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Comment sour note (Score 1, Flamebait) 234

1) Andrews & Arnold Ltd don't have 4 million numbers. They have fewer than 100,000 geographic numbers, plus a few tens of thousands of non-geographic numbers, assigned to them by the UK telephony regulator. I suppose it's possible that they could have agreed to use more through another provider.

2) Trapping a few telemarketers and tormenting them for entertainment purposes is fine, as is making money for receiving these calls, but what will happen in practise is that they will answer a lot more "wrong numbers" from regular people who have mis-dialed. If they search their existing CDRs for rejected calls to their unused numbers they will almost certainly find that there are a few numbers that already receive many call attempts because the number actually dialed is similar to some other genuine number. Recording and using mistaken calls from "your mum" for entertainment purposes and charging her for the privilege is somewhat immoral in my opinion.

3) The correct behaviour is to reject unused numbers with an NU indication. Anything else is antisocial and profiteering, but they would be welcome to do this on their freephone numbers (where they are charged for the calls).

Note: I work for a telephone company that does have millions of numbers assigned, including many premium rate and pay-per-call numbers. We could make a significant amount of money from caller's mistakes, but that would not be right.

Comment Re:Scanner (Score 1) 133

You still need all the mechanism of the machine to transport hundreds of feet of film past the scanning head at a constant speed without breaking it and keeping it nicely spooled. If the 35mm film had sprockets perhaps they could have used the mechanism from an existing 35mm film projector instead of having to make their own constant speed mechanism for the sprocketless film.

The phototransistor (photodiode, CCD etc) method is a long established technique for playing back an optical analog sound track from film http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film and I can't see any particular need to reinvent the wheel for this. If they considered that the film was too fragile to pass through the machine more than once, it would not be difficult or expensive to have 8 phototransistors so that all the tracks could be played back and recorded digitally at the same time.

Security

Tabnapping Scams Around the Corner? 362

scamdetect pointed us to an interesting bit of news about a new security risk called tabnapping that was recently outlined by Aza Raskin. The short story is that background tabs are updated with login forms impersonating the sites they originally contained, but hosted by helpful third parties primarily interested in your password. (CT:Original writeup removed at request of submitter)
Sony

Submission + - Sony Sued Over Other OS Removal (thinq.co.uk) 1

Stoobalou writes: A Californian Playstation 3 user has filed the first class action lawsuit against Sony over removal of the 'Install Other OS' function from the Playstation 3.

The action seeks to redress Sony's "intentional disablement of the valuable functionalities originally advertised as available with the Sony Playstation 3 video game console."

The suit claims that the disablement breaches the sales contract between Sony and its customers and constitutes "an unfair and deceptive business practice perpetrated on millions of unsuspecting customers".

Comment Re:Sony's Official Announcement (Score 1) 147

Not all "fat" PS3's were affected either as they did not all contain the faulty chips.

More likely they have the faulty chip, but the internal clock is wrong. This would be more or less the same "fix" as removing the RTC battery for a while.

I would expect a small number of owners to have the problem for 24 hours at some random time. There have probably been some PS3s that have done this before March 1st.

Businesses

How Do You Find Programming Superstars? 763

Joe Ganley writes "You are a programming superstar, and you are looking for work. I recognize this happens relatively rarely, which is part of my problem. But stipulating that it happens, how do I, as a company looking to hire such people, connect with them? Put another way, how do you the programming superstar go about looking for a company that seems like one you'd like to work for? The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well. We aren't worried about retention or even about how to entice people to work here once we've found them. The problem is simply finding them. The signal-to-noise ratio of the big places like Monster and Dice is terrible. We've had much better luck with (for example) the Joel on Software job boards, but that still doesn't generate enough volume." What methods have other people used to find the truly elite?

Robots Learn To Lie 276

garlicnation writes "Gizmodo reports that robots that have the ability to learn and can communicate information to their peers have learned to lie. 'Three colonies of bots in the 50th generation learned to signal to other robots in the group when then found food or poison. But the fourth colony included lying cheats that signaled food when they found poison and then calmly rolled over to the real food while other robots went to their battery-death.'"
Politics

Call for a Presidential Debate on Science 610

Writer Matthew Chapman recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post calling for a science-only Presidential debate. While I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the candidates to embrace such a potentially difficult series of questions, a bit more emphasis on modern science and technology certainly couldn't hurt. "None of the candidates should know in advance what questions they might face. Not knowing the questions in advance would force them to study as much science as possible, and this in itself would be a marvelous thing. However, a statement would be read at the start stating that no one expects politicians to understand every aspect of the many scientific disciplines. The debate's tone would try not to be adversarial, but cordial and educational. It could even be fun."

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