People are talking "millions". I hope they count in centîmes...
How does that compare to a billion dollar for a photoshop filter and assorted commodity hardware?
16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
I crap on everything that Sicherheitsdienst General Holder emits ... but that guy is not smart.
Asleep during the engineering ethics course?
Not groking that BP might hang him out to dry if SHTF?
Not keeping a personal copy or an annotated action log? One of the portable recorders that medical personnel use might come in handy. Well, one is always smarter afterwards, but at least a notebook...
BP not dumping all the conversations to WORMs in triplicate with a notary sitting on each?
The blame train is just leaving the station...
"He hinted it was a high-security organisation but didn't say what it was, which market it operated in, or even whether it was in the private or public sector."
Black Mesa Research?
"Yeah .. High Security! That's why we leave armed missiles lying around for everyone to check out. It's part of the tour!!"
> Biggest contribution by far from the polish was getting their hands on a working [Enigma] machine
That sounds entirely too Hollywoodesque.
Looked it up in "Mathematics and War" [2003, Birkhäuser Verlag]
The Polish mathematicians could read most german codes by 1932, but didn't manage to break the Enigma. They obtained a commercial Enigma used by business firms to get general insights into the machine. Then the french were contacted by an employee of the Reichswehr cryptography agency, [Hans-Thiko Schmidt] who sold secrets to captain Gustave Bertrand (but not the Enigma wiring scheme details). Captain Bertrand then contacted the Polish Cipher Bureau, and the final arrangement was that the French were to concentrate on delivering intelligence reports from Germany to help in code breaking, while the Poles were responsible for theoretical studies of Enigma intercepts. These guys actually cracked Enigma successfully
> In late 1934, the three mathematicians experienced the exciting decryptment of a transmission they could read as "To all commandants of the airfield throughout Germany" The signal ordered "the transportation to Berlin, alive or dead, of Kerl Ernst, adjutant to S.A. chief"
> Thus 1934 was the year when the cryptology team of the Polish Cipher Bureau broke the ciphers of the German Army (Heer) and the codes of S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst der SS) as well as codes and ciphers of the German Navy. The Kriegsmarine used three kinds of Enigma keys: operational, staff and admirals. The last key was resistant to breaking for a long time.
The Bombe came later after Enigma keys were changed regularly, but it was all based on the Polish work.
Receive E-Mail.
Access to computer automatically denied.
Can't open desk drawers. Automatically locked.
Window locked down, suicide is not an option.
Burly roboguard shows you out of your office; door closes and access code blinks red.
Speaker system gives out a canned announcement by good-sounding female text-to-speech system that you are now leaving the building.
Never be able to read the retraction.
This is like copying commentary. Yes, in this world where you can trademark A Goat On a Roof, this counts as "Intellectual Property". Remember we are going up against copy-friendly people like China with that kind of stupid.
The only really nasty thing one can say about this that in both cases the error report in the exception will certainly confuse the hapless developer. Too half-assed to actually say "Out of range [X,Y] with index Z", instead just saying "Z"? Yes, good work, one side. Or both sides.
"One state has repealed an equal pay law, that's bad"
I still don't see how forcing someone to pay a woman more when he doesn't want to is helping employment of women (you need to follow up with "positive discrimination" laws and it goes lawyersque downhill from there) , but twenty bizarre ideas are orbiting in the heads of progressives even before they have eaten their equitable breakfast cereal.
-- Justice Kelly said Eircom was "of great strategic importance for the State" and a "key provider of fixed-line services throughout the country".
Too big to fail? Important for the State? Is this Mussolini's Italy?
It's just another service provider. One with 800'000 EUR debt per employee. Who holds that debt btw?
Probably "we".
I hear about Xbox hueg losses and what is this?
"sales chief too stubborn to accept and embrace the future of ... Windows Phone 7"
"great Lumia range hardware"
"deadwood in the company that's holding it back"
"almost worthless symbian platform"
"Elop's experience and drive will ensure the company regains it's lost market"
Has been copypastaed from a Microsoft talking point memo? Or maybe an investment boutique flyer?
And it's "its", not "it's"
Electrons are still "infrangible"
This here phenomenon seems to occur in a more complex materials that have several electrons and nucleai bunched up in a fracking complex structure.
The problem is that the reporter tries to describe something using imagery that doesn't necessarily apply. One would have to start from the mathematical foundations. The methaphors may come later..
"Running telecoms on diesel generators is FAIL on so many levels."
How is that then?
You may not have the luxury to have a gas turbine trucked in and connected to a large preexisting infrastructure or even power your hardware off a reliable electricity cable.
Things that look like FAIL to well-pampered central europeans may make perfect economic and logistic sense elsewhere.
That's the mental disorder right there.
It does NOT exist to encourage innovation. After all, if someone knew how to encourage innovation, we would be cruising the galaxy right in a Jetson two-seater by now. It exists to put a "NONE SHALL PASS" fence around someone's crap that he deems to fall under "IT'S ALL MINE, MINE!!", completely forgetting that he stands on the shoulders of all that worked before him and worked next to him.
Just looking at how patents came to pass, how they metastasized into a daily dose of cancer and the historical evidence of the damaging effect on innovation tells the whole story.
Copyrights have their use. But these too should be strongly curtailed. In particular, no control on grey imports, please.
1) Take all possible pictures of Schrödinger's lolcats and arrange them in a box.
2) Assign a selection probability to each picture, exponentially decreasing with the fatness of the lolcat, but so that the sum of the probabilities over all pictures still yields at most one.
3) Select a picture at random, using the previously assigned selection probabilities.
4) If the tail is on the left, emit 1. If the tail is on the right, emit 0. Otherwise, emit NULL (and restart the experiment.)
Now use lasers somehow and there you are.
It's just because money is cheap, credit is easy and no-one will ever pay anything back.
In a world where 3 trillion dollar can be injected into the economy and the interest rate be kept below zero for years and years without a single person setting himself on fire in shame and desperation on the front porch of some parliament, anything can happen.
Let's roll!
As for the 20th century fraud squad. What can you do when government is the one performing the fraud? In fully daylight? And it is DEFENDED for doing so?
http://atimes.com/atimes/China/NC24Ad01.html
"In any case, in a few years the dreaded Chinese rare earth monopoly will have collapsed, with the assistance of the Chinese themselves, and the free world can enjoy its hybrid vehicles, its smartphones, its Tomahawk missiles, and its night vision goggles free of the anxiety that China will make the rare earth world go dark."
Even humans have arses too big too comfortably lift up and accelerate to appreciable speed. I do not think Trannysaurus will drop down in a vehicular device soon. And then again, why not meet them? Because lizard races are hollywoodian ungood?
Anyway, I remember some paper about how the chirality comes about due to [the magic of] galactic magnetic fields working on amino acids buried in comets. So there.
And on a far planet, we read:
"Death Star ape aliens could rule galaxy!!- Rather than dying out in the dimly lit aftermath of a ginormous asteroid impact, apes on Earth may have instead spread to other planets and built a terrifying space-conquering empire...."
"Hence the experiment achieves the genuinely spooky: a read-write operation across two laboratories connected by around 60 meters of fibre, in which the receiving atom becomes entangled with the transmitter, even though there’s been no direct interaction between them."
I do not understand... hold on, yes I do!
"German scientists link two labs with ‘universal quantum network’"
should actually read
"German scientists 1) copy quantum information from one atom to another and also 2) link two atoms into a single quantum system, both by exchange of photons via interconnecting fiber"
This is extremely nice engineering. This is not particularly "spooky".
Yes, I know that the "spooky" comes from having to deal with a probability calculus using complex numbers instead of reals. Nature is like that. Deal with it.
This is not particularly spooky.
"In other words, bacteria are already good at battling antibiotics, so it’s not entirely safe to assume anthropogenic antibiotics have created an evolutionary hothouse that forces bacteria to defend themselves."
FAIL at logic.
The bacteria population is NOT good at battling antibiotics at least by default otherwise there wouldn't BE any antibiotics.
The bacteria population BECOMES BETTER at battling antibiotics otherwise there wouldn't BE more antibiotics-resistant strains right now.
This "BECOMING BETTER AT" evidently comes from evolutionary pressure on the bacteria population. It doesn't come from God's Own Farts.
This is what "evolutionary hothouse that forces bacteria to defend themselves" MEANS.
Whether ancient bateria have activated genes to pump the molecules to the outside of their fatty surface is neither here nor there. It just means that modern bacteria probably can just fallback tio already-present genes, leading to better survivial in the hothouse.
Maybe so, but activist shareholders do exactly what they are supposed to be doing: take an interest in what's being done with the company they partly own and what the board that they employ is up to. Most shareholders are content with letting the board cash in, run everything into the ground, then jump out with a golden parachute. Then lefties complain about how corporations are "evil" and similar crud.
Are you from a strategy boutique?
They do NOT want iOS/iPhone, as apparent preferences show.
They might *consider* "iOS / iPhone" if the price on the rebranded Foxconn gear was right (i.e. low enough to not drop out of the preferences list immediately). Time for price readjustment. Unfortunately, that would destroy the cachet of the item, right?
Unfortunately, this means, given the fact that banks will have stashed their bailout money into exactly such a bubble [the bailout money now holding up your ever-decreasing-in-real-terms pension payout against total annihilation] BIG BOOM SOUNDS SOON. Then further destruction and wailing, followed by cries for more bailouts, socialization of unsustainable debt through TARP 2020, praising of Keynes [and a flood of books praising the genius of Keynes], praising of Marx, Stalin or Roosevelt and loud demand for "government job programs" (which will probably consist in recycling burnable materials and copper from deserted, dead towns). As well as appearances of Michael Moore. Oh God.
I can't wait.
Getting in touch with the crying-all-the-way-to-the-bank content-provider reality, more like. This "reality" being pushed by crying , know-it-all, I-was-there-but-you-weren't El Reg contributors btw.
Now allied with the securo-nazi-congressional-industrial complex. With "bipartisan" support.
One would think these people have checked out the antics of a certain Middle Eastern country where "shoot and cry, shoot and cry" is the order of the day.
> I had heard the Kindle's performance with PDFs was also terrible.
Performance ain't so bad in general except for PDFs that are actually scans or mainly image, but "personal Kindle 3 experience stories":
PDF may not be visible in its entirety with the lowest part of the page impossible to get onto the screen.
I have one PDF that repeatedly locks the Kindle up. You then have to try to reboot it by doing several cycles of power-off button 15s presses. Frustrating as hell.
...So I'm wary of this device. The user interface also needs some serious work by UI gurus.