Posts by Christoph

Just the thing we need ...

... to fire at anyone wanting to get on a plane in the USA. Well obviously we need to - that 5 year-old kid might be a terrorist, and the manufacturer's salesman assured us that there's no medical risk at all.

And other objections

"There are huge political, legal and diplomatic objections,"

They hadn't noticed that there are also huge technical objections?

Asking for it

They locked up the drives for two years, then moved them somewhere else, then looked around for someone to sort them out? Hardly surprising that it went wrong.

If drives with extremely sensitive data were redundant and removed, they should have gone straight to secure destruction.

And surely an NHS region can find enough spare cash to get some gadget that can mangle a disk drive beyond the ability of anyone short of GCHQ to recover data from it.

Not the Mekon's body shape though

The Mekon's body was shrunken and spindly. By 300AD the average US body shape will approximate to a sphere.

"Scarecrow"

They missed the chance to call it "Worzel Gummidge"?

How did they hit that many?

Mistaken anti-virus hits usually only knock out one program that happened to trigger a new signature. How did they manage to hit that many? Or was it one core windows component that all of them used?

The NHS is, what, the third biggest employer on the planet? And they can't get volume discounts?

This is new?

The traffic sensing bit is ancient - they had those black rubber bars across the road to sense traffic movement near junctions decades ago.

Security problems

How much will it cost to upgrade security for every single military and business and private site that relies on a fence for security?

In fact how can they be upgraded? Anywhere with extensive grounds will have people dropping in for a look. Anywhere with a back garden will have burglars dropping in.

Haircut vouchers?

Just how many haircuts do they expect one person to need? Or do they expect you to spend all day in a spa?

If they offered something that might possibly classify as useful it might be worth looking at it.

But presumably the people who developed it think haircuts and spa days really are what Londoners are all desperate for. At least the Londoners who think it's a good idea to take a bike onto a tube.

Microsoft, here to help you

You seem to be banging your head on the keyboard. Do you need any help with that?

They have to have trains

Obviously they will have to include a hi-tech train system serving the whole city.

There is no way that the kind of people who like building stuff like this will miss the chance of having a full-scale working train set to play with.

Map for the web

"What about a map for the web?"

Presumably he doesn't follow xkcd

Cloud, noun: Somewhere it's all blurred and you can't find your data.

What happens to border crossing?

If they put massive restrictions on the border with Canada then what happens to the people wanting to flee north over the border for a better life, away from the crumbling economy of their own country?

Can you challenge a foreign patent?

What happens when a US company has a 'patent' that was granted without any proper investigation for patentability or for prior art, and tries to enforce it in the UK? Can the UK court challenge the validity of the US patent?

Was there a warning message?

It being the US, they can hardly complain about the kid's actions unless there was a large warning message saying "Do not urinate on this computer"

How much beauty?

Did they measure the actual value of excited beauty, in millihelens?

Making people worried about giving sensitive information to the police is merely gibberingly insane.

Making people worried about giving sensitive information to their doctors, and the doctors worried about collecting such information, goes rather beyond that.