Posts by Gianni Straniero

Yahoo! scores Premier League highlights package deal

Rant alert

I believe the original reason for not televising 3pm Saturday kick-offs was to protect the gate revenue of Football League clubs, not the Premier Leagues ones. I'm not sure if this argument holds much water, though. Is a Rochdale fan likely to stay at home to watch Chelsea v City instead of supporting his or her own club in person?

It has also given broadcasters excessive influence on the match schedules. You routinely get absurd situations like a London club kicking off in Manchester at 12:45, which means an unholy start for travelling away fans.

It's almost rare now for top teams to kick off at 3pm on Saturday. I believe the only time you are guaranteed a full complement of Premier League games at that time is the last day of the season, ostensibly to prevent the outcome of later games from being influenced by earlier results, which might affect the final league placings.

'Beauty with antimatter bottom' created out of pure energy

No bottom on display

Nor an antibottom, mores the pity. I understand (in the loosest possible sense of the term) that the antimatter partner to a bottom quark is a "bottom anti-quark".

I wonder if they're beginning to regret their nomenclature.

Boffin [indicating screen]: This is a top quark.

Joe Public: And that's the opposite of a bottom quark?

Boffin: No. That would be a top antiquark.

Joe: That's strange

Boffin [pinching bridge of nose]: No, it isn't. [Indicates other part of screen]. That's strange.

Joe: Why, what is it?

Boffin: Strange, dammit! It's a strange quark, you idiot!

Joe: Charmed, I'm sure.

Boffin: [head explodes]

PARIS hacked Canon: 108 minutes, 1,298 stills

Automovil

May I enquire what species of vehicle Sr Haines is driving in this gripping film?

Ash cans flights for another day

NATS working with engine manufacturers...

... and suggests they fit filter tips to the air intakes.

Guy Kewney, pioneer, guru, friend - RIP

Very sad news

GK was required reading throughout his carreer. Sometimes controversial. Never dull.

Probably the only tech writer to (briefly) become a household name following *that* BBC News 24 interview.

BT fibre upgrades hit full speed

Git tae fuck

I suppose this might be some justification for BT's south east English chauvinism:

http://www.griersons.com/ne2/images/stories/ukmap.gif

BBC ices launch of free iPhone news app

Re: BBC needs breaking up

> yeah yeah the Natural History unit at Bristol does world-class work

I think Bristol's output is worth the license fee on its own. The fact that they throw in eight TV channels, a load of radio stations, and a fat website that is the envy of the commercial sector is just gravy.

Roger Boyes probes Vienna Boys’ Choir

Advertising

As ever, if you switch off your ad blocking software, you get some unfortunate juxtapositions. See, for example, the big yellow box on the right:

http://yfrog.com/9fadfailp

UK.gov blames Israel for cloning passports in Dubai hit

"Unnamed diplomat expelled"

For which read: "known Mossad agent".

Whenever there are mutual explusions of "diplomats" from embassies, they're always intelligence staff. Just goes to show we know a lot more about one another's spook setups than we like to let on.

FA launches security probe after England team bugged

Place your bets

"It's unclear how the hours-long recordings were made, much less who made them."

Hmmm. I'm offering 2/5 on The News Of The World. Any takers?

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx changes its spots

You lot are lame

What a lot of fuss over nothing. I came here expecting a good, old-fashioned desktop manager holy war, between Gnometards and KDEjjits, and what do I get? People telling one another how to change a theme.

What is the world coming to?

Mystic Met Office abandons long range forecasts

Big and strange

Do the Met not mean that the UK is too *small* and strange to forecast? My impression is that continental forecasts are usually more accurate. In summer it's always hellish hot, and in winter it's always devastatingly cold.

Is the UK, a smallish island, subject to the vagiaries of oceanic weather, with its cyclones and occluded fronts piling in from the west?

Mere idle speculation on my part. Much like a long-range forecast, I suppose.

Hunt for murderer of lost golden cloud toads hots up

@ Sean Timarco Baggaley

I objected to the use of the term "warmist", which was absent from Lewis' previous essays that touch on climate change. For the avoidance of doubt, I also object to terms like "denier", which are frequently used elsewere. Neither adds value to the literature.

And you are at it yourself, talking about "panic-mongers".

As for the detail of your arguments, please see http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php, especially paragraphs 55 and 62.

What's all this then?

"warming alarmists", "warmist tendency", "warmist researchers"...

Your articles on climate change used to be more balanced than this. Have you been hanging out with Andrew Orlowski of late, or is this evidence of a hardening of El Reg's editorial stance?

Argentinians invade Falkland Islands website

Don't cry for me, Las Malvinas

@Iglethal: I believe someone did ask the Falklanders whether they'd like to be British or Argentinian, and they chose to stick with Blighty. That the population is almost exclusively descended from British stock might have influenced their decision, but who are we to argue?

Anyway, why is it that a bunch of hacktivists replacing Twitter's homepage with pro-Iranian propaganda is classed as "cyber terrorism", while this ostensibly identical act is not?

'Clumsy' French cop tasers schoolkid

These hands are deadly weapons

Dreyfus: The beggar was the lookout man for the gang.

Clouseau: That is impossible. How can a blind man be a lookout?

Dreyfus: How can an idiot be a police officer?

Clouseau: Well, all he has to do is enlist...

Dreyfus: Shut up!

Endeavour good to go on 7 Feb

Re: NASA boo-boo

According to the ESA, the cupola will have a launch *mass* of 1805 kg (3979 lbs), and an on-orbit *mass* of 1880 kg (4145 lbs). So yes, NASA made a boo-boo.

And yet ... the ISS orbits at approximately 350 km above the Earth. At that altitude, g is 8.7 m/s/s, reduced from 9.8 m/s/s, the average value at the surface.

This means the cupola *weighs* 16,356 N in orbit. But since it is in freefall, its occupants will appear to be weightless.

I thank you!

Avatar renders this earthly life meaningless

Cheap therapy

Once the daily trips to the IMAX start getting prohibitively expensive, they can just grab an old VHS of Pocahontas and watch that with some blue-tinted specs:

http://failblog.org/2010/01/10/avatar-plot-fail/

Oz firm seeks talented IT developer

Vacancy

I imagine they'll soon be advertising another vacancy, perhaps in the HR department.

Trouser-bomb clown attacks - how much should we laugh?

[Citation needed]

I am currently growing a Sagaretia theezans bonsai tree. According to Wikipedia, "when ground up and mixed with salt, it forms a minor explosive capable of shattering glass."

So there's another suggestion for would-be jihadis. Anyone want to be labelled the "bombsai bomber"?

Will a service pack for Windows 7 rock up anytime soon?

This article requires more editing

Will a service pack for Windows 7 rock up anytime soon?

By Phil Bandwidth.

No.

ENDS

Outrageous new means of megastar demise spotted

Kablooey

I trust our region of space (indeed the whole Galaxy) is sufficiently filthy with heavy elements that this sort of thing is unlikely to blow us all to Kingdom Come.

Still, plenty of other things to worry about. A well-aimed GRB occurring somewhere in the Milky Way might yet scour the Earth clean of all life.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1473550404001910

(As an aside, does anyone else find it interesting that "Milky Way Galaxy" is a rhetorical tautology? No? Just me, then.)

HP probes 'racist' webcams

It'll be all white on the night

Early iterations of Street View suffered much the same problem. Honkies were successfully airbrushed from the streets, but folks with darker skintones were clearly visible for some time.

DNS attack hijacks Twitter

cui bono?

Would flattening Natanz be a disproportionate response to this incident? We need a "tinfoil hat" icon, I believe.

Boeing 787 Dreamliner set for first flight

"Beyond limits"

"Mid-air stalls, dives and steep banks" all sound fairly routine, if you're approaching Heathrow in a Boeing.

Spook firm readies Virgin Media filesharing probes

Re: Encryption

@takuhii

No, no. You're setting up a VPN *through* your ISP, no to it. Yes, you want to encrypt the wireless traffic between your computer and your router, because it is sent over the air and can be intercepted by anoyone in range of your wireless adapter.

But a VPN provides an encrypted tunnel through which other traffic can pass. All the ISP knows is that encrypted traffic is going to another host on the Internet, most likely on TCP port 1723.

This differs from encryped peer-to-peer traffic in that the ISP will not know the intended endpoint of your communications, nor the TCP port the endpoint is using. Encrypted peer-to-peer is like encrypted web, in that although the contents of the packet cannot be determined, the address and port of the recipient can be, e.g. www.yourbank.com:443.

So the (rather clunky) workaround for Virgin users wishing to game the system is to connect over a VPN to a system that is not on Virgin, which then forwards your filesharing traffic to your peer. You just have to hope that the peer is not also a Virgin customer.

Acoustic matching

Good luck with that, especially if they're using Gracenote.

No more UFO reports please, says MoD

Please spam Nick Pope instead

I had a look at the recently-declassified UFO files. The vast majority is made up of wearisome correspondence between wingnuts and put-upon civil servants. Very little UFO material at all.

Of course that's only the stuff they decided to declassify. The *real* files are kept... etc... etc...

Web host Daily recovers after Tux-themed defacement

"eastern folk music"

Or more specifically, Turkish hip hop.

McNealy's inflatable 'blimp' pleasure-dome angers neighbours

Slapshot

It took me a while to figure out that this is a hockey term, and not some peculiar North American sexual practice.

Kent Police exceeded powers in too-tall photographer case

Whoa there, big fella

I am delighted to note that 5' 11'' is now considered "tall". I think I will step out for a spot of light intimidation.

UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files

Something for your cron

echo -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- > /tmp/annoyance && dd status=noxfer if=/dev/urandom count=498 2>/dev/null | base64 >> /tmp/annoyance && echo -----END PGP MESSAGE---- >> /tmp/annoyance && mail -s "My plans for world domination" [e-mail] < /tmp/annoyance

Set it to run every ten minutes or so...

TrueCrypt FTW

Interesting article, which boils down to the fact that the poor lad was jailed for pissing off the Plod.

I especially like this:

"One file encrypted using software from the German firm Steganos was cracked, but investigators found only another PGP container."

Imagine their faces...

At least we know Steganos is no damn good for encryption. And as Chris Hatfield says above, TrueCrypt gives you plausible deniability.

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=hidden-volume

Collisions at LHC! Tevatron record to be broken soon?

Glenn Beck

I'm not actually saying the LHC has already brought interdimensional invaders into our continuum and started raping our wives, but why won't CERN deny that it has?

There has been an awful lot of media speculation that is really damaging to CERN. I wonder why they won't just put all our minds at ease and confirm that the world has not been turned into grey goo. Of course I am not saying that it has, but they should be up-front about whether or not the unverse has been turned into strangelet soup.

Until they do, people will continue to speculate, and this can only be damaging to CERN's reputation.

BeautifulPeople shun hairy Reg hack

Hee haw

Beats the picture of you in a wetsuit, and no mistake.

NASA: the Moon is a hydrated mistress

Brain training

A dozen 7.6 litre buckets in a 20-30m crater. Solve for ppm.

Volume of a spherical cup (crater) is given by the formula

V = \frac{2}{3} \pi r^2 h

where r is the radius of the crater, and h its height. Let r = 10 and h = 6, for a crater formed by a 90 degree impact.

V = 1,256,637 litres

ergo this portion of the moon is approx 72 ppm water by volume.

It seems unlikely, therefore, that the regolith is similar to any kind of cheese known on Earth.

Channel 4 to become Channel 3D tonight

Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus

One dressed entirely in cyan, and the other in red, presumably.

NASA: the world will not end in 2012

A Good Thing

If the world comes to a sudden and catastrophic end in December 2012, at least we can stop worrying about what to do with the Olympic stadium after the games.

US sees 'hot-tub related injuries' increase triplefold

Death by statistic

The Home and Leisure Accident Statistics website is a rich source of entertainment, especially if you filter results by the object or product involved:

http://www.hassandlass.org.uk/query/index.htm

For example, read the horrifying number of accidents involving a Wendy House:

Year: Number of accidents

2000 869

2001 750

2002 820

Sadly the website uses POST for idempotent transactions, which provides the IT angle for this comment.

Google not normal for Norfolk

"Google"

This is a simple linguistic problem. The verb "to google" beans "to throw stones at the moon" in the dialect of Norfolk.

Somerset council resigns over blog

Re: 23rd June?

Yes, but the "caravanette" went missing "three years ago". The first post on the blog is dated November 2006.

ESA proposes ion drive Sun-dodge Mars commsat ploy

Re: Lagrange points

Interesting idea. It seems Mars-Sun L4 and L5 have asteroids, which might be a bit inconvenient. they're both 750 light seconds from Mars, so radio links would still be slow.

I don't have a chart to hand, so I'm not sure if Earth-Sun L4 and L5 would also be occluded during conjunction.

Prehistoric titanic-snake jungles laughed at global warming

Settle down, you lot

Here, once again, we see the old arguments: climate change is nothing to worry about because it has happened in the past; nature got along fine last time it happened; ergo we need not worry.

This is foolishness.

- Correct: it happpened before.

- Correct: the biota survived.

- Wrong: we DO need to worry

If you take the long view, you (by definition) accept the fact that all of humanity's interesting achievements took place while the climate hovered around its present mean. (For the purposes of clarification: I am not including the extinction of the Palaeolithic megafauna among the "interesting achievements").

Truism: all the good stuff happened in the Holocene.

If the climate changes -- either by getting colder, or getting hotter, I care not which -- I have confidence the biota can adapt and survive.

The question is, can we?

The answer is not clear. "Civilisation" emerged during the Holocene. It may have appeared during countless interglacials/interstadials during the Pleistocene, but we have no evidence that it did.

If you have a technological solution that will guarantee continuity through whatever climatic changes we can expect -- either warming or cooling -- post your source.

Otherwise, STFU

Rate this comment

Please can we have a system for rating comments, like the one you offer for rating articles? Imagine the fun we could have with this little lot.

Guardian gagged over Commons question

Dunces, the lot of 'em

Trafigura's alleged involvement in the dumping of toxic waste in Abidjan was the subject of a Newsnight report in May, and again in September of this year. It's hardly a secret.

RE: Moderation policy here?

@AC

The Barclays case, while certainly interesting, appears not to be the subject of the injunction. The fact that the injunction was sought by Carter-Ruck, and that The Guardian was able to publish that fact, rather gave the game away.

@The Moderatrix

I understand your caution in this regard. El Reg reports elsewhere that websites cannot be held accountable for libellous material posted by commentards.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/17/libel_law_review/

IANAL, but I wonder if this might extend to any breaches of gagging orders. But I don't blame you for not wanting to become a test case.

Horny new 'ballerina' Tyrannosaur was light on its feet

PEDANT ALERT

's/Archaeologists/Palaeontologists/g'

Cyclists give TV chef a Wikikicking

"I stepped on the gas"

Silly fool. Doesn't he know there's no gas(oline) in a Tesla? If not, he hasn't much business reviewing one, has he?

MoD stokes media-paralysing UFO feedback loop

"life imitating art"?

Shurely t'other way round, as the Air Component tangled with the Belgian Triangle six years before Independence Day.

NASA, Japan (nearly) finish topographic map of Earth

Colorize

Earliest usage according to the OED is 1611, in "Queen Anna's new world of words" by John Florio.

"Muffola, a kinde of colour that Goldsmiths vse to colourise mettals."

This entry has the added benefit of reintroducing the word "Muffola" to currency. Try using it today!