* Posts by HCl+NaOH

3 publicly visible posts • joined 14 May 2010

Europe-wide ecommerce laws ahoy!

HCl+NaOH
Coat

I'm afraid it will be difficult for you to get reimbursed ...

"I bought a goat from Romania, but when it arrived it was dead.

Who do I write to?"

This is very common with cheap goats imported from Greece. Many fail to meet the stringent standards of the Romanian Independent Shepherds Union and are then re-sold on the western markets.

Over time, this has lead to clashes between angry mobs of dissatisfied western customers (mostly British) and gangs supported by the Romanian Goat Cartel. The most recent such event occurred at a friendly soccer match in Austria, where several Englishmen were injured by rock-hard balls of old polenta hurled by Romanian gang members.

In response, several groups of English hooligans reportedly chartered buses and departed for an unspecified destination in Romania. The Romanian authorities' pleas with the Austrian government to stop the incoming buses remained unsuccessful. The Austrian government's claims that they have no jurisdiction over transiting buses full of Englishmen could not dispel the rumors that Austria just could not afford to lose the vignette (road tax) revenue and therefore had to let the English pass.

The situation was diffused by a small group of Hungarian customs officials in Hegyeshalom, after a surprisingly-short goulash and barack palinka-supported round of negotiations.

Meanwhile, Romanian exports of re-branded goats continue and the matter has been brought to the European Commission's attention. Suggestions by Romanian diplomats that harmed European consumers be compensated by the original Greek exporters were opposed by the majority of the delegations, with the Germans reportedly saying "not until we get our freakin' money back!"

iPhone, BlackBerry, Droid: purveyors of pestilence

HCl+NaOH
Coffee/keyboard

You wouldn't want to share your phone with a friend, not after you met him and shook his hand ...

The real story here is that people actually pay Stanford money in exchange for a title earned through this kind of seriously advanced research.

Somewhere there's government or higher education job with Timmy's name on it.

Meanwhile, other stochastic-mechanistic models have determined that most Reg readers' hands have at least 256 germs per square micron, and should refrain from contact with the keyboard, no matter how difficult it may be in this particular instance.

Google heats up native code for Chrome OS

HCl+NaOH
WTF?

PNaCl?

The Portable Native Client project - aka PNaCl, pronounced 'pinnacle' - uses the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) bitcode format. The idea is to compile C, C++, and other languages into LLVM bitcode that allows for client-side translation into the client's native instruction set.

That kinda describes java, doesn't it (that is without the language and without the inherent convenience when compared to C/C++)? Yet another virtual machine architecture, how is that new/different? (other than the fact that it would be controlled by Google as opposed to Oracle).

Here's to Larry with hopes that he will put Java back in the game. Loved his remarks regarding Schwartz's blogtastic performance.