your code

Pete Silver badge

what about the old favourites?

Hmm, how things have changed. I was always taught to comment my code. Write simple clear and well-structured source and to reuse existing functionality whenever possible.

It looks like these good practices are no longer needed.

'Boil a frog' ID card rollout to continue until 2012

Pete Silver badge

"optional" security?

So only some groups of people will need security cards. How will that work? If Plod stops you in the street and asks to see your I.D. card, all you have to do is say "I'm not a student or foreign national" and they'll send you on your way - EVEN IF YOU ARE

Can someone tell me please, how this protects us from terrorism and makes us all safer?

And then there's airport workers - because they work in such a security conscious area. OK, on that basis the House of Commons is much, much more security conscious (even though it only contains MPs, no-one we'ed really miss, and it wouldn't delay our holidays either). Why doesn't the govt. roll out I.D. cards for MPs as well?

You don't know disk about storage failures

Pete Silver badge

leave it to the professionals

All this tells us is that when you leave storage management to people who "have a PC at home" (and therefore know about disks - ha!) you get amateurish, cobbled together systems using cheap components and lousy architectures that fall over, figuratively speaking, as soon as you look at them.

This study tells us more about the commoditisation of datacentres. Just because eBay will sell you a disk for about the price of a packet of cornflakes means that t'powers that be now object to paying realistic prices for _solutions_ to store their enterprise data.

What we need are some decent disasters (a few more minor earthquakes should do it) to literally shake-up peoples' perception of storage and make them start doing it properly.

Should Europeans pay to receive phone calls?

Pete Silver badge

make the customer pay for received cold-calls?

This sounds like I'm being asked to pay for all the annoying sales calls, silent calls and "surveys" that any sales organisation wants to burden me with.

Apart from the sheer annoyance of having to take these calls, I'll now have to fork out for the privilege - I don't think so. Where can I hand in my handset?

Vista volume activation cracked

Pete Silver badge

still wouldn't want vista

even if they gave it away - happy with my (legal) XP and will be for many years to come. It does everything I need

Apple's Time Capsule: is its HDD really 'server grade'?

Pete Silver badge

merely playing warranty games

I doubt if this label means it will fail more or less often - just that you'll send it back to a different place (Apple) if it breaks.

In practice anyone who runs a server without some form of redundant storage is, IMHO, a fool anyway. So I reckon just having a single disk in a box, makes it a domestic appliance - not a commercial grade server.

CERN completes 'world’s largest jigsaw puzzle'

Pete Silver badge

I think I'll wait

for some clever oriental to bring out the pocket-portable version.

"ATLAS's role is to measure particles produced in proton-proton collisions within its 7000 tonne, 28,750 cubic metre bulk packing 100 million sensors"

Terminator Salvation is go for May 2009 release

Pete Silver badge

at least total annihilation will stop global warming

New Mexico "represented an arid Western United States in a post-apocalyptic future" ...

Actually that's a pretty good description of NM right now. At least if the robots kill off all the people it won't get any more arid.

Gov boffins to carry out simulated London dirty bombing

Pete Silver badge

yesterday's threat

In the never ending catch-up that is all the govt seems capable of, has anyone though that maybe (just maybe) the baddies might do something novel?

If they *did* have the toxic material for a dirty bomb, and they wanted to distribute it, surely there are simpler and more fear (or should that be "awe") inducing ways that a boring old bomb?

This sounds a lot more like security theatre than a practical proposition. What happens if the baddies don't release their agents in the same street that the govt. run their test in? What happens if the wind is blowing in a different direction? What happens if it is/is-not raining?

There are far too many variables to make this test useful in any form other than a publicity ("there's nothing to fear") setting.

Pakistan blocks YouTube

Pete Silver badge

first of many?

All this tells us is how completely lacking the internet is when it comes to resilience.Now that people know what/how to drop a major site, I can see that it will only be a matter of time before M$, Google, the USA or pretty much any other major web location drops off the face of the planet.

Whether these losses will be due to incompetence or hackers (not even government sponsored, I can see this becoming the domain of script-kiddies) doesn't make much difference. The next logical step will be for the baddies to not just drop these sites, but to put up their own versions, with their own agendas/advertising/viruses.

Maybe the internet's age of security innocence is coming to an end?

Doctors back more tax on booze

Pete Silver badge

rich people get liver disease, too

If the government genuinely wanted to reduce deaths, they'd restrict alcohol consumption across the board - not merely raising the price so that people on low incomes couldn't afford it.

Raising the price (especially as the govt. has a vested interest, as they get to trouser the tax) is not the answer as it is a divisive process and discriminates against the social classes of voters who traditionally vote for the labour party.

Raising the price is also morally dubious, especially if the govt. acknowledge that some people are dependent on alcohol as it exploits their dependency to raise revenue - closer to the actions of drug pushers than a supposedly caring state.

The only fair way to reduce alcohol consumption across all social groups is to reduce access based on attributes other than price: age, rationing, times/days of sales, location of outlets would all work. The government could even admit they were wrong and bring back 10:30 closing times.

IT security controls partly blamed for SocGen debacle

Pete Silver badge

the fallacy of "security through obscurity"

The trader used his knowledge of the bank's IT system. They depended on traders not knowing where the holes were, to stop them from doing this kind of thing. As soon as a trader with the knowledge and the inclination came along, they got dropped in the brown stuff.

Compare this to how hackers gain access to peoples' PCs. They have both the skill and the inclination. The O/S vendor (no names!) stamps on people who publicise bugs and security holes in their beloved software, so faults don't get reported and don't get fixed. It's just another example of security through obscurity: if people don't know about a security problem, they cant use it.

Sadly no-one will learn this lesson. IT will continue to be a steel-armoured front door, with a side window left open. To conceal that fact, O/S manufacturers and financial institutions will simply disguise the open window, or prosecute anyone who points it out.

This won't be the last time a bank suffers a huge loss. The only surprising things are that nothing was learned after Nick Leeson's little escapade and that neither that, not this debacle was motivated by personal gain. I would expect that in many banks there are less scrupulous individuals quietly exploiting their own security holes and squirreling the money away for themselves.

Ban booze in supermarkets, says health adviser

Pete Silver badge

it's a culture thing, not a drink thing

The original piece is not about supermarkets, it's about cheap booze, specifically with respect to young people.That's not the problem.

People from every nation get drunk.

The main difference is that when young brits get drunk they (according to the stereotypes) go around smashing things up and thumping people.

Contrast this to drunks from other countries who will either seduce each other, talk loudly or just fall asleep.

The problem is not the getting drunk - it's why do young brits cause so much trouble when they do it. That seems to be a cultural problem, with what people do when they lose their inhibitions, rather than a booze = violence issue, which is the way the newpapers with the small vocabularies are presenting it.

In other countries booze is *much* cheaper than in the UK (7 euros for a 1litre bottle of local brandy, for example) but you don't get the middle-class, affluent, cut-off-from-reality, sip-of-sherry-on-a-saturday-night types there saying it should be made more expensive.

Maybe people should start looking at the root-cause, cultural, issues, rather than merely hiding the problem with the simplistic idea of "more tax" to stop individuals doing things they disapprove of.

HD DVD firesale begins on eBay

Pete Silver badge

a quick eBay tip for getting prices

If you want to know how much items are going for on eBay, don't rely on the £X amount with 5 minutes to go. We all know that most auctions shoot up in price in the last few seconds.

Instead do an advanced search and tick the "completed listings only" box. That'll list the closing price for past auctions.

Oh yes, if you want to exclude chinese stuff, select only items within 500 miles of birmingham

Consumer group slams 'unfair' software licenses

Pete Silver badge

if they did write the licenses in plain english ...

... they'd probably read something like this:

You've just paid for our software, but

- we make no guarantee that it will work

- if it doesn't work, too bad. You're not getting your money back

- we won't fix any bugs

- you can't sell it, back it up, let anyone else use it, or use it for business purposes (even if you were told you could)

- if the CD gets scratched, you'll have to buy another copy

- if you change or upgrade your computer, you'll have to buy another copy

- it could completely break any other software you're using, including other products from us.

- it probably won't be compatible with the next version

- you'll have to upgrade a load of other things (including mandatory "service packs" that will stop other, random, programs from working

- the manual will be completely irrelevant and unintelligible

- if your computer is more than 6 months old, it's run too slowly to be any use

Now just press "I accept", close your eyes, cross your fingers and hope.

Have a nice day

Counterfeit vans: A little-known online grocery scam

Pete Silver badge

makes people more paranoid - we all suffer

So this is a threat that Ocado have "identified" (shouldn't that be "dreamed up"), presumably without ever having seen one single incident. I suppose they would say that "well, it's possible".

It seems to be to be a manipulative way to gain a USP - Unique Selling Proposition. Until of course all the other home delivery outfits latch on, so it'll only be a few weeks or months before they're all at it.

What this means is that, with absolutely no evidence that this has ever happened, their customers have now been made afraid of another way that baddies could mug/rob/con them. They've increased the overall level of fear for a small and temporary increase in their marketing reach - I hope they're proud of themselves.

Bush orders US Navy to shoot down rogue spy sat

Pete Silver badge

@worried about hydrazine

The scuttle left a *lot* of debris, that may be why the yanks are so worried. The particularly sensitive information is the size of the camera lens/mirror as this determines the size of objects on the ground that can be identified. Wreckage may also leave the CCD & other optics intact which would give info about the amount of ground in a photo and also the wavelengths of light the camera works at

Pete Silver badge

what would be really funny

... is if the chinese shot it down first!.

I can imagine the statement from the chinese government:

"we were equally concerned about the risk to health from the unspent fuel and since China has a larger surface area than america, there was a greater chance of it falling on us. So we decided to use our proven sat-killer technology rather than wait for the americans, who might have missed"

Maybe it'll become a new olympic sport?

Oz teen elephant pregnancy sparks protests

Pete Silver badge

prudes running wild

I'm not an expert, but I'd say that of you have two elephants that are intent on having sex, there's not much that a zoo keeper can do about it. Calling it "irresponsible" and likening it to "allowing" 12 year-olds getting pregnant is completely bizarre.

Maybe these people woud prefer the animals to wear trousers and skirts - that way they could kid themselves that they're just like the ones in childrens' books - with no reproductive organs at all.

When poor people pollute - the Tata Nano and eco-crime

Pete Silver badge

@elephant

So far as economic growth goes, you have to face up to the point that the overwhelming majority of the world's population is so far below our living standard that the planet cannot support everyone having central heating, a car, TV, nice furniture and all the other trappings of contemporary western life.

Hell, one third of the world's population doesn't have *any* electricity at all. When the sun goes down, their lives just stop. So even getting them up to "poverty" level would take a huge amount of CO2 emission. Keeping them there, even more.

Ask yourself this: (c'mon everyone, you can all take part) which is better, to keep the climate as it is now, or to stop 2 billion people from dying early? Hint: you can't have both, unless their carbon emissions come directly from you

UK men would stay out of bed for 50in plasma telly

Pete Silver badge

shock news: people lie when answering questionnaires

most people just give the answers they think the surveyor wants to hear. I bet they would get completely different answers if the person asking the questions was a tall, blonde 22-year old model than if she was a 55 year old, 22 stone granny with a moustache.

p.s. any chance they'd back-date the offer :-)

Should the IT department be accountable for energy use?

Pete Silver badge

it's only "funny money" - makes no difference

OK let's imagine that IT is to be billed for the leccy it's (actually, the company's) computers use. How would that work? Budgets are calculated on the basis of what a department costs. It you increase a department's costs then their budget needs will go up. Likewise if you change things so that (for example) Facilities are no longer responsible for paying the power bill, their costs will go down. It's not as if they'll be allowed to keep the money they're now not spending - it just gets funnelled to a different cost centre.

Of course is you were a CFO with no clue, and even stupider staff, you could probably get a way with call ing this a green initiative, but no-one with half a brain would believe it.

Iran fires rocket 'into space', plans satellite for '09

Pete Silver badge

@Dave Why not?

> if Iran lobbed one or two nukes at the US using the technology - how many would come back?

Interesting question. Given that the yanks haven't put a nuke on a rocket, fired it and detonated the bomb for well over 40 years they may be a little rusty. It's over 15 year (1992) since they even popped one off underground, so the scientists who have tested american weapons are all retired now and none of the current generation know how to do anything except simulate!

Maybe thet'd have to go cap in hand to the North Loreans and ask how it's done for real :-)

'Crash tested' e-voting machines spread doubt on Super Tuesday

Pete Silver badge

the proof of the pudding

will be how many nominations Ronald Regan gets

Microhoo! marriage hits Google salaries hard

Pete Silver badge

job agency commission

Google are actually paying £50K for this post, but once the agency has taken their placement fees, there's only a quid left.

Boffin shortage will blight Blighty's prosperity

Pete Silver badge

water off a duck's back

Sadly the people in govt who read these reports are all arts/history/language/"-ology" graduates and are therefore incapable of understanding the facts, figures and forecasts of what a lack of science/tech graduates mean. Since the Daily Mail doesn't have hysterical front page headlines about the lack of quality scientists, they'll do nothing.

I'm left with the distinct impression that so long as people can watch programmes on TV about nature and fluffy animals, with the occasional pretty piccy from Hubble thrown in, they reckon that "science" is in good shape.

US Navy to test fire electric hypercannon

Pete Silver badge

...back in favour of surface craft - hardly!

OK it might just be possible to shoot one or two rounds, depending on the recharge rate, at an attacking aircraft with one of these thingys, but they won't be much good against submarines. As the old (submariners) saying goes:

"there are two types of naval vessel - submarines and targets"

Oh yes, what happens to all the loose metal on a ship when it fires it's rail gun, will there be more friendly casualties from flying spanners etc. than the enemy will suffer?

Low-tech hack was behind $7.2bn SocGen fraud

Pete Silver badge

it wan't me - he must've hacked my access codes!

Ahh, the old "someone got my password" excuse.

Well, maybe they did crack/guess/spot other people's passwords, that should not necessarily remove blame from this guy's colleagues. How did he get these access codes? "Hey Jean-Paul, can I borrow your access code for a second" "Mais Oui, Jerome it's ...."

It's very convenient for the bank to point the finger and say it's all the work of one single "evil genius" (lone gunman comes to mind here). I would expect the truth is much harder to swallow and will lead to an accusation of a general lack of security, both in the bank's processes and in staff mentality

'100% accurate' face recognition algorithm announced

Pete Silver badge

buy a burkah and wear sunglasses

then let's see it recognise faces.

I'd also like to see how it fares with identical twins

Rogue trader blows sox off control systems

Pete Silver badge

old news

every other news outlet was talking about this days ago.

The story's so old it's growing mould

Employee's silent rampage wipes out $2.5m worth of data

Pete Silver badge

heh heh, a better way to screw with the company

I wonder what the legal status would be if she hadn't deleted the files, just encrypted them?

The data's still there, so nothing's been stolen. Yo umight argue "criminal damage", but if she could demonstrate that when restored, they hadn't been damaged, woudl that argument hold up?

So long as she didn't ask for money for the encryption key, there's no extortion angle.

Pete Silver badge

wot, no backups?

How can a business have such a high value of assets unprotected (from hardware failure) by keeping them on just a single server?

What if they had a fire, or disk failure, or someone nicked the whole damn box. It amazes me just how irresponsible businesses still are, even after decades of banging on about security and backups and redundant copies we still get businesss who rely on the pure dumb luck that theor box won't fry itself, or some trainee won't accidentally reformat something.

Accenture and BAE pull out of ID card project

Pete Silver badge

they'll be back

Just wait until the govt starts waving money - they'll all be buzzing around like flies over a **** Until there's any prospect of that, there's no project, so no reason to be involved.

Vodafone USB Modem 7.2

Pete Silver badge

speed is "up to ...", maybe cost should be "up to", too

Mobile internet devices are infamous for quoting ludicrously unreachable theoretical maximum speeds with real-life values of maybe 1/10th the headline figure.

It would be nice if we could hold back on the line rental and just pay on a pro-rata basis

French government decides mobiles 'may not be safe'

Pete Silver badge

Re: ...and the risk indeed!

Society never bans things that have a risk attached. They only ban things when the risk outweighs the benefits.

Cars are the classic example (oh god, I wish I hadn't mentioned that). We can even count the number of deaths per year that are caused in motor accidents. However, the benefits are huge, and society as a whole is prepared[1] to accept the cost, both in finacial and social terms.

Phones are similar. The benefits are great and the risks, if they exist at all, are too small to measure. Result: acceptance, see [1]

[1] yes a few individuals don't like 'em. Tough, this is a dicta^H^H^H^H^Hdemocracy, everyone else loves them - live with it.

Skills shortage: it's mind over matter

Pete Silver badge

Too much process waste

When you look at what most IT staff spend their days actually doing, it becomes strikingly obvious that most of it is NOT what they are qualified for. While they might be a trained Java/C++/SQL programmer or a designer or tester or whatever, a significant proportion of people's time is spent sitting passively in meetings, writing progress reports, wading through emails CC'd to 100 irrelevant people and approving documents they neither care about nor understand.

This all happens because no-one today is prepared to make a decision, without the safety blanket of "shared responsibility" and indemnity.This comes from having everyone else (involuntarily) a party to that decision, since they were "copied in" or had to "sign off" on the decision because the process requires it. Likewise the talent can't afford to ignore all this bumf, because they will be held acountable if they fail to spot the one single sentence in an entire email that may, possibly, effect their area of responsibility.

What the industry needs is for people who are productive in an area to be allowed to GET ON WITH IT, while others who have no special skills (we call them "managers") get out of the way and do their job of facilitating the money-earners by making sure they do not get delayed with pointless interruptions and distractions. It should be the management goal to ensure that the talent has the information and resources they need, in a timely manner so they are not delayed in making the products that pay everyone's wages.

Geminids warm up for annual light show

Pete Silver badge
Unhappy

totally overhyped

Every time there's an astronomical event (meteors, eclipse, comet etc) the pundits always tell us it will be "spectacular". It never is.

Even when the event isn't clouded in or rained off and you're away from light pollution - a mean trick in itself in the UK, unless you live on Dartmoor or the scottish Highlands, it's rarely even up to watching a plane go over at night.

Now pardon me for actually reading the article, but a "few dozen meteors per hour", or one every minute or two is not exactly a firework display.

What seems to happen is columnists who have no idea what they're talking about see an article that was written by and for amateur astronomers. They think "wow!" and copy it, adding a few embellishments to sexy it up and print it. I just wish these writers would stick to things they know about and quit the incessant hype.

Canadian runs up $85,000 mobe bill

Pete Silver badge

It's time that internet companies spoke our language ...

... instead of taking words with well-defined common meanings and twisting them into marketing speak. For example 20Mb/s* (where the * means "up to" and usually only gives you 1/3 rd of the headline figure). Or "unlimited downloads" where unlimited really means "however much we want to cap you at - which we'll never tell you".

If a phone plan says yo can use the phone to connect to the internet - that's it, you can USE IT. Real people don't know what "tethering" means or even what a "modem" is for that matter. If phone companies want to make your usage so restrictive, that information needs to be in plain english (or canadian) and at least as high-profile as the original headline.

It's about time some of the regulators took on the phone and internet companies. I really hope someone takes an ISP to court soon and gets a judgement that this woolly advertising practice has no standing.

Maybe I should start paying "up to" £15 per month for my "up to" 10Mb/s connection: fair's fair.

Met plan moves police to out of town megabases

Pete Silver badge

isn't that how they do it in Iraq?

Large bases that the public aren't allowed in, away from the trouble areas. And have a force of "locals" actually plodding the streets. Who says the govt. never learns.

All we need to do is increase the number of armed officers and replace their hats with berets and you'll be there.

Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia

Pete Silver badge

publish this (on Wikipedia)

This article sounds like it belongs on Wikipedia, as a reminder of what can go wrong when a small number of people assign themselves unaccountable power over others.

IT departments poised to fly past airlines on CO2 emissions

Pete Silver badge

just good planning

statements like ..."already used up 75 per cent of their data centre floorspace and 61 per cent expected to hit storage capacity within two years." Is exactly what you'd want to happen. Floorspace and storage capacity are not hard limits (in the way that the amount of land is). When one datacentre fills up, companies just build another - or extend the ones they have.

Therefore there is no question about growth being sustainable or unsustainable, it's just growth. If it becomes uneconomic it will stop, not because the amount of capacity purchased 2 years ago has been used up.

You would not expect a datacentre to be buiilt larger than needed, nor would you expect a company to buy more storage that it has immediate use for - since the price of storage drops year on year, that would be daft.

if you want datacentres to use less electricity, reduce the (legal) requirements for disaster recovery and hot standby systems, that double the consumption but don't do any useful work. You don't get airlines flying 2 planes to every destination on the offchance that one will break down.

Maybe if we, as users, were willing to put up with websites loading in a second longer, there would be less pressure on companies to run such fast and hot servers.

Net to be whupped by TV in attention battle

Pete Silver badge

one to many or one to one

The thing about the internet is that to scale up, you need a new connection for each new subscriber. Apart from a PC, that means more connectivity, more network infrastructure, wider pipes. Compare that with enlarging a TV aurdience - all you need is more TVs.

From a simple economic point of view, it is easier and cheaper to double the size of the TV watching audience than the number of internet subscribers

However 2012 is only five years away (well, just over 4 if you count Jan 2008) so whatever happens, it won;t change very much in that short space of time

Commuters shouting into their mobiles? Just jam 'em

Pete Silver badge

@ "cough" friend

ahh, I thinkI know the one you mean ($48, free P&P?).

After getting the train from London to Bath during the week and having a tosser wittering away for the whole trip, and then ANOTHER on the way back I fully intend to get one of these.

Personally I don't care if they're illegal. I don't care if it annoys one individual in the carriage and I know I will neither get caught nor prosecuted for having or using it. (I may however get a medal)

If people simply don't have the internal resources to sit quietly for an hour or two, or are so invasive of (to?) the personal space of others, they deserve to be treated like the two-year-olds they are emulating and should have their lives controlled for them.

Gov advisers pick six crucial techs for UK

Pete Silver badge

where are the goals?

Having read (well, skimmed) the publication it all seems very airy-fairy as far as setting goals for this initiative. From what I could see there was no single statement in any of the tech. descriptions to say what tangible outputs there would be.

It does look to me as if the government has some rather ill-perceived ideas of what will be important to the UK (but cyclones, earthquakes?) and has decided to throw some money in those general directions. Maybe they'll be able to say they are doing something, but from this I can't see where the payoff will come from.

Telling lies to a computer is still lying, rules High Court

Pete Silver badge

sauce for the goose (reciprocity)

so if it's illegal for a person to lie to a computer, should it hold that it is then illegal for a computer (or the person/entity who programmed it) to lie to a person?

Examples:

the product is in stock

this page will load in a few seconds

you are the millionth visitor to this page

Hitachi 'collision avoidance' bot does a Ballmer at press do

Pete Silver badge

complete misrepresentation

... you should be ashamed of this report.

This hysterical and robo-phobic report is nothing like what the A.P. story says. You have completely blown it out of all proportion just to get a juicy headline. The robot in question bumped once, then was grabbed before it fell over, since it operates on two wheels (a trick neither you nor I could manage)

There was no "orgy of violence" and no possibility (sadly) of any reporters getting dismembered.

Get a grip and stick to reporting the facts if you want to retain your credibitiy. If not, go work for the Daily Mail - this is just up their street.

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