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User: _Shad0w_

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  1. Re:Cold war is over on Export Ban Drives Cuba To Non-US Analytics Software To Boost Tourism · · Score: 1

    I am reminded of the, possibly apocryphal, tale of when the Americans wanted to buy the land for the old American embassy in London off the land's owner. He refused but eventually offered a compromise: he said he would sell it to them if they returned the land they'd taken from his family in America. The owner is the Duke of Westminster. The land is most of the state of NY and Maine. They declined and opted for an extremely long lease instead.

  2. Re:XOR is useless on Popular Android Package Uses Just XOR -- and That's Not the Worst Part · · Score: 2

    It's a component of pretty much all encryption algorithms, afaik.

  3. In summary... on NSA Worried About Recruitment, Post-Snowden · · Score: 2

    I think "You reap what you sow" sums it up.

  4. Re:Could be a good idea.. on UK Announces Hybrid Work/Study Undergraduate Program To Fill Digital Gap · · Score: 2

    Most of the fresh graduates we interviewed recently couldn't actually tell us what the difference between a class and an object was. And these were people with 2:1s.

  5. Re:a quick search on No More Lee-Enfield: Canada's Rangers To Get a Tech Upgrade · · Score: 1, Insightful

    A slightly better search would have told you that tender was cancelled in 2011 and a new one issued this year; they're holding the new selection process next year.

  6. Re:I've been wondering why this took so long on London Unveils New Driverless Subway Trains · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Victoria, Central, Jubilee, and Northern lines all use semi-automation. It wasn't uncommon to see the driver stood up in the middle of the cab when it pulled in to a station, when I used the central line regularly; the train stops itself. I've been on a couple where it's overshot the end of the platform and they've had to skip the station and continue to the next (reversing a tube train means the driver has to get out and go to the other end - it delays the service too much, so they just won't do it).

  7. It has been for years. Pretty much every business in the world that deals with defence contracts will store restricted material on their own site and computer systems at some point. In the UK there's even a designation for it List-X Site. Other countries have their own designation.

  8. Re:Windows 9X on Possible Reason Behind Version Hop to Windows 10: Compatibility · · Score: 2

    We also know not to rely on the kernel version number to work out what the given version of Windows we're running on is capable of - you ask it if has the capability.

    I was actually moderately surprised by the fact that people were using the product name to work out the version - it's not even that easy to get that string. I think there's a WMI object that contains it, but it was only added in Vista. I can only assume it's generally developers using some form of helper library that maps the version number to friendly names for them.

  9. The City of London Police are a territorial police force though; they're all (well all of the full time and specials) are sworn constables.

  10. They should sort their shit out here first on BT and Coke To Offer Free Rural Wi-Fi In South Africa Through Vending Machines · · Score: 1

    BT can't even offer decent broadband service to the whole of the UK, ffs.

  11. Re: Mind boggling on Now That It's Private, Dell Targets High-End PCs, Tablets · · Score: 1

    You mean that fruity company that didn't pay a dividend for 17 years? Short term investors didn't invest in it, oddly enough.

  12. Re:What? on NY Magistrate: Legal Papers Can Be Served Via Facebook · · Score: 2

    No you don't. If you deliver something by mail you have no guarantee they got it, unless you use a service that requires a signature on delivery. Even then all you might have is a guarantee that *someone* signed for it, not that the person it was addressed to did. Our posties often just sign for things if it's something they can fit through the letterbox and no-one answers.

    But then in the UK you don't have to prove they got it, just that you sent it. Proof of postage doesn't cost you anything; you just have to take it to a post office and ask for it rather than using a postbox.

  13. Re:Surely on Star Wars Producers Want a 'DroneShield' To Prevent Leaks On Set · · Score: 2

    I doubt it's that easy to get restricted airspace put in place. Also jamming devices are generally illegal in the UK (punishable by a two year prison term and/or an unlimited fine).

  14. Re:Slashdot chews up expensive data plans... on Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans · · Score: 1

    Actually it's been moderated 80% funny and 20% informative.

  15. Re:Nope on Would Scottish Independence Mean the End of UK's Nuclear Arsenal? · · Score: 1

    Or just build a new base in Cumbria and move it over the border. Shame they got rid of RNAD Broughton Moor really.

  16. Why do you need speech recognition? on Driverless Buses Ruled Out For London, For Now · · Score: 1

    Why would you need speech recognition on a London bus? You never talk to the driver. You get on, touch your Oyster card to the reader, and get off when you get to your stop. That's it. It's a flat rate fare. You can't even use cash on them anymore - you have to use an Oyster card.

  17. Re:Why ODF? on UK Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The vast majority of their users aren't especially smart when it comes to technology. They're essentially office workers - they don't give a stuff about the underlying format, they only care about being able to do their job.

  18. Re:C++ on IEEE Spectrum Ranks the Top Programming Languages · · Score: 1

    There's actually a standard for writing in C++ for (embedded) safety critical systems, created for the JSF. It exists partly because they were finding it increasingly hard to recruit engineers who knew Ada (or had any interest in learning it).

  19. Re:What the fuck is this thing? on ARM Launches Juno Reference Platform For 64-bit Android Developers · · Score: 1

    The main reason to move to 64-bit isn't memory, it's address space. Some other useful things falls out of it in a co-incidental kind of way too, like more registers (which are nice for tight loops).

  20. Re:First Amendment to what? on Google and Facebook Can Be Legally Intercepted, Says UK Spy Boss · · Score: 1

    1994, actually; "Intelligence Services Act (1994)" to be precise. Though GCHQ has been around since the early C20th.

    Said act uses wonderfully nebulous language that basically comes down to "we can intercept anything we want because we say so".

  21. Re:context on Endurance Experiment Writes One Petabyte To Six Consumer SSDs · · Score: 1

    The main difference is LTO tapes (and similar) are actually designed so they can be used for archival storage (in the region of 30 years). Hard drives just aren't. If you can get a drive that's been sat in storage - no matter how good - for 20 years to spin up then you're very lucky.

  22. Re:It's Nissan on BMW, Mazda Keen To Meet With Tesla About Charging Technology · · Score: 1

    My reading of the sentence was "European and Asian suppliers along with only one US supplier, Tesla; the other US suppliers will just do their own thing."

  23. Re:Not sure what they mean... on Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock · · Score: 1

    Except browsers can actually send a header that lists your preferred languages, in order. Chrome can actually does this, although it's buried away under "Advanced Settings". Google just don't pay any attention to it on their servers (apparently).

  24. Re:Windows Phone and RT do not require C# on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    I'm guessing dogfooding doesn't apply to shitty UI elements :)

  25. Re:DRTFA on After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out · · Score: 1

    My suspicion was Java would be more or less identical, but I don't work in Java so I wasn't 100% sure.