* Posts by I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

1355 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2007

Thievin' teen bot herder admits to infecting military computers

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Flame

Hire the biatch

Rather than send him to prison hire him at the rates the first poster suggests is standard. The long hours and all that aggro will either make him fit to go up against those commie hackers or cure him of the wish to infect.

Then if the Canadians need teaching another lesson in diplomacy like they did in the 1960's or Brown turns into another Wilson, instead of water-boarding a Canadian Ambassador or framing Brown with saucy snaps, they could just give them DDOSs or even BSODs.

That'll learn em!

Teen hacker re-unlocks Apple's iPhone

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Go

* A title is required...not

So what is to stop another phone manufacturer making iPhonalikes with crippleware to keep them legal and giving the lad a crate or two to play with?

I'd buy one for about the £20 they are really worth, if I didn't already have an old Samsung

EFF and chums sue Feds over border laptop inspections

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Paris Hilton

Home of the brave

It may not be the land of the free. Was it ever? Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees in the home of the brave and the land of the free?

It seems to be alive and kicking in Utah these days too. Of course hanging 70 yr old white women was never a national sport:

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_8214996

This would never happen in Los Angeles. Not if you are a young, cross eyed white whore at least.

New Mexico bets future on promiscuous supercomputer

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@ Ru

Or in a desert and only use it at night?

If they have a market earmarked there is not much to argue with so long as the contract is signed.

How many New Mexicans will be taken on to maintain it? And why is the running cost going to be 2 million dollars. That seems inordinately high for a computer, or do they include the cost of a solar energy plant?

It actually begins to make sense now. Cheap real estate, free energy in the day and night cooling. Combine that with plenty of available labour.

I imagine a lot of high-tech projects might be attracted to the region if they were offered that background.

Stopblair.eu tries to halt Tony's march on Brussels

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Pirate

Why the hell do I have to relog in every time I solve the issues of the day?

He is a war criminal and belongs in prison not politics which is what I put on the comment when I signed it.

Seabed cables will be fixed by next week

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Black Helicopters

Is it really so

So the guardian PDF of the five or so broken links was wrong?

Or is this a CIA plot to reassure us the terrrrists aren't winning?

SCO details bleak future

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Go

Share and share alike.

Boise, their solicitor or whatever, has booked up to go the course for 40,000 shares as far as I know. These are worth some $0.045 per share cents according to http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_S/threadview?m=tm&bn=2942&tid=450831&mid=450831&tof=-1&rt=2&frt=2&off=1 (Which didn't stop someone selling a bunch of them just before news of the French bank scandal broke recently.

And at $1800.oo, makes the firm one of the most grossly overpaid luxuries going.

Which leaves this misdirection:

"The revenue from our UNIX business has been declining over the last several years primarily as a result of continued competition from alternative operating systems, particularly Linux and from the negative publicity of the SCO Litigation."

It's not as if they made money -even when they were honest. That "revenue" was at a nett loss.

US Army struggles with Windows to Linux overhaul

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Paris Hilton

Blue Farce of Death

It explains all the blue on blues.

But someone mentioned the police force vss criminals. The criminals are not more secure or better oriented toward modern communication. Far from it. Their difficulty lies in lessons learned.

The police can get away with making mistakes. One after the other. And because of command lines they may never get rectified. But they use work arounds, unofficial protocols.

Criminals are lucky to survive making one mistake. They can amass fortunes until that happens but someone else will be spending it if they make one mistake.

And so we must assume the same reasoning on the battlefield. Only with communication errors, the military will only get to make one mistake per man killed until someone tells the chimp he is making a mistake.

The problem then is getting the fool to listen.

It won't matter if you use Linux or what.

I wonder what version of Windows the military is using. I bet it is a cut down version of Win 95.

IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet

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Paris Hilton

Nervous Centre

Perhaps someone over there aught to think about centralising a couple of these things to cater for their elections. One in each camp instead of a Diebold or set of Diebolds in every voting station.

That way when the inevitable fraud charges erupt both parties would have access to the computers. Be nice if they were in flood/hurricane/tornado/earthquake proof centres too.

Somewhere in England perhaps. OK not England, at least US IT tends to be secretive. If it were in England everyone with access to a bug would be in there. They have the freedom of information act and we just have an act.

France then?

Hollywood writers abandon Hollywood for web

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@ Steve Roper

The OP sounds like he is doing all right. (Obviously not a man of principle.) Either that or he is writing for Reader's Digest or some other political rag.

That's assuming he is a writer. Not just a mouth. I wonder if he is a writer, does he write novels or some such rather than scripts? If so does he have an agent?

If so can he say why he needs a personal assistant to do what less well cared for writers need to unite to obtain?

Everyone needs some sort of representative who knows the ropes when it comes to negotiations. "Those that can, do" so to speak. Those that can't, get a union/manager. It's that simple. Not everybody has negotiation skills. It doesn't come naturally to some people.

*****

But what is this about:

"One such venture is Virtual Artists, a company that bills itself as a marriage of "A-list writers from Hollywood" and "A-list writers of free/open source software.""

The link goes to a site you have to supply an e-mail to. But we don't need to worry as they will respect it. Spam it perhaps but at least do so with respect?

As it happens I wish them well but if they are backed with web techies they aught to know that exclusivity has a price online. Or don't the writers know the first 3 things about their business are: Publicity, publicity, publicity.

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@ Steve,

US went overseas because the US financed it. It took UK manufacturing with it once the ball got going. With the USA managing all the armies in the Orient outside China and Russia, what were the eastern countries going to spend money on?

As for Mafiosi running unions. The fact is that once a section of a community gets used to a certain lifestyle, it's nearly impossible to make them revert to suit market forces.

Look what happened after the full tilt production and high wages of coal miners in WW 1. As soon as production was cut back, the management expected the miners to take massive reductions in salaries.

And they wouldn't do it. So customers went abroad. It's as simple as that. When did the USA start seriously looking at small cars? Or high quality production?

Just like us in the UK: never.

It's only due to the fact that the USA spawned the oriental car markets that they still have an auto industry. And it's only because the Japanese have an interest in Europe, that Britain has one.

It has almost nothing to do with unions. (Unless you count the fact that management couldn't force individuals to take pay cuts.) Wait and see what happens in the wonderful world wide web when market forces do more than shift help desks overseas.

I can't see Intel or other huge code writing companies relying on western resource pools. Google doesn't, unless you count the free software they use. Complex, is it knot?

Straw: Police can bug MPs without asking Cabinet

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Bugger off

Looks like the evidence against the accused is inadmissible. What gets me is that they have kept the poor bloke there for 2 years and are only amassing evidence retrospectively, ie while they have his conversations in that cage bugged.

Meanwhile, no US troops have been sent to Britain to tell us why they killed our lads. Or maybe they sent their testimonies on disk?

BitTorrent admin's police bail extended (again)

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Happy

Hamless offairs.

"Critics accused Cleveland police of allowing itself to be misled by the record industry anti-piracy lobby. In the BBC News report of the raid, for example, Ellis was accused of "illegally downloading music on to his website" and Detective Inspector Colin Green wrongly stated that OiNK users paid subscriptions"

It was a red rag to a porker though, calling it Oink. Our boys in blue are not exactly famous for treading lightly, especially in matters electroiink.

A380 superjumbo in natural-gas powered test flight

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Paraffin

By any other name.

What would be the chances of getting a plane airborne on a mixture of Bunker Fuel and Hydrogen?

Air pollution driving midweek rain

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@PJH

The latest stats are for a particular part of the USA and refer to a particular type of weather system.

MiYahoo's future rests with open source and courage

I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

iHooM?

It must have occurred to Google's owners a long time ago that using cool runnings would allow them to run a broader based network as well as a less power hungry one and that it would eminently suit climates in places like Malaysia, which were waiting to be knocked over.

So, while we were all wondering if Google were going to go head to head in a pointless duel with Microsoft, they pumped Open Source and went fishing. And whilst Yahoo and M$ simmer at home, fighting internal politics and legal squabbles to settle disputes over money they made years ago, their competition has come up with another cunning plan.

Google is set to make Rupert Murdoch's empire look tin-pot. And Open Source is going to heal IBMs open sores and final scores. I can't see what Microsoft is going to do with Yahoo except bring a bigger fire engine to the blaze.

Think about it. What is there in the merger that is going to shine when it's polished? Some new e-mail presentation? Another search tool? Alternative groups?

That's it?

That's a joke, right? There is nothing in the article that points to something we haven't already got.

Microsoft! needs! Yahoo! developers! developers! developers!

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Not getting IT

"Microsoft has a track record of "not getting" it when it comes to building and supporting online services, from the early days of SGI's mighty Rick Belluzzo taking Microsoft's internet helm to the snotty nosed de-activation of measly-sized Hotmail email accounts."

This paragraph and Visa between them sum up Microsoft completely. What purpose does it serve to remove a site from MSN? Or is there a clause that advertisers can sue them if they leave a dead site up?

How much does it cost to keep someone's e-mail account open?

And who the hell decided that pushing DRM was a Microsoft responsibility? WTF did they think they were doing when they designed that fault?

So that just leaves their Office ware about to beach high and dry. You wouldn't have thought it possible a few years ago. But lacking innovation and having victims fight back...

Someone must have forgot to grease the pot in Europe. It's not as if the British Govt couldn't have accepted some, they are as crooked as a badly bent thing.

419 scammers plead guilty in US

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@ Andus

The Nederlands have joints the US has torture. Plus gang wars. Might be good.

I hope so!

Microsoft! bids! $44.6bn! for! Yahoo!

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Jobs Halo

A shot at redemption.

Most comments seem to be against the duopoly but as far as I am concerned Yahoo went to the dogs when it sold out a Chinese blogger.

I am ambivalent about the proposed deal but if M$ promise to ditch all Yahoo management, I shall probably not go Linux. Not that anyone would miss me.

Top secret UK data network goes live two years late

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Coat

Code Direct

I don't know what was wrong with CDs. They seem to be perfectly secure.

Beats throwing them out of the car in a lap top anyway. Waste of a perfectly good lap top, I always thought.

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Happy

@ Anyone

Data is read, something just blew; no more CDs

Over to you.

Email trail from navy man to London 'terror' site goes fuzzy

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Stop

Extradition to a country that uses torture? Us?

How can Britain extradite anyone to a country that murdered a Canadian Ambassador for telling the truth about Viet Nam?

OK the bloke behind it and the smear on Harold Wilson is long gone but the patriots involved in the crime are still in power.

What on earth is behind our secret police? The SS?

US military prepares for plummeting spy satellite

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Boffin

@ Mike Richards

The US abandoned nuclear reactors on satellites fairly early as it perfected efficient solar cells for its reconnaissance satellites. They could put their satellites further out where solar arrays were less prone to atmospheric drag and make up for the greater distance with superior optics.

These things are as big a buses because of all the fuel they carry. It's either that or plutonium firing helium discharges.

The fuel is for overcoming gravity anomalies and friction. They use tiny amounts of fuel to correct the orbit or to change it to suit a topical event.

Having failed to locate it properly they probably used up most of the fuel intended for minor orbital correction on getting its error corrected. Or tried to.

Larger or more modern solar panels will only have served to cut size and weight. Most of the 24/7 ability would have come from rechargeable batteries. Early varieties built up a problem locking into a poor charge cycle due to the regularity at which they were drained and charged.

That problem gave rise to the idea that power packs on earth need to be fully drained before they are recharged.

Malaysia flirts with Google over world's biggest data center

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@ Lars

Wasn't that sort of attitude the thing that lead to the split between Microsoft and IBM?

IBM were looking at hardware and M$ were seeing software. 2000 computers these days would knock spots of 100 000 in those, whatever those days were.

It ain't what you say it's the way that you say it.

That's what gets results.

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Happy

@Dave Harris

Nope.

In such a country as Malaysia you would know who to go to and what to go with. Everyone would make a profit. Big toothy smiles all around.

A few thousand more miles and you could have direct connections to anywhere on the South China sea. What's stopping them?

To do anything like that in Britain would require upsetting everyone and their dogs. Which is probably why no-one has attempted it. I did hear of someone trying once, Cable and Wireless. Are they still in business?

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Stop

@ greatwestern

You have identified a problem.

You don't suppose that the people behind Google might have identified it as something else?

One thing Google knows is the power of the web. With enough munie a company could establish themselves well and truly if they got in at the start of business.

And it would cost a lot less to make Malaysia a top notch nation than it would to do something similar in Britain. They wouldn't have to deal with an impenetrable level of corruption for one thing.

I've read stories about the Google people inventing their own server hardware. It sounds to me it would only take a few million miles of relatively cheap glass wire to connect it all.

It won't have to go into a sewerage system too, neither. Good luck to 'em. I'd like to have seen Tory BLiar inviting them in to sort out BT instead of giving Microsoft carte blanch to sort out our IT all those years ago.

What a stupid tosser.

Amateur code breaker honoured for defeating Colossus

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Paris Hilton

Short sighted oaf.

"Churchill ordered each of the machines to be disassembled after the war in order to keep their design secret."

Good job virtually all the Nazi leaders were even more stupid.

Apple on the lookout for one million unlocked iPhones

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Enigma Version II

What sort of people would want to pay extra every time that Apple issue an update?

I can't imagine a million users would want the hassle. Something is odd about all this.

Spy satellite to slam Earthside

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Flame

A singular disingenuousness.

Rather lacking in facts that article of yours.

"It's estimated that the spacecraft weighs about 20,000lb - roughly the size of a small bus - and might contain beryllium: a light metal with a high melting point that's used in the defence and aerospace industries."

It might weigh about 200,000 lb and contain plutonium in the beryllium. Or are we supposed to believe the real threat is from beryllium that was too durable to ionise?

So who do we sue if it turns out that the beryllium was used as open ended (weapons grade) plutonium cases?

There aught to be a democratic result oriented icon for stories like this where radioactive fall out and the like is just as likely to drop on London and Birmingham as it is on North Wales or some Twatt in Orkney.

(Thinks) Should I include a link for that last bit? (Stops thinking and hits Enter.)

RIPA could be challenged on human rights

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Coat

Password schmashword

What is to stop someone writing a code to make the hard drive erase if a certain word or phrase is used?

If the drive is half full of pictures, all it has to do is copy them once on top of a quick erase. Or am I being silly?

But why would anyone want to keep something incriminatory on an hard drive? If they were intelligent enough to thwart the law, they'd be mad.... to... err....

OK, I see.

Bush orders NSA to snoop on US agencies

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Boffin

Can you tell who it is yet?

Come on, he isn't on strings for the hawks in the Pentagon/Global Oil Pirates or anyone else. Nobody who can simultaneously deal with the worst attack on the USA since Pearl Harbour AND read My Pet Goat (UPSIDE DOWN) can be that stupid.

He's got a plan, you wait and see.

Leaked email reveals civil service laptop rules

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Thumb Down

Nice to see you to see you nice

Any reason for the stuff to be on file without the person or persons concerned being informed of it?

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

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Happy

@yeah, right.

If the drawing were ever required during the life of the building, they would be worth a substantial amount to the architect.

It's unlikely that he would require all of the seven years worth. Any idea how many building that might entail? 7 years worth of work or 4 hours worth of deletion.

Sounds substantial either way. And CAD software isn't that cheap either. I think 2.5 M sounds fair. I would certainly press for higher damages than the cost of the IT resolution.

Pity they can't.

At least no lasting damage was done, quite the reverse. They learned a useful lesson that may stand them in good stead if they ever lose an hard drive/raid array and they got rid of a really nasty person.

No loss there. And the bill is tax deductible, I imagine.

A good result was had by all.

Maybe even a party after her sentence.

Auntie hops in bed with Murdoch on MySpace

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Thumb Down

Streaming pile of oops.

How can iPlayer be available for Linux?

It took years and cost a large fortune to cobble together the player. And there was no money in the pot or time to make do and mend the last time BBC TV tax was mentioned in parliament.

So where did the funding come from to bring the rebirth of the original abortion?

Autothrottle problems suspected in Heathrow 777 crash

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Thumb Up

What OS?

I have had enough crashes on my computer to want to know what they are running. I don't think it's Windows, somehow.

Sun's JavaFX tools to interop with Adobe

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Black Helicopters

That'll learn me.

I must remember to read the poster's name before reading the comment.

MoD laptop losses expose government data indifference

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Flame

CD heaven

I know what's happening to our CDs they are being used by George Bush and co to hide all their secrets.

Why else would so many CDs disappear without trace? Either that or there is a mountain of them secreted about the EU.

Yet more go astray. And that is only from mid December:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7204399.stm

Mashups haunted by past experience

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School support staff are in unison.

Eventually, the author was found, questions were answered and a compromise reached: the teacher was pulled from his teaching duties and moved to head office for the maintenance of the library software.

The teacher was now folded into the IT team, which meant the maintenance of the software could be properly managed and documented should he ever leave or once he retired. It did mean, though, this one teacher never taught again.

*******

So they took a willing volunteer with a successful idea and entwined him in a place he should have been most use? And this is not better than them hiring another teacher to replace him?

I would have thought the difference in having the lowest paid IT staff in the business eked out with someone with sharp end experience of what the educational needs are would be no bad thing.

Or are IT staff employed in schools paid what they are worth in some other places?

Viva VBA - alas

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Gates Horns

Election Promises

Someone remind me just what Tory B Liar had in mind when he was a sock puppet for Microsoft? How many years ago is it now?

RIAA wiped off the net

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Thumb Up

Nice going but no cigar.

Instead of wiping the server, they should have inserted a few famous names. Not too many but enough to seed allegations of whatever.

From water wheels to the Google brain

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Happy

Leat to l33t

Nothing to say about it but I got the best title.

Or should that be the naffest? Is this a nafffest?

Chinese firm sets legal dragons on Microsoft

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Hung? W ong.

First they try you then they shoot you then they charge your mam for the bullet used.

Personal data for 650,000 customers vanishes into thin air

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Unhappy

Chimpsville.

Well it's nice to know we only lose our stuff because we don't have any security in government.

And that fractious colony has the same problem because they do.

Imagine the fiasco that could result if we got together over the subject. We'd end up in the wrong country in the wrong war killing the wrong peopl....errr...

Oh...

Software firm bills council over high website traffic

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Black Helicopters

Who needs to lose CDs?

These days all you need to get your personal needs and circumstances sent to a disinterested third party is allow a government agency to use your website.

I hate to think how much capital Russia is making from all of this ability.

They have just the sort of secret police they can call out of retirement to collate the data and use it it effectively.

Boro council in child data theft flap

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Alien

What the hewl?

It's hard to believe how incredibly stupid government agencies are.

When I were a lad one of the things drummed into us was not to keep other people's personal data on computer. That you could go to gaol for keeping other people's data online -even if you were running a charity or social club.

So now we have the idiots in charge of the most personal of personal data actually employed by the people who police us all and the data of all data being hung out like washing on a line left overnight.

I dare say they will issue an apology then forget everything they might have learned.

Criminal idiocy has its feet well under the table at night in Britain.

TalkTalk and Carphone on the naughty step

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Happy

Lost in e space

As an AOL user, I wrote to them to ask about what Talk Talk and the assorted detritus over there was getting up to and they sent me some CDs.

Or at least they said that they were in the post.

Beeb confirms iPlayer streaming dominance

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Paris Hilton

Smug, cynical, ill-informed and spiteful.

Smug = middle class or just well educated?

Cynical = experienced in working for British management.

Ill-informed = modern journalism.

Spiteful = uncouth but honest?

What I want to know is what the flip one can spend 25 minutes usefully watching on the BBC that you can't get in 2 minutes online elsewhere. OK DIY tips are likely to be text only and holiday programmes aren't going to be much more than adverts.

That just leaves East Enders and quiz programmes.

Who needs it? Paris Hilton?

AT&T to crush copyrighted network packets

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What plausible business model...

the communications giant joined Microsoft and NBC Universal in arguing that internet service providers - like AT&T itself - should be sniffing your networks packets and blocking anything that copyright holders don't travelling over the wire.

*****

"Blocking anything that copyright holders don't" what?

What is Microsoft doing in the censorship business? Who ever bought an operating systems package (or an office one for that matter) because they needed it to determine what copyright laws are throughout the world?

Who's idea was that?

One can understand an ISP's wish to be clean of whatever laws there are on copyright wherever they are based. One can see the point of NBC Universal being involved.

Even if you twist things to include the fear Microsoft has that they can be scammed by the same file sharing pirates.

But when you buy an OS, you don't expect to be actively involved in helping all these good people to sort out their problems -by default, do you?

UK.Gov green lights nuclear power

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Gates Halo

@Russell Hancock

> tides are very predictable (roughly every 5 3/4 hours) and reliable!!

I thought it was about 12 hours and just under 20 minutes..... so much for reliability!

> Oh and there ain't much uranium in Cornwall....

We don't need much. And if they only need to run at 2% capacity, we don't need 98% of that.

And the bonus is that the more we use to power bloatware and stuff, the less there will be left over to make atom bombs.

FBI preps $1bn biometric database

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Thumb Up

Missing Innaction

I am all in favour of these big friendly giants.

I think the idea behind losing all the data discs they can involves gathering all the fingerprints they need when they finally locate them.

The longer they are missing the more filthy criminals will get their dirty hands on them and the more crooks they will be able to identify.

I think I got that right didn't I? That's the reasoning behind the giant databases in the first place, some kind of a sting operation? Is that right?