A 19 year-old Hertfordshire man has pled guilty
It still makes me cringe to see "pled", I know it seems to be accepted nowadays in American English, but to me it's just wrong.
Now git orf my lawn!
4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
'Morning, sir or madam or neuter,' the alien said. 'This your planet, is it?'
'Well, yes. I suppose so.' he said.
The alien stared thoughtfully at the skyline.
'Had it long, have we, sir?' it said.
'Er. Not personally. I mean, as a species, about half a million years. I think.'
The alien exchanged glances with its colleague. 'Been letting the old acid rain build up, haven't we, sir?' it said. 'Been letting ourselves go a bit with the old hydrocarbons, perhaps?'
'I'm sorry.'
'Could you tell me your planet's albedo, sir?' said the the alien, still staring levelly at the horizon as though it was doing something interesting.
'Er. No.'
'Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category, sir.'
The idea of privacy in Iceland is interesting when they have a national genealogical database, the Islendingabok, that allows people to check that they aren't about to marry their cousin.
But that's because of the way they do names in Iceland - there is no family name / surname which gets passed down through generations, like most European countries. Instead, the second name reflects the male parent's first name, so if Bjorn has a son called Ragnar, then his name will be Ragnar Bjornson, and if he subsequently has a daughter called Agnetha, she will be Agnetha Ragnarsdottir. If Agnetha meets and marries a nice bloke called Anders, then their son would be Peter Anderson, and their daughter would be Malia Andersdottir, and so on.
Until the truck can park the trailer in the loading bay at it's destination, you can't say it "delivered" anything, it just transported it from point A to point B.
And for any proper delivery vehicle, like for instance a supermarket truck, it's the driver who unloads the cages at each drop off. Let's see your Uber truck do that!
...with really long TTLs, how do you manage regional or global load balancing? Failovers? Switching records in general? Migrations?
You can do it by not using DNS to switch between sites. Instead you have one or more load balancers with fixed IPs which you point the DNS at, and then redirect the traffic to the sites and servers as you want.
We do DR failover this way, as well as load balancing and migrations between hosting environments.
There is a slightly increased latency, obviously, but not enough to impact normal traffic.
"Soon computers will be routinely inventing, and it may only be a matter of time until computers are responsible for most innovation," Abbott said. "To optimize innovation – and the positive impact this will have on our economies – it is critical that we extend the laws around inventorship to include computers."
Dear God, why would you possibly think that removing responsibility for innovation from humans is a positive thing? Or that innovation is somehow something that needs replacing with a machine analogue?
Tell you what, lets replace all the intellectual professions with computers, and all the professions that require physical labour with machinery, and watch the human race stagnate and die.
I remember playing with Microsoft's Speech SDK in the early noughties.
SAPI 5.1 I think it was, and it was pretty good at Text-to-Speech, but the Speech Recognition Engine was.. umm... interesting... to work with at that point.
It was however possible to fudge it so that what it heard was recognised - even if it wasn't what you actually said!
At last, a proper shed for server enthusiasts!
No longer will I have to run my 96node compute array in the cellar next to the wine-rack, with all the spiders...
Now I can put a shiny "micro data centre" in the garden, next to the fish pond. I'm sure my neighbours will be impressed.
The wife might not like me digging up the flower beds to lay the power and connectivity, of course, but hey, they needed digging over anyway...
if you hand in a Mac for repair the form you fill in on a tablet they give you asks you to give them your user password.
Well, yeah, otherwise they can't do a lot with it, can they?
There isn't some secret Apple Genius login which gives them access to all Macs, they need your password to get into it.
<rant>
This isn't just an Apple thing, I've lost count of the number of users who hand me a tablet / phone / laptop to fix and wander off without telling me their PIN / Password. If I can't get into it, I can't fix it!
</rant>
“Privacy is a basic right in European law. It is not in US law. In the US, companies cannot access their customers email addresses. In fact, we find that idea appalling, that you could access your customers' emails. It’s like walking into your bedroom.”
I don't understand the above quote, at all. It seems to be suggesting that Europe has privacy laws, but in the US where there are no privacy laws, customers' email addresses are private, but in Europe they aren't?
You seem to have done so little research into this story that you mention Tim Anderson without noting that he was the winner of BBC Masterchef in 2011?
Now as it happens, I agree with the sentiment of the article that this is likely a scam, but I feel sorry for Tim if that is the case, and think it unlikely that he would deliberately participate in a fraudulent campaign.
1/ A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
See, straight away we have a problem with this. How can we use our robotic weapons if they've got this rule stuck in their programming.
We need the option to relax the ruleset to include all sorts of conditionals:
1/ A robot may not injure a human being, except when they are
i. the enemy
ii. a terrorist
iii. a Republican
iv. a Democrat
v. a Mexican
etc...
or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm (except where they are cheaper than a robot, or a terrorist, or a foreigner or...)
You see? much better...
OK, on to the next one:
2/ A robot must obey the orders it is given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
Now this is no good at all. You can't allow just anyone to go giving robots orders, how can you keep control of things?
No, the revised rule would have to be something like:
2/ A robot must obey the orders it is given by authorised human beings.
We don't need the wishy-washy bit on the end, I mean we'd only order them to harm bad people, anyway.
And then we get this:
3/ A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Really? Come on, that robot cost a fuck-ton of money, we're not going to let it get damaged by trying to protect some no-account humans.
3/ A robot must protect its own existence at all costs.
There, that'll do it.
Now, what was all this about?
"Robots will destroy humanity unless we write new laws to control them, a Parliamentary committee has been told."
I thought Isaac Asimov had already done that?
Don't be silly, you can't expect the British government to adopt a set of rules developed by a foreign Sci-Fi Author, can you?
Any rules which the government is prepared to sign off will have to be re-imagineered by a highly paid consultancy group, and must embrace diversity and allow for future expansion.
Asimov's laws are far too prescriptive and narrow in scope...
I'm afraid I too am a luddite, I have no pay-by-bonk type cards, they are all chip-and-pin, and I will not, ever, entertain the idea of any sort of banking app on my phone until absolutely forced to because no other method is left.
I seem to recall a movie with a noob getting brooms to do his sweeping. And lots of it.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice: a ballad by Goethe written in 1797, and a symphonic poem by Paul Dukas written in 1896–97, used by Walt Disney in his 1940 Fantasia and then filmed in 2010 starring Nicolas Cage.
That one?
I used to see the single missing folder issue where the user had inadvertently dragged a folder of e-mails into another folder (or sometimes a folder of files on the fileshare).
Ooh, that reminds me of the time one of our developers put a textbook down on top of his mouse, whilst the files in Visual Source Safe were open in an Explorer window which had focus, and managed to drag and drop half the projects into an unrelated folder. Cue panic as he looks at the screen to find all his source code suddenly missing...
We don't provide external IT support to the public, thankfully, but as a software house we do provide on-site training for local government users of our product.
One of our sales staff came back into the office the other day having done a training session at some local government offices, and she was telling us that one of the people she had been trying to train used a wireless mouse at her desk.
Apparently three times in the course of an hour's training session this user managed to hold the mouse the wrong way up (as in, the buttons at the back) and then complained that her mouse never worked properly and "she'd told IT loads of times, but they didn't listen to her."
The sales rep said she had to struggle with herself not to just snatch the mouse off the user and turn it round... She said she was rehearsing that old support question (Do you still have the box for your computer... etc)
Interesting that you said "screw in a lightbulb". The outsourcer bid for that job, but on commencement discovered that the old bulb was still in place. As this work was out of scope the costs tripled....
Then, having amended the workflow to take account of the new requirement to unscrew and remove the old bulb, (with inherent increase in costs), it became apparent that the old bulb required to be pushed in, turned half a turn, and released, before withdrawing it, rather than unscrewing it as previously specified.
This was a paradigm shift in methodology, and a committee was hastily convened to investigate this.
In due course, a new requirement was drafted, embracing the new ideas, and the scope of the contract was amended to take account of the change in approach.
The outsourcer completed the first part of the work - to remove the old lightbulb, but then found that the replacement item had been ordered to match the original specification (ES fitting).
At this point the government cancelled the contract as it had gone way out of time and over budget.
@Milton
As a recent member, I think you have yet to grasp the idea that El Reg, although a haven for tech knowledge, also carries on the best traditions of British "Red-Top" tabloid publications of yesteryear, and therefore wildly exaggerated headlines and inappropriate images are part of its stock-in-trade.
The small white puck design, he argues, is superior to the traditional, ugly, rectangular box with antennas poking out of it. Why? Because people are more comfortable with sticking the little puck on tables rather than hiding them in cupboards.
Only if they are happy to have a power cable trailing across their table from a power point. And as I understand it, at least one will require an ethernet connection, as well. They very carefully don't show that in the photos.