Posts by Angus

NASA marks 50th anniversary of monkey spaceflight

Wonderful!

"My god, it's full of bananas"

Take-Two sues over death of Duke Nukem Forever

Hehe DNF

Did Not Finish! :P

Secret European project to battle online jihad

@ AC 20:47

Hmm according to the CIA world factbook I don’t think you are in imminent danger of becoming a Islamic State.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uk.html

Religions: Christian (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist) 71.6%,

Muslim 2.7%,

Hindu 1%,

other 1.6%,

unspecified or none 23.1% (2001 census)

Online attackers feed off Norton forum purge

Surely this can't be right..

"Kyle said that the forum is run by Symantec employees in what amounts to their spare time"

A support forum run by Symantec employees in their spare time.. WTF???

Inside the world's greatest TV remote

@Gobot

Hmm and is your idea of intrusive TV displays the same as mine.. or the fellow with a hearing aid? I suspect mostly no.

David Blaine tw*tdangles into Urban Dictionary

I am with The Dark Lord

I prefer the term "gitwizard", which I think rolls off the tongue easier.

Palm unfazed by Apple patent threat

Wonder if

Palm believes an iwidget has infringed on one of their patents and is just itching for Apple to make a move so they can whip it out and smack em with it. I bet Apple will be very cautious if only coz they are wondering why Palm aren't peeing themselves in terror.

US bandwidth gets new caps

@ Spare a thought for us poor people in AUS

Personally I don't mind having the caps. At least I know exactly what I have paid for and can use, there is none of this utterly missleading "unlimited" rubbish. Heh and with the pathetic value of the AUD vs the USD our plans are actually costing us less than the ones offered here.

I will agree that you have to avoid Bigpond like the plague tho. There is no way for me that any of their plans are worth the money they ask. Plus their charging for uploads is just taking the piss. I imagine telstra target the people who really dont know better, or the ones who take out one of those all inclusive plans (mobile, home phone Internet etc) and dont check the fine print.

5,000-year-old 'ice man' was shot to death

Intensive Care Medicine Journal?

I would have thought he might be a bit beyond even the most intensive of Intensive care.

Fake plane death businessman left SOS bullet-point list

Ok

Let this be a warning to anyone who bought the “Anyone can be a Master Criminal” books..

Obviously not everyone can be.

Govt uses Obscenity Law to stuff up cartoon sex loophole

So

this means that they will soon be legislating for laws against the depiction of ANY illegal act?

Sacked worker faces jail over malware revenge attack

Well

you can see why they wanted to sack him. Stupid and vindictive.. what a combo.

Wrath of Spielberg smites Welsh uni leaflet

@Pete Burgess

I think you are right, I bet that was why the C&D was sent. As to if it was likely that any one viewing the leaflet may have thought that he endorsed the said course is another matter. Since I haven't seen it I cannot say.

Intel accused of stealing chip virtualization, violating God's law

Well..

I am convinced!

German beaver escapes from Dartmoor

lol

"The furry trunk-muncher"

Government pipedreams on internet ratings doomed to fail

@ AC 16:36

Hmm you sure you haven't already started drinking yourself silly? Because I am having problems deciding exactly what you are complaining about. Unless of course you are in favour of technically unfeasible and unpopular secret filtering (Australian model) or unenforceable ratings for websites (Brit model) and don’t like articles pointing this out.

If of course I have missed your point please enlighten me.

City of Heroes fingered in MMO patent lawsuit

Well they are not going to take on Blizzard are they..

bit too much money there for them to get anything but a royal butt kicking. But seriously the US patent system is beyond a joke.

Pair arrested over leaked BNP list

@ Paul Bristow

Fascists and the Nazies can not really be classed far lefties mate or totally far right really either. As for the Nazis official name of “National Socialists”, well that, is just a name, and while it is vaguely descriptive it doesn’t tell the whole story. For instance the Nazies embraced the idea of certain aspects of “socialist” or Far Left goals they also grabbed certain aspects of the “Ultra Conservative” side of politics too, often for quite different reasons than the originators envisaged. They are a kind of hodgepodge of ideas and it has been proposed that they could be classed as extreme centrists. This is of course horribly simplified and not totally accurate.

For example while they (Nazies) liked Nationalization of industry it wasn’t from any sort of communist ideals as they disliked the communists as much as they disliked what they called Laissez-faire capitalists. For Fascists, the state is everything and the Nazis also added the race, in both cases individualism is suppressed for the sake of the state, and/or race in the Nazies case. Of course people being people this (as do many other ideologies, just ask Marx) it seems gets twisted to lesser or greater amounts, so very often it becomes what is good for those in charge becomes what is good for the state/race. Once again this is oversimplified and there is much more to the story.

Anyway to be honest it is often difficult for me to see a whole lot of tangible difference between ANY extreme version of politics (or religion for that matter), be it right, left, centre, Christian , Muslim etc as the final practical outcome of many of their policies or ideas are very often so similar as to make very little difference in the end.

BBC relives The Day of The Triffids

Sigh

"The corporation promises, though, a "fast-paced, futuristic and electrifying take" on the chilling guide to why you shouldn't look at meteor showers."

Oh dear..

Satanic net neologisms - nominations invited

God the choices!

Well as many have said there are too many to accurately add but these two I save a special hatred for:

Anything that has two point fucking zero after it. To be honest though anything that is part of “web 2” is automatically suspect to me. Always makes me think that they have taken an old turd.. pushed it into a vaguely different shape and then spray painted to it to hide the fact that the idea is about 4 years old and stank then too.

Blog, always makes me think of a toilet, and lets face it the content inside most blogs is the same shit contained in a filled crapper too.

El Reg seeks top net neologism

*tard

Ya *tard for me.. Tho woot is a close second. Hmm actually any misspelling that has become accepted is good eg 'teh' etc. Since I am a crappy speller it gives me a way of looking hip while actually being a spelltard.

Oxford don offered $10,000 for proof terrorist penned Obama memoir

@ Matt Bryant

Lol are you seriously suggesting that Millican has deliberately falsified his results? While it is not impossible I cannot see what he would get out of doing so to justify the risks to his reputation/job for a Politician from another country. Sorry I just cant see any connection. Especially as Fox and co came to him. If he had sought them out I could see your point.

To be honest if Millican had refused to say yay or nay over his results I would be more inclined to agree with you (if as you intimate he is sympathetic to Obama) that he was possibly covering up something he didn’t like.

David Tennant quits Who

Whew

Well thank god Tennant is going. The last series with him and Ms Tate was bloody horrible. I saw only one and a bit full episode.. the one where he starts to regenerate. Oh how I cheered when he started to regenerate. Oh how I swore when he regenerated into the same idiotic, gabbling git.

Eccleston you bastard why did you have to leave!

Facebook picks Dublin for international HQ

Re: Top o' the morning...bitch

Love it. :)

California Academy of Sciences: A new lease on life

@ Marvin

Hell yeah the Swamp castle icon gets my vote. :)

Police drop BT-Phorm probe

the aim was to enhance their products." ?????

Riiight...

I would respectfully suggest it would be more accurate to say.. "the aim was to enhance their bottom line."

HMV keeps Warhammer-ers from goblins

@@Age issue a problem

Huh.. I am with Kit. Not really had any issues with obvious teens in AoC. There is always the odd twonk but overall it has been pretty good. That being said since I live in Australia and have to play on the US servers I am usually on there off peak hours so the kiddies have probably finished whackin the weasle and are tucked up in bed. :)

Sainsbury's punts 'Innocent kids juices' for £2.99

@ all the whiners about "wots the IT angle"

Sigh... the story is in Bootnotes. I suggest if you have issues with articles that have very little or nothing to do with IT you give the whole section a miss rather than reading them and then complaining it. Getting all huffy and then polluting the comments section with your inane whines about "How this has nothing to do with IT" gets a tad old.

As a simple guide, the articles with "Bootnotes" above the headline are things you probably want to avoid.

Wall Street shudders under Lehman collapse

@AC Stop it now

Heh how is moving to Russia going to help if I dont like capitalism? Some very rich, uber capitalists living there.

Caterpillar plans 600 tonne godzilla-lorry robots

@Yeah right

That is exactly what I was thinking. Tho I think this is a bit of a tiddler in comparison to a full out Bolo if I remember rightly. Mebbe a baby bolo.

Apple to charge iPod Touch owners for new OS - again

Ok

So if they are required by law to charge for the Touch "upgrade" why dont they have to charge for the iphone version? Surely that is an upgrade too.

Boeing trumpets 'relevant battlefield laser' raygun

@Rick

Hmm well I think the point is that most of what you have mentioned there (perhaps not the animated cartoon on a mountain trick) can be done more effectively at the moment with conventional weapons/munitions. Until these laser weapons can be more powerful and reliable and do the job better than aforesaid conventional gear I suspect that they will not be terribly popular except possibly for niche applications.

As for the derision heaped upon Lewis for his reporting style I fail to see your point. Since Lewis was in bomb disposal before joining the Reg and the "Laser Avenger" reported on here was being built up by boeing as a way of dealing with IED and UXO threats (that is what they successfully used it for). I figure he probably does understand quite well that aspect and the relative merits (or lack of) of the LA.

Apple iPod Touch

@Ascylto

So when you praise an apple product you are being fair and if you criticise one you are being what... unfair? biased??

/shakes head.

90% is about right.

I have had one for 2 weeks now and generally I am pleased with it. The sound (once I got rid of the basic ear buds) is very good and mostly the controls are nice. I do however have some niggles with it.

1. The lack of specific Volume buttons to me is quite annoying, I really would prefer having dedicated buttons for that.

2. The screen for me while watching video is on the whole very nice, as long as the video is bright. Dark colours seem to be a bit muddy on my one.

3. Itunes. Unfortunatly I am not a big fan. Just a personal preference thing but not that thrilled being forced to use it.

4. Safari. On the whole it renders pages very nicely and with little issue, however it seems to have problems with pages that have frames that have a set viewable resolution and are very long. You find yourself having to scroll a looong way down sometimes as it wants to render the whole frame and not just the visible part it seems.

Also would like to be able to set the page width/rendered resolution manually. That is a wish however and not really a complaint.

5. It's soo shiny.. Too bloody shiny.. not to worry tho.. the back of mine will very soon be a mat finish from all the scratches. :P

6. Why the cut down version of the calendar? Minor issue but annoying.

On the whole tho a nice item that does what it says well.

Russian spammer murder hoax exposed

Bah

Damn thats sad. The Russian mafia could have got a whole lot of nice press and goodwill from this. Plus lets face it.. no jury would convict if they were caught. :)

Australia to get 1,000 megawatt wind farm

@Herbys

The main concern is the tailings left. Or as as happend here in Australia contaminated water getting into the local creeks and rivers. Not to mention human error (try contaminated water being accidentally leaked into workers drinking water at one mine). Perception is king and unfortunately some of the mines here and one especially (Ranger), have had quite a few pollution accidents. Whether they were truely serious or not dosnt really matter in many peoples eyes. The fact that they have had that many does not encourage confidence.

Boeing robo-chopper for DARPA's super-spyeye

Hmm how about..

Voyeur

Vehicle for cOvert YankEe Udder peRving

I am sure there must be lots of others. :)

Apple iPhone

Sheesh its not all over?

Sigh.

FFS to those who want/have an iphone.. great. Those who dont want/have and iphone.. great.

The incredibly futile thing in these arguments is not one of you is going to change the mind of the other, and lets face it.. its not that important.

Google malware watchdogs bite mom-and-pop shops

@Lexx

Ehh? Non Story? Just what about this do you consider not worthy of reporting?