Posts by Simon Neill

Common brain parasite 'can affect host's actions'

Eugh.

See, there is an issue here that cats are just like dogs in one respect - they need training.

Naturally a cat will scratch the sofa, it will walk anywhere it can. The solution is train them not to. Its not hard. Positive reinforcement for good behaviour, mild negative reinforcement for bad behaviour. All it took for us to train our cat not to scratch the sofa was to grab her every time she looked like she was going for the sofa and move her away from it. 2 days later she stopped even going for the sofa. Job done.

Same with the kitchen counters. Any time she looked too interested in the counters or like she was going to jump up on the counters or the dinner table, just grab her and move her away. She learned quickly and never walked on the counters.

The problem here is NOT the pet, its the owner. A little bit of cat shit in your flower bed is not going to do any harm, its already full of mole shit, fox shit, bird shit, worm shit, spider shit, beetle shit and all the rest.

As for who's responsibility it is to keep a cat out of a garden, that is a tough one. I am not digging up your flower beds to retrieve my cat's shit. You probably don't want me in your garden digging up your flower beds. There are plenty of animals that will come in and dig up/shit in a garden. If you have a problem with that, then yes you need to do something about it. As for the owner stopping a cat going to the toilet somewhere, that can be done. Rather the other way round. You train the cat where to go to the toilet, I've seen people train their cat to actually use a toilet.

TLDR version:

If a cat is doing something it shouldn't, your problem is not the species its the owner. If someone didn't train their dog to stay you wouldn't blame the dog.

Cats vs Dogs.

Well, I'd imagine the difference in view is because of the difference in behaviour.

Dogs shit where they stand and are taken for walks in public areas. This means that dog shit can (and usually is) all over public areas where others come to walk and play.

Cats on the other hand aren't taken for walks and generally find a discrete spot to bury their business. I've never been walking down the street and stepped in cat shit.

As for the whole garden thing, that is surely a problem with the owner not the animal.

As for accountability of an animal - again, I'd imagine the view is that a cat is far less likely to injure or kill a human. I've heard of plenty of stories of dogs killing and injuring people, but other than the one story of a guy having a knife fight with his cat and somehow losing*, I can't recall of cats ever making the news in that way.

*http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2011/05/killer_house_cat.php

UK punters happy to pay £3 to top up e-wallets

But..

If you pay them in cash they then need to make sure they have enough change on premises at all times to give you change.

Then they have to transport said cash to a bank most likely, since the majority of their expenses will probably not accept cash. That then is either a high risk transfer themselves or they pay someone like securicor to transport it for them.

Then there is the insurance, buying a safe or whatever they feel they need and the fact that stolen cash is very hard to recover. Perhaps paying by card IS the better way.

Schoolteachers can't teach our kids to code, say engineers

Its like you work here.

Ahahaha. Yeah.

I'm with jake here.

I work in a school and spent most of the morning logging on for kids that can't handle the concept of username and password, even with both written on a slip of paper for them.

Teaching them to program? As well teach a labradoodle quantum physics.

NASA to trial laser-powered space broadband

I have to ask.

Why we can get better broadband from Mars than we can to my house?

I do hope this works though. Fit the next rovers with a HD video camera, stream video of mars.

Prototype iPhone 5 lost in bar, right on schedule

Makes me think.

Maybe it wasn't an accident.

Think about it, pre-release prototype. If anyone says "This is shit" it can be passed off as a glitch in the prototype and fixed pre release. Not to mention its a LOT of publicity for the loss of one unit.

School caned for losing 20K details

WTF.

There are several things wrong here.

Why the HECK did a school have details on 20,000 people to start with?

They have about 2,200 pupils on roll according to their ofsted.

That means they have details for 9 people per pupil on roll. That seems excessive.

Our policy is

Share your password with anyone and we break your thumbs.

We have to break more teacher thumbs than pupil thumbs though.

Wildfire shuts down Los Alamos nuke lab

I can guarantee

that you are not. First thought was andromeda strain second was computer virus from 2005.

Netherlands first European nation to adopt net neutrality

Hrm.

Well, I am all for prioritising my skype data or game data over someone else's bit torrent data. I'd even be ok if you slowed my steam download so that others could skype/game smoothly.

what I object to is paying my TV license for bbc iplayer to exist then paying my ISP to watch it. If google want to provide youtube for free, fine but again I refuse to pay my ISP to use youtube specifically. If they can't supply the bandwidth and data transfer limits they have given me in the contract thats their problem not mine.

'Leccy price hike: Greens to blame as well as energy biz

Solar Panels

What I'm seeing here is that its a battery style wearing out - so after 20 years they still work, just only at 80% efficiency.

I still say the absolute biggest problem with solar and wind is simply availability. We can make the things cheaper, perhaps we can make something organic that works of chlorophyll. BUT - probably my highest energy use in the day is at 6:30 when I have a morning (electric) shower. Let me just look up how well PV cells work on average at 6:30 am....oh right, they don't. Guess its cold showers from now on.

iTunes Match is iPiracy, claims loopy Oz industry troll

what a stupid idea.

So, you pay $24/yr, license all your unlicensed songs and what...RE-license all the ones you ripped from legit CDs?

PASS!

Also, would they stop bloomin moaning. If it makes people legit rather than pirate surely its a good thing?

BBC to serve Wimbledon finals in 3D

women's tennis

bridging the gap between pr0n and sp0rts since 1872.

Boffins grow brains in petri dish

12 seconds?

Thats a lot longer than the tools I work with.....Can we buy these and get them implanted in people?

Honda security breach exposes 283,000 customers

Agreed.

Screw cookies, there is a perfectly good "reject cookies" button built into my browser already.

Boffins develop method of driving computers insane

Well...

That made my day. Of course, I could have made it insane sooner. Just set it to work in this place and it would go insane in a week, max.

Is there anything to find on bin Laden's hard drive?

Also...

You can interrogate people by beating them with hard disks.

Cops raid man whose Wi-Fi was used to download child porn

Maybe.

Where I live there are no less than 11 Wireless networks broadcasting SSID in range of my laptop. One of the reasons I use cable for my desktop.

I have disabled SSID broadcast, enabled WPA2 with a quite nasty key, restricted MAC addresses, turned off DHCP and basically ticked every setting I can to make it difficult. I know not a single one of these precautions is 100% reliable but as they say - "you don't need to outrun the bear, just your friend". With 11 networks broadcasting SSID in the same area I figure the hacker will take the easy option over my wireless.

US Navy laser cannon used to set boat aflame

@white engines.

I can't believe several of you just said "Paint yourself white to reflect the blast". Sure I've heard that before somewhere and it turned out to be bs.

Human heart could power an iPod

Thermodynamics...

"However, in time, we could see such piezoelectric nanogenerators put in the soles of our shoes, or utilising movement from rolling car tyres, even harnessing wind to deliver additional sources of energy. "

There was once an idea to put rollers in busy roads and use cars passing over them to generate electricity. This was dropped because that energy gets added to the fuel bill of the car. These will have the same effect. Of course, if they turn out to be more efficient than an alternator then what a great idea. Probably make tyres more expensive though.

Similar arguement applies to attaching these things to the body.

Handy radiation checker comes to iPhone

Doses...

Nice to see that even the higher readings basically rate as 2x the background radiation. OH NOES!! WEZ ALL GUNNA DIEZ!! </sarcasm>

Take your media hype and shovel it.

Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear

OMG! Its NUKULERR!

Pretty much is the reaction. I'm sick of hearing about how radiation could cover the land. We learned from chernobyll. Heck, we learned BEFORE it happened. As for relative safety....ask the gulf of mexico how they feel about oil.

Wind and solar energy are useless, I don't want to stop using my PC because the wind stopped and the sun went in.

Tidal seems like a reliable alternative energy source, not that I would like to maintain any form of equipment under 20 feet of salt water. Don't imagine it would last long.

USB key to 4,000 vulnerable people's front doors lost

WHY.....

...was this data held on a USB stick?

I can't see any reason why someone needs 4000 codes on a USB stick. The main DB should be on a secure sever, then a care worker should be given the 10 codes they need. If you do need to move 4,000 codes why not just put them straight on a laptop rather than a piddling easily lost USB stick?

Sixth Japanese nuclear reactor loses cooling

I really hope..

...this doesn't start more scaremongering about nuclear power (and that noone else dies of course). As others have said, nuclear power is overall one of the safest methods of electricity generation. Sure, when it goes bad it goes bad in a horrible way. Thing is it so rarely goes bad. A 9,0 richter scale earthquake is pretty damn bad. If a 40 year old reactor can survive that and not explode, come on...the rest of us are surely fine.

Dim Brits think TARDIS IS REAL

It does exist!

well, someone keeps erasing my memories of friday nights. They also seem to take large ammounts of money out of my wallet too.

The hoverboards kind of exist, just we call them maglev trains.

Spooks' secret TEMPEST-busting tech reinvented by US student

Yeah..

For a proper IT centre I'd be doing option 1 as standard. Nothing to do with spies, just don't want any nasty dirty power hurting my babies.

Hrm.

A point for sure, but what is the detection range of sonar? does it extend into the ultrasound?

A moot question I suppose, since if it doesn't now it will soon for this very reason.

More worrying is what 50W of ultrasound does to a solid structure over days/years. Surely can't be good.

Honey I shrunk the chip ... now what?

Woah!

Slow down dude! lets build a PC that can deliver 60FPS of crysis first.

BT fibre-to-the-premises trial takes 7 hours per install

Costs.

Its not so much the cable as the hole/pole to carry it.

FTTP

All well and good giving me a bazzillion gigabit line to my house if all you are going to have is a dial up modem at the other end and cap me to 20 bytes per decade and all.

Rogue AV pimps finally show love for alternative browsers

Yep...

Just been handed the second laptop to get this.

Thank you virus writers for giving me job security.

RoboCop statue fundraiser hits $50k

DVD movies

weren't there 4 not 2?

Latest boffinry: Feeding TNT to sheep

So..

no supersheep then? Do we at least get bannana bombs?

'Air laser' tech could sniff bombs, probe atmos from afar

Range?

How would you range the return signal? Say you focus the beam to scan from 30 feet away, how do you know the bomb is 30 feet away rather than say...3 inches? It makes a big difference if said bomb is triggered by a pressure sensor or trip wire...

I'm assuming this is some sort of spectrophotometry dealio?

California's green-leccy price system will stifle plug-in cars

Witty Title.

My cousin owns a flat on an "eco7" plan. What this means is that he has two sets of wiring for high drain stuff (e.g. water heater). Running the heater at night costs a fraction of what it costs in the day, since energy at night is a LOT cheaper due to lower demand. A similar solution would surely work for electric cars: cheaper electricity but only between 12 and 6.

MOSSAD SPY VULTURE seized in Saudi Arabia

Dare I say...

The bird is the word?

Cell phone search needs no warrant, say Cal Supremes

I agree

100%.

However the fact that a warrant would be so easy to acquire kind of makes me think "meh" about the whole thing. Its not like they arrested him for speeding then found a text message and accused him of murder. I guess in principle though...

Gov gone wild: Mad new pub glasses, bread freedom introduced

I would like...

...to subscribe to your newsletter.

BOFH: Who's been naughty and who's been nice?

Finally...

I feel the Christmas spirit.

aaahhh.

Police appeal for missing Taser

I find this...

...absolutely shocking.

Supermarket techie in mega loyalty-point blag

Not at sainsburys

Sainsburys at least list nectar balance before and after at the end of the reciept and also allow you to claim nectar points for previous shops if you produce a reciept without said.

Shut up, Spock! How Battlestar Galactica beat Trek babble

Sold.

That is all.

Firefox, uTorrent, and PowerPoint hit by Windows DLL bug

This sounds familiar...

CCP did something like this with an EVE Online patch once. Part of the EVE client features a file called "boot.ini" and an incorrect path during an update caused systems with the client installed on a drive other than C to accidentally update c:\boot.ini rather than <evepath>\boot.ini. Ooops.

The problem with "hard coding" DLL locations in an EXE is that you then have to isntall the exe on the same location on every PC ever, which breaks it for anyone with multiple partitions or running programs off network drives or whatever. Course, having a program look for DLL files in the data directory you just opened a file from seems silly.

Easily avoided by not downloading data files that come with free DLLs.

Regulator allows charging for uncounted TV text votes

@"close the lines"

That works fine for britain's got dancing on idols where the phone lines only exist for that show, but what about (as an example) Real Radio doing a vote using their existing phone line? calls/texts won't be counted for the vote but they still need the lines open for song requests etc. Not sure if any TV shows would have this format, but you see the point. The regulation has to be good for EVERYONE.

ISS cooling pump refuses to come quietly

Anyone bring...

...some gum?

Xmas kicks off on 2 August

Next..

I will be able to buy christmas stuff on my birthday. Heck, if they are starting the 2010 campain in august, why not start the 2011 campaign in september?

Soon "not christmas" will be shorter than "christmas"

Coalition spends £3.75m on ContactPoint

meh.

I know they are different governments, but said it before and I'll say it again.

£50,000.00M bank bailout.

£00,003.75M database.

MEH!

Child protection campaigners claim hollow victory over Facebook

@add it to the browser

Actually, its already been done. Ironically its the "mean nasty closed doesn't allow plugins monopoly granny hitting" browser that has gone first.

http://www.ceop.police.uk/ie8/

Romford coppers try to stopper young snapper

how bout this:

http://www.met.police.uk/about/photography.htm

"Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel."