Indeed. This is specifically the police force of the City of London "square mile", i.e. the historic, tiny core of London, long-dominated by financial businesses, and not the police force of London as a whole.

In fact, the rest of London is served by the Metropolitan Police Service. Why would the City need its own special police force? Hmm...

This article may also be of interest.

Indeed. To clarify, this is specifically the police force of the small area confusingly titled the "City of London" (AKA the "square mile"), i.e. the historic, tiny core of London, long-dominated by financial businesses, and not the police force of London as a whole.

In fact, the rest of London is served by the Metropolitan Police Service. Why would The City need its own special police force? Hmm...

This article may also be of interest.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion. If anything, I'd expect nerds to be the ones more likely to care that the underlying tech was the authentic original, beyond its external appearance.

Or perhaps this is one of the differentiators between a "nerd" and a "geek".

Either way, whatever one thinks of this sort of thing, it isn't really a story. People have been shoving small-form factor PCs inside old computer cases for years now, leading to stupid headlines like "upgraded Commodore 64 runs 10,000 times faster" when it should say "midrange Micro-ATX PC shoved inside gutted and mutilated Commodore 64 case (with holes cut for ports and slimline DVD drive) runs at its usual speed, supports C64 emulator like every other PC, doesn't even use the original keyboard".

I doubt this is even the first time something like this has been done with a Raspberry Pi. I'm not attacking this submitter in particular, and I don't dislike it as much as I would had he destroyed a much rarer retro device for such purposes, but it's still not news.

That rings a bell; I think someone made that point the last time I referenced that article- as I mentioned, that post above is mostly just an unmodified cut-and-paste of the original one I made years back, but still pretty relevant. I should have updated that part, but as I said I'm at work just now. :-)

I'm at work, so haven't had the time to properly read the articles et al. However, it's been known for years that MS *have* been doing a lot of serious research with talented people- the research they needed to avoid the position they're now in. The problem is that the vast majority never made its way out for short-term business and political reasons, and they're reaping that failure now. Here's a post I originally made in early 2012 in turn referencing someone else's *very* informative comment (itself dating back to 2010):-

This story rang some bells with me, and yes, it does appear to be the same case already reported on Slashdot (the figure given in the linked article there was also 640kg).

That time, however, the slant was on the Chinese being concerned that the Japanese may have been "stockpiling" this missing plutonium for weapons.

Which begs the question as to why, if it couldn't be used to make an atomic bomb?

To be fair, I wouldn't expect a cannon to render *any* images very well. On the other hand, it probably does better than an Epson in defending ships against pirate vessels. (Well, perhaps not a $50 model...)

I guess the Russians found out that under "Summer Time" the livin' wasn't...

(puts on sunglasses)

...so easy.

YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Fair point, but I'll put that stupidity down to the fact I was on a five-minute break at work :-)

Let me guess... eventually it burned a hole all the way through the centre of the screen until one day it got through and (a) blasted the woman whose job it was to collect the change from the machines' head off or (b) lasered her, segment-by-segment- via an early-80s pseudo-computer-effect- into the Asteroids machine itself where she was forced to play life and death computer games and interact with anthropomorphic, sentient realisations of abstract computer concepts, while finding some way to prove that she *was* due the five hours overtime they'd refused to pay her?

Which begs the question- would it be worth someone's time to buy some of these unwanted out-of-the-way buildings and then fund (possibly fully) the construction of a line and station covering that area?

That quite obviously wouldn't be cheap- to put it mildly- but given the ludicrous value of some buildings and land in Tokyo, the returns could be huge.

Its four weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope... and the original version of Space Invaders. Its *five* weapons are...

Intel has already come up with an Atom CPU with integrated FPGA, but only for the embedded market.

I'd already been thinking about the possibility of end-user-accessible, on-the-fly-reprogrammable FPGA functionality as part of a "regular" computer before I heard Intel had produced an integrated CPU/FPGA (though it's not clear how easily configurable the FPGA was there). I raised the issue in that previous thread and got a *very* interesting and informative response (thank you Tacvek) that pointed out some major problems with the concept of general access to such functionality.

The issues raised there explain why Intel are unlikely to be making an easily-reconfigurable hybrid product like this available to the general public any time soon, however smart and exciting the idea sounds.

One of these spiders was going around telling people "Actually, I'm a vegetarian."

When I pointed out that it was eating a fish, the spider replied "Oh yeah, I can eat fish, that doesn't count."

"Also, I'm permitted to eat Carrot Top."

Given the existence of undocumented- and more seriously, undisclosed- yellow marks output by various laser printers which have in at least one case been proven to be steganographic markings *and* decoded, it's certainly not "moronic" to consider that a similar scheme could in theory exist hidden in some digital cameras.

Frankly, in the wake of the Snowden revelations I wouldn't even consider this possibility ludicrously paranoid any more. Of course, digital cameras can have giveaway signatures like naturally-occurring hot pixels (and other signs) anyway, so in a sense it's already there. I don't think it's plausible that a non-GPS-advertised device would have a hidden detector inside, or even any method (e.g. WiFi triangulation) of detecting its location if that wasn't already designed into it.

A camera on a GPS-enabled smartphone though? If my life depended on it, I wouldn't bet against the possibility.