This is BT. Control and Overcharge are their middle names. Actually their full name is Bastard Control Crumbling Infrastructure Bad Support Incompetent Overcharge Telecom. They shorten it to BT so they can fit it on the trucks and use the cover name "British Telecom".
They'd have no problems at all in controlling or overcharging for IPT, especially with the Toothless Wonder regulator (whose best threats seem to be things like "Oh, go on, please drop your prices, pretty please with a picture of Tony on the top"... although anything with a picture of President Blair on it is probably a serious threat now I think about it..)
Fuck, I thought that the socialists were supposed to care about people and not corporations.
Theoretically they still do, but in many cases they either don't actually understand the issue (the patent system is complex, buried in legal mumbo-gumbo and a long way down the list of the list of things Normal People - and therefore MEPs - are interested in) or they have been scared into the "some directive is better than nothing" position without realising that in this case "some directive" in any of its current forms is far, far worse than nothing at all.
... erm, except that the bug was identified by the players based on the change in the alertness of the guards. This would be just as easy to do on the XBox as it was on the PC...
It's also a rather tricky bug that may not have been caught in their testing process.
Bollocks.
This can be found out by anyone who does even moderate real play in the game, and many of the fans (especailly on TTLG) pinned down the problem in hours.
If the testing team can't do it then there's something seriously wron with their testing strategies (if they even have them).
If Adobe adds banknote detection code into Photoshop, you can't easily remove it.
Easily being the operative word. There's nothing to stop a suitably capable individual from running it in a disassembler and noop-ing the calls to the detection code (game crackers have been doing this sort of thing for years). It's quite probable that groups bothered by this (ie: the ones that don't just use an old version of the software...) will just employ, coerce or otherwise recruit a cracker to remove the problem.
The stupid ones. Storage is so cheap that 1Gb of space for mail is nothing - I paid less than 60 quid for a drive 120 times than a few days ago. When drives cost less than a pound a Gb, what exactly is the advantage to using Google mail?
And even if/.ers are drooling over it, how many would rely on it to store data vital to their life without backups elsewhere?
Hopefully the UK will get the new system tested and online before it causes more problems!
The only minor problem is that the new system is, if anything, more likely to cause problems than the old one. Especially if it follows the same pattern as the majority of the other big systems our useless government has thrown money at.
To most, all that matters is the illusion of freedom.
Re:Will Brown Do The Right Thing?
on
Stallman vs Ken Brown
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That should have a "... oh, right." at the end.
Unless you believe Ken Brown and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution as a whole have a reputation as anything other than Libellous FUDmongers For Rent?
I have a theory that/.'s comment code automagicilly puts errors in your posts - missng letters and teh good old reversals and so on - after you have previewed your comment and hit submit. After all, I always preview my comments yet there are always a few tyops that make me cringe...
He's a popular author. He knows how to tell a story, a story that can include some fairly complex ideas, to the general population. If a scientist stood up there and tried the same thing, half the audience would be asleep within five minutes while most of the rest wouldn't understand how anything he said had any real importance.
You need someone who can put some fire behind the ideas. non-scientists just can't see any reason to do things just for the science, you need someone who can appeal to their sense of adventure, excitement and mystery.
Meh, you can't be one of those people who, when the PC version comes out, grabs or builds models of real cars to use instead of the ones Rockstar provided (my favourite is Max Pain's Modded Vice City - some of the detail in the cars in that is incredible.)
As far as I'm concerned, more real world stuff would be great (especially if they got streetplans correct.) Unfortunately there's no way in hell Rockstar could get away with it - the outcry over the Haitians line would pale into insignificance compared to the howls of protest there would be from the communities the game takes place in: Rockstar would be giving people somewhere to practice real-world crimes! "That drive by shooting was practiced in GTA!"
Actually I think that's the real reason Rockstar have avoided making real cities: it's not a matter of needing fake things, it's that if they used real things it'd cause them no end of legal trouble..
Who modded that "funny" for goodness sake? It should have got an Insightful or Informative IMO, it's just a shame/. doesn't have a "too bloody accurate by half" rating.
He fucked up by publishing photos taken by British Army personnel apparently doing things that the Red Cross and Amnesty International have been telling the government about for some time (and the government has admitted this) only for it to be show (by the Military police...) that the photos are faked (apparently by matching scratches on vehicles no less.)
So instead of it being soldiers engaged in acts that have been reported to the government already, it is solders faking sick and degrading behaviour and passing these off as real to a newspaper. Either because they are mentally disturbed psychotics who get a kick out that sort of behaviour or in an attempt to set up the newspaper.
Now call me picky, but one is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers while the other is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers. The only difference is that the mirror has paid for its opposition to the war by being set up - in either event it shows that there is something fundamentally broken in the discipline and behaviour of British soldiers.
Yes, Morgan isn't a nice man, I can't stand the guy, but what is going on here stinks of an attempt to midirect the public away from the very real and serious allegations that respectable organisations have been making about British behaviour in the gulf towards a mud-slinging match against a paper that has been a thorn in the side of the government since the start of last year.
While the verneshot idea sounds nice, and may explain some incidents, I think it's a bit too unlikely. The article there was on them in New Scientist a couple of weeks ago left me singularly unconvinced - especially when they resorted to suggesting the 1908 Tunguska event was a verneshot (completely ignoring the fact that people saw a flaming object heading towards the explosion location rather than away from from it as you'd get with a verneshot...)
Nah, when they find solid evidence of a verneshot pipe I'll be likely to believe it happens.
From what I've seen ATI cards (on Windows) are a like 10% or so slower with OpenGL than with DirectX.
And it is even worse in Linux - my ATI Radeon 9800Pro was running some OpenGL apps at the same or lower framerates as my NVIDIA GF4ti4600. Yes, ATI may make good hardware, but their drivers and, especially their OpenGL implementation, suck like a black hole on Linux.
Spook 1: "So, we have fragment of ready-salted crisp crunch followed by old muffin.." Spook 2: "Nah, that was a piece of bagette" Spook 1: "You think?" Spook 2: "Yeah, must have been about 3 weeks old" Spook 1: "eurh, okay, hairy old bagette and then..."... some time later... Spook 1: "...So from that, we can work out that his password is 'password'. Such is the power of sub-key decomposition auditory analysis gentlemen!"
Slashdot Mirror
"Dvorak is slowly becoming the mad, raving, lunatic of the high-tech industry."
:)
I wonder when the fight between Dvorak and Kevin "Captain Cyborg" Warwick is then...
This is BT. Control and Overcharge are their middle names. Actually their full name is Bastard Control Crumbling Infrastructure Bad Support Incompetent Overcharge Telecom. They shorten it to BT so they can fit it on the trucks and use the cover name "British Telecom".
They'd have no problems at all in controlling or overcharging for IPT, especially with the Toothless Wonder regulator (whose best threats seem to be things like "Oh, go on, please drop your prices, pretty please with a picture of Tony on the top"... although anything with a picture of President Blair on it is probably a serious threat now I think about it..)
Fuck, I thought that the socialists were supposed to care about people and not corporations.
Theoretically they still do, but in many cases they either don't actually understand the issue (the patent system is complex, buried in legal mumbo-gumbo and a long way down the list of the list of things Normal People - and therefore MEPs - are interested in) or they have been scared into the "some directive is better than nothing" position without realising that in this case "some directive" in any of its current forms is far, far worse than nothing at all.
... erm, except that the bug was identified by the players based on the change in the alertness of the guards. This would be just as easy to do on the XBox as it was on the PC...
It's also a rather tricky bug that may not have been caught in their testing process.
Bollocks.
This can be found out by anyone who does even moderate real play in the game, and many of the fans (especailly on TTLG) pinned down the problem in hours.
If the testing team can't do it then there's something seriously wron with their testing strategies (if they even have them).
If Adobe adds banknote detection code into Photoshop, you can't easily remove it.
Easily being the operative word. There's nothing to stop a suitably capable individual from running it in a disassembler and noop-ing the calls to the detection code (game crackers have been doing this sort of thing for years). It's quite probable that groups bothered by this (ie: the ones that don't just use an old version of the software...) will just employ, coerce or otherwise recruit a cracker to remove the problem.
The stupid ones. Storage is so cheap that 1Gb of space for mail is nothing - I paid less than 60 quid for a drive 120 times than a few days ago. When drives cost less than a pound a Gb, what exactly is the advantage to using Google mail?
/.ers are drooling over it, how many would rely on it to store data vital to their life without backups elsewhere?
And even if
Hopefully the UK will get the new system tested and online before it causes more problems!
The only minor problem is that the new system is, if anything, more likely to cause problems than the old one. Especially if it follows the same pattern as the majority of the other big systems our useless government has thrown money at.
To most, all that matters is the illusion of freedom.
That should have a "... oh, right." at the end.
Unless you believe Ken Brown and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution as a whole have a reputation as anything other than Libellous FUDmongers For Rent?
:)
The translation is "What they don't know will kill them" In this case I recommend checking that my sig hasn't attempted to boobytrap your keyboard...
I have a theory that /.'s comment code automagicilly puts errors in your posts - missng letters and teh good old reversals and so on - after you have previewed your comment and hit submit. After all, I always preview my comments yet there are always a few tyops that make me cringe...
Or maybe I just use IRC too much..
What, you mean like Mozilla mouse gestures (which supports 44, at last count, of Mozilla's navigation, navigation, zoom and control functions)?
He's a popular author. He knows how to tell a story, a story that can include some fairly complex ideas, to the general population. If a scientist stood up there and tried the same thing, half the audience would be asleep within five minutes while most of the rest wouldn't understand how anything he said had any real importance.
You need someone who can put some fire behind the ideas. non-scientists just can't see any reason to do things just for the science, you need someone who can appeal to their sense of adventure, excitement and mystery.
Or our own shortsightedness and stupidity.
Bill Gates wants to control your fridge with NT4.0.
Don't be silly. Everyone knows it's Longhorn that'll do that.
Meh, you can't be one of those people who, when the PC version comes out, grabs or builds models of real cars to use instead of the ones Rockstar provided (my favourite is Max Pain's Modded Vice City - some of the detail in the cars in that is incredible.)
As far as I'm concerned, more real world stuff would be great (especially if they got streetplans correct.) Unfortunately there's no way in hell Rockstar could get away with it - the outcry over the Haitians line would pale into insignificance compared to the howls of protest there would be from the communities the game takes place in: Rockstar would be giving people somewhere to practice real-world crimes! "That drive by shooting was practiced in GTA!"
Actually I think that's the real reason Rockstar have avoided making real cities: it's not a matter of needing fake things, it's that if they used real things it'd cause them no end of legal trouble..
747s can go down to 250knots and be managable - heavy load turn stall speed is around 210knots IIRC.
Who modded that "funny" for goodness sake? It should have got an Insightful or Informative IMO, it's just a shame /. doesn't have a "too bloody accurate by half" rating.
He fucked up by publishing photos taken by British Army personnel apparently doing things that the Red Cross and Amnesty International have been telling the government about for some time (and the government has admitted this) only for it to be show (by the Military police...) that the photos are faked (apparently by matching scratches on vehicles no less.)
So instead of it being soldiers engaged in acts that have been reported to the government already, it is solders faking sick and degrading behaviour and passing these off as real to a newspaper. Either because they are mentally disturbed psychotics who get a kick out that sort of behaviour or in an attempt to set up the newspaper.
Now call me picky, but one is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers while the other is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers. The only difference is that the mirror has paid for its opposition to the war by being set up - in either event it shows that there is something fundamentally broken in the discipline and behaviour of British soldiers.
Yes, Morgan isn't a nice man, I can't stand the guy, but what is going on here stinks of an attempt to midirect the public away from the very real and serious allegations that respectable organisations have been making about British behaviour in the gulf towards a mud-slinging match against a paper that has been a thorn in the side of the government since the start of last year.
While the verneshot idea sounds nice, and may explain some incidents, I think it's a bit too unlikely. The article there was on them in New Scientist a couple of weeks ago left me singularly unconvinced - especially when they resorted to suggesting the 1908 Tunguska event was a verneshot (completely ignoring the fact that people saw a flaming object heading towards the explosion location rather than away from from it as you'd get with a verneshot...)
Nah, when they find solid evidence of a verneshot pipe I'll be likely to believe it happens.
Maybe they are using RIAA counting systems and it was really 8 impacts 250m years ago?
(8 may need to be adjusted up or down depending on your country's definition of billion...)
From what I've seen ATI cards (on Windows) are a like 10% or so slower with OpenGL than with DirectX.
And it is even worse in Linux - my ATI Radeon 9800Pro was running some OpenGL apps at the same or lower framerates as my NVIDIA GF4ti4600. Yes, ATI may make good hardware, but their drivers and, especially their OpenGL implementation, suck like a black hole on Linux.
Now if we can just think of some way to persuade him to replace the flying excrement with his face in said fan interaction...
Nah, it's make it easier:
..." ... some time later...
Spook 1: "So, we have fragment of ready-salted crisp crunch followed by old muffin.."
Spook 2: "Nah, that was a piece of bagette"
Spook 1: "You think?"
Spook 2: "Yeah, must have been about 3 weeks old"
Spook 1: "eurh, okay, hairy old bagette and then
Spook 1: "...So from that, we can work out that his password is 'password'. Such is the power of sub-key decomposition auditory analysis gentlemen!"