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User: _Shad0w_

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  1. Re:Seems fishy on Revealed: How the UK Spied On Its G20 Allies At London Summits · · Score: 1

    Because UKUSA and ECHELON exist.

  2. Re:How is this even possible? on UK Government Spending £6,000 Per Computer Every Year To Maintain Desktops · · Score: 1

    They're civil servants, they don't get anywhere near industry rates, even as specialists. It's only the very senior civil servants who get stupid pay (and even they're underpaid by industry standards). They do, however, get index linked pensions to make up for it.

  3. Re:Not-so-accurate source on BBC Clock Inaccurate - 100 Days To Fix? · · Score: 1

    I would be extremely surprised if the BBC didn't have NTP servers already.

  4. Re:Now if we could just kill PDF... on DRM: How Book Publishers Failed To Learn From the Music Industry · · Score: 2

    You only need that if the PDF is actually just holding un-OCR'd images, rather than text. If the PDF contains text you can just extract it (afaicr the text blocks are just Deflated streams of text).

  5. Re:Now if we could just kill PDF... on DRM: How Book Publishers Failed To Learn From the Music Industry · · Score: 1

    That's my problem with them too. The last PDF eBook I got (which was an OCR'd scan of "Spy Catcher", because there's no actual eBook version available) I ended up converting it to a mobi so it actually displayed properly on my Kindle, modulo the OCR errors.

  6. Re:buy DRM free books on DRM: How Book Publishers Failed To Learn From the Music Industry · · Score: 1

    Tor and Forge are DRM free as a matter of policy.

  7. Re:Just think of ... on Google Maps Used To Find Tax Cheats · · Score: 1

    Erm, nope. Pretty much everywhere in Europe has both. We pay income tax when we earn money and VAT when we spend it. We also incur income tax when we save it and get paid interest by the bank.

    In fact ~25% of my gross income gets taken in income tax and National Insurance via PAYE before I even get my hands on it, then most stuff I buy has a 20% VAT on top of it (there are exceptions: some stuff is a lower rate and an even small amount of stuff is zero rated).

  8. Re:Ask any McDonald about mcdonalds.com domain on Microsoft Files Dispute Against Current Owner of XboxOne.com · · Score: 1

    It follows the current trend of bringing out new games in a series which have the name of the original game. Which is not to say I disagree - I think that trend and the name "XBox One" are both stupid.

  9. Re:That's great and all on BT Runs an 800Gbps Channel On Old Fiber · · Score: 1

    Half of Cambridge doesn't even have access to BT's FTTC...

  10. Re:That's great and all on BT Runs an 800Gbps Channel On Old Fiber · · Score: 1

    Yes, they're owned by BT Group.

  11. Re:The Rothchilds never make the list on Bill Gates Regains the Position of World's Richest Person · · Score: 1

    I suspect there's already a list for companies, it's almost certainly dominated by banks and other financial institutions (HSBC has over $100 Trillion in assets, for example). The Vatican Bank is probably near the top of the list, if you figure out how much money it actually controls (it's a private institution, so its records aren't public).

  12. Re:Sounds like his "philantrophy" isn't working... on Bill Gates Regains the Position of World's Richest Person · · Score: 1

    Combined, he and his wife have given away nearly $30bn to charity, how in the hell is that not working? They've also stated that they intend to donate at least 95% of their wealth by the time they die.

  13. Re:C'mon, Slashdot on Bill Gates Regains the Position of World's Richest Person · · Score: 1

    They dropped that epithet ages ago.

  14. Re:The Rothchilds never make the list on Bill Gates Regains the Position of World's Richest Person · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Probably not, they have dynastic wealth, rather than individual wealth. Individually they're still wealthy, but not on the scale as individuals like Bill Gates.

  15. Re:The Other Shoe on Used Game To Survive? EA Plans To Drop Online Pass · · Score: 2

    They also went out of their way to say Sims 4 will have no always-on requirement, unlike the new Sim City. I think the backlash took them a bit by surprise.

  16. Re:Not A Flying Car on Flying Car Crashes In British Columbia · · Score: 2

    What it mostly looks like is a car with a paragliding chute and a huge fan on the back.

  17. Re:grow up, you entitled shit on Has Google Shut Down SMS Search? · · Score: 1

    I don't think that attitude is limited to America.

  18. Re:Am I the only professional C/C++ coder ... on Vulnerability Found In Skyrim, Fallout, Other Bethesda Games · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some of us C# programmers started life as C programmers, became C++ programmers at some point, and have now ended up as C# ones. You go where the money is; that's what being a professional is: doing something for money.

  19. Re:Did we really need on Vulnerability Found In Skyrim, Fallout, Other Bethesda Games · · Score: 1

    One of those writes to stdout and one of them writes to a string, they're not really interchangeable if your aim is to display something on screen...

    I think you're getting confused with the fact that using ?sprintf(), ?scanf(), etc. is discouraged in favour of using their ?sn* counterparts, due to buffer overrun possibilities, but I could be wrong. Calling printf() with an un-sanitized user supplied format string is also discouraged, because it may contain a %.

    printf() is just a wrapper for vfprintf() with the FILE paramter as stdout, I believe (it is in glibc anyway).

  20. Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back? on LinuxDevices.com Vanishes From the Web · · Score: 1

    That's what I can't understand; it's not like the site competed with anything else in their portfolio. It didn't mesh because it just wasn't something they were interested in as a business. In circumstances like those I really can't see why they don't spin it off in some way.

  21. Re:Time to start taxing revenue instead? on Google Ordered Back To UK Parliament To "Explain Itself" Following Investigation · · Score: 1

    Unless they're e-Books, because it's worded in such a way that it refer exclusively to printed works, which is annoying.

  22. Re:Why explain himself? on Google Ordered Back To UK Parliament To "Explain Itself" Following Investigation · · Score: 1

    The best bit is the court in that case is actually parliament itself; you would be called before the bar of the house. Although they haven't actually fined anyone since the C17th.

  23. Re:Time to start taxing revenue instead? on Google Ordered Back To UK Parliament To "Explain Itself" Following Investigation · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately that fucks over a lot of companies. In fact most companies that have high overheads; we had an income of over £80m last year. Only £3m of that was profit.

  24. Re:Software Defined Networking on Inventor of OpenFlow SDN Admits Most SDN Today Is Hype · · Score: 2

    I seriously doubt that many of us are programmers any more.

  25. Re:Marketing doesn't kill innovation on Inventor of OpenFlow SDN Admits Most SDN Today Is Hype · · Score: 1

    Actually my experience is of them trying to cram more and more features in to existing software, rather than improving and fixing the bugs in the ones that are already there.