Re: The end is nigh

"You're thinking of horses"

Not for long. The horseocolyse is neigh due to over eating of the stock.

Re: that is not more secure

That would be an interesting form of read head since it needs to read many bits of information across a wid3e area. Based on what I know of old reel-to-reall and cassette recorders, the read head is relatively large with a tiny gap at the point where it reads the data, effectively a horseshoe electromagnet. The reader would need one for each bit, accurately aligned. I'm not sure if hall effect sensors are available in strips, which might work. Are there existing readers which can read a mag stripe all in one go? If not, then they'd have to be designed and built, which is much more difficult than using off-the-shelf components.

I'd have thought a simple light/light sensor or similar across the card slot and /or reader assembly would detect if any sort of modification was inserted. That ought to work in existing readers.

Re: Sounds like a good idea

vindictiveness."

Most criminals aren't vindictive in the sense you describe. It's just another challenge to be overcome or time to move on to something new.

The problem I see is the cost and time. It may not be possible that existing machines can be economically retrofitted so even if all the ATM manufactures go with the idea and decide to pay the royalties for the patented design, it could be many years before it's rolled out in any meaningfull quantities. After all, one of the largest ATM markets in the world still don't support chip'n'PIN yet.

Re: See ya old Rupey-boy

The Sun has a website?

On a slightly more serious note...

Having never visited their site and not being a reader of the paper, putting up a paywall makes no difference to me. Not sure why it should matter to you either. "Good riddance" is a bit harsh for something you don't read anyway.

Re: The Gmail account should be set up ...

"Why Gmail specifically.... ?

It is because US agencies have easy eyes & ears on the Big G....?"

It's because they are G-Men, of course!

The one with the one shot biro and the tie clip camera in the pocket.

Re: Who cares about flexible?

"Yup. Flexible displays are a bit of a gimmick. Not seeing the point."

Think "roller blind" and something the size of a fat fountain pen.

Re: Not portable

"Point taken, though... a company would want to exhaustively test the durability of a flexible display before selling it to the public, or else risk a lot of returns six months down the line."

That's progress for you. Back in the early days of computers, and later,laptops, the users paid a small fortune to buy one or their employer supplied it. But all users knew the value of the equipment and it's fragility. The components to build them cost a lot due to high R&D costs and low yields. This gave the manufactures time and money to further develop the products while improving on cost and yield.

In todays markets, the big consumer suppliers seem to aim solely at the mass market product so it has to "ready" for them, ie durable such that even a moron can use and abuse the product with little risk of breaking it. To some extent, that seems to be slowing the release of revolutionary new tech in favour of small and minor increments. The Corp. buyers are maybe equally to blame too as they want to roll out new tech to all and sundry at box-shifter prices rather than giving the "best and newest" to those who need/deserve it (or are high enough up that they must have it :-)

Re: How many of you...

"Have an isa, or child trust fund, or make private pension contributions etc"

All of those "financial instruments" are capped at a maximum level of tax-free investment on an annual basis. In other words, they are designed to encourage saving by waving a carrot in front of the investor. All that saved money goes into the pots of big business where they can use it to make more money while creaming off the "management fees".

On a totally unrelated note, Starbucks for example, pay almost their entire income to low tax based "associated" companies in eg Switzerland for the use of the name and to source their coffee. Surely if they were doing their "fiduciary duty" to their shareholders, then Starbucks UK ought to change their name to something they own and source their coffee more cheaply on the open market.

"So, they're changing from taxing /content/ to taxing /media/? Why the change?"

As per the article, it's not really a change. It's more of an expansion/landgrab.

After all, even in France, the "Piracy tax" on blank Cassette tapes and video tapes has probably dropped significantly over recent years.

Re: EU

What? You mean let the unelected EU set tax rates across the EU? Do you want the United States of Europe to be created so quickly? Tony Blair did state many years ago that his ambition was to the first President of a fully united europe. Can't we at least wait until he's dead and gone?

Re: Here we go again...

They can't change the law..."

The law may not need to be changed if the reports are true. Especially if it turns out that Google UK staff are negotiating sales contracts right up to the point of signing and only that bit is handled in Ireland. That situation would not surprise me in the least. Whether it could be argued to be strictly within the letter of the law would be something for a court to decide.

Re: That line.

"istr that this scenario featured in some sitcom before somewhere."

Yes, Coach!

Re: Could someone please explain me this British anti-ID obsession?

"the pervasive need to prove your identity and citizenship with some form of photographic ID means that passports and/or driving licences have become de facto compulsory"

When I git married, my wife decided it made sense for us both to use the same bank, especially since she was annoyed with her existing bank. It was difficult as she doesn't drive nor have a passport. The levels of proof required was just plain silly and since we'd just got married, the marriage certificate was the only paper we had with her married name on it. Then the bank staffer suggested an easy way. We open a joint account and since I'm already a customer, the marriage cert, would just finel. He said all we had to do was wait 'till the next day then phone up or call in to the branch to change the account by removing my name from it. Job done.

Now, I suggest that an ID would not have been all that much use in this case, partly down to the ID being in the "wrong" name (just married, remember?) and the need for more than one piece of ID.

And no, an ID, even if compulsory, would not be accepted on it;s own in many places. Even Citylink, when collecting a parcel from the depot, have posters up and instructions on the "while you were out" card stating you need either your passport or photo drivers license AND a bank statement or utility bill. I'm not sure why banks, couriers etc have a need for anything more than a govt backed form of ID with a name, address and photo on it.

Re: Works on ZX81

and if it includes binary-to-audio on the fly, then that's impressive."

Wot, sort of like the SAVE routine built in to all those old 8-bit computers?

Re: A pity...

"In case you're too lazy to check the statistics - at the height of 2nd intifada, circa 2001, over 90% palestinians supported suicide bombings. Those are the same people, who danced on the roofs at September 11th, and the same people who were throwing candies and celebrating London Subway bombings. Their suffering is their choice, they can stop any time they want and peace will ensue."

Boston, Mass. was a hotbed of IRA support and funding while the IRA were planting bombs in UK pubs killing innocent civilians. What was your point?

Irony alert!

"Arab...talking porkies"

Mmmmm...not so sure about that.

Re: So, if someone comes along and copies all the Star War Movies

The difference is that places hosting trailers for movies are hosting a short, specially created clip provided by the copyright owner.

Google are hosting the entire work in a searchable format and will create and provide a "trailer" on demand from any part of the entire work without permission. They made a whole copy. I'm not so sure Hollywood or the music industry would be quite so enamoured to have this happen to their products.

I wonder how hard it would be to automate a Google search of a specific book and "find" the whole book by scraping all of Googles "small, fair use, selections"? You certainly could not download all of a movies trailers and re-create the whole movie. (Although in recent years, watching a couple of different trailers for a movie generally does give you the main gist of the story and pretty much all of the best bits anyway.)

Re: Not a big deal in the UK...

Although I agree that is already a bad situation, at least the CCTV images are not splattered all over the interwebs (unless they record you doing something particularly unusual, stupid or funny).

With Glass, those images and/or videos may well be posted "just" to that users archive, but if it's anything like Farcebook. his/her friends can see it and more likely friends of friends down however many degrees of separation is allowed. Not to mention the facial recognition that could well "tag" you in those images/videos.

Re: Beards are Best?

Beards add years to your age"

That's precisely why I've grown a beard at the age of 50. In a couple of years I'll shave off the grey bearded and "lose" 10 years :-)

Re: I wish...

"So you could get the balloon to rise to some place where it weighs roughly the same as the stuff around it"

All one needs to do is coat the balloon in Cavorite.

"I know, right? Kids today, with their terrible music, appalling taste in clothing, ..."

Hi Dad!! <waves>

Re: CH3CHOO!

"The CH3CHOO, is expressed this way to represent the reactive carbonyl group."

And there was me thinking they were either just jumping on the climate change train or going off the rails.

Coat. Got. Gone.

Re: It's only a matter of time...

"talking to somebody else, whether they are in the car with you or not, is fatally distracting."

Fatally distracting? If that was true, it would be carnage out on the roads and cars would have been banned within a few years of their invention. If that's how you feel about it, I hope that either you are not a driver or that you always drive alone with the radio permanently disconnected.

Texting while driving is already illegal. Using voice activated text is almost certainly distracting. It seems that smartphone designers with all that processing power and RAM to work with have decided that voice recognition is best handled by having the damned phone keep asking you questions then handing off the speech recognition to some remote "cloudy" server. Even my crappy old Nokia from years ago was capable of doing speech to text for voice dialling simply by pressing a button on the headset cable and speaking the name, Now, with a Galaxy, it's a right palaver so I don't bother.

Re: Don't swim in the Kool-aid

"I bought an iPad mini because I WANT a smaller tablet"

I think you missed the point there. It's not that the iPad mini is selling well or not. The point is that Apple, until recently, had decreed that a smaller iPad would not sell because no one would want one one therefore Apple would not build and sell one. Rather than innovating with a smaller form factor to meet market demand, they had to have the proof shoved in their face (and for Steve "no smaller iPad" Jobs) to be out of the game)

Re: @Kristian: Poor results?

No. There's football, then there's American footchess.

$Diety! that game's almost as slow as cricket!

Re: $600,000?

"his paycheck will be garnished"

What with? A sprig of thyme?

If you can't do the thyme, don't do the crhyme!

Re: Great headline that:

Neatly lumping average web surfers in with parasitic content scrapers"

AIUI from the article and IANAL, Meltwater simply aggregate headlines with links to the relevant published sites. I'd have thought that this would be driving more customers to these sites rather than costing those sites money which must be recovered in licence fees.

Re: @James O'Shea

"except that this would involve including an installer for the other system with their product, which would increase the cost of that product, and also that installer probably would force users to restart their machines to be sure that the new file system was properly installed. This is likely to be unpopular."

Most devices which currently run FAT code (as opposed to media which simply stores the data structure) already come with an installer to fill your PC up with manufacturer info, manuals, file/photo/media management s/w, "lite editions" of commercial s/w etc so having that also install a filesystem driver is hardly a problem.

What that filesystem should be, getting a "free" and "standard" one which is useful and efficient and getting manufactures to use it is a different problem.

Re: ...and a non industry standard connector.

"The big innovation of the the Lightning connector is that it fits either way round."

Sort of like a bathroom electric shaver plug and socket?

Re: This is roughly the same as griping about ...

Wild guess here, but the downvoters are humourless USAians who've never heard of a wallet.

Personally, the first time I heard the word "pocketbook", many years ago when I was a tad younger, I thought it was something like a small notebook. Separated by a common language.

Heard recently on an audiobook, I'm still trying to work out what a "clabbard house" is. The spelling may be wrong since I've only heard it, not seen it.

Re: So few comments?

"Banning drone photography would be fundamentally stupid - it's the same as banning cameras because you might hold one up over a fence."

...or even arresting people with cameras for being too tall? Oh...wait...

Re: Hopeless Dopes

I'm currently maxing out my 60Mb/s VM BB connection quite nicely thank you.

BTW, NTL:Telewest are the people selling their VirginMedia branded company to Liberty Bell. VirginMedia did not buy out NTL, Telewest, Blueyonder, Virgin Mobile or anyone else. NTL:Telewest paid Virgin Holdings £10m +shares for the to use the Virgin branding for 10 years.

AIUI, when Telewest "bought" NTL and created NTL:Telewest, the TV side top people were mainly ex-NTL people while the BB side ended up being bossed by mainly ex-Telewest/Blueyonder people. At the time, many people seemed to agree that was the best people from each side running the business.

Also, IIRC, only Redifusion had co-ax cables for TV/radio in the 60's. I'm willing to be corrected but I thought that system died and went dormant before the current cable network was layed by the original franchise holders.

Re: This is roughly the same as griping about ...

Vote with your pocket-book"

What's a "pocket book", where do I get one and how do I vote with it it? What language are you speaking?

Re: Another one bites the dust

"The irony of you misspelling 'they' in this comment is just too much..."

Personally, I thought the misspelling of smart was the ultimate irony.