Posts by Graham Bartlett

Google limbers up for Windows 7 with Apps billboard onslaught

Handy having Rentokil on board

You know, in case you've got bugs you need sorting out...

US boffins use Obama dough to study clouds

Why Magellan?

Simple - it's going to get halfway there, after great expense and hardship, and then take a spear in the chest and die horribly.

UK.gov backs ID scheme with peanuts promo spend

Never mind the marketing budget

I really don't mind having an ID card. I already carry my driving license with me at all times. If you want to merge ID cards, passport and driving license into one, I don't care.

I *do* mind having to pay a couple of hundred quid for something which does FA for me. And frankly I'd rather that having paid that money, hospital porters and tax-office helpdesk staff weren't able to fake-up a criminal record for me.

And that they weren't able to clone my ID so that they can carry out real crimes and implicate me. Not that I think they'd deliberately want to smear me, but if you're doing this then chances are you'll pick someone at random who's about your age, height and racial group, so casual checks of photos won't spot it. That makes it even harder to prove your innocence if you look similar to the real criminal.

DARPA, Microsoft, Lockheed team up to reinvent TCP/IP

Look on the bright side

We've got DARPA, Lockheed and MS working together on this one. These are three of the best organisations at putting the "dead" into "deadline", so the chances of anything occuring on this are pretty damn minimal. My best guess, they'll come up with something that works, kind of, by about the same time engineering progress has given us superconducting comms cables and quantum-dot processors which invalidate everything they've done. So it's not like it'll affect anyone. And that's $31m which isn't going into researching new nukes, which is also good news.

Aussie Sex Party in evangelist head-to-head

Concrete block stains

Just checked out the fundamentalists' website.

Did they not consider it could be rust or other metal oxides washed off whatever's sitting on that concrete block? Or paint washed off by a shower of rain shortly after painting?

Radical Christians - putting the "mental" into "fundamental" for over a thousand years...

Cambridgeshire makes road charge last resort

From someone living in Cambridge

'it would be introduced if congestion "reached a critical level and nothing else would help".'

Nothing else would help, eh?

Try sequencing your traffic lights then - it's only been happening in London for about 40 years. For people who aren't residents of Cambridge, there are several areas of town where progress is virtually impossible with any significant level of traffic because there's a zillion traffic lights, and not a single road in Cambridge has successive lights rigged to work in sequence. Newmarket Road infamously has 10 sets of traffic lights on about a mile of road, all of them out of sequence with each other.

And the few areas of dual carriageway through the city centre have been converted into bus lanes. Sure, the busses and taxis can go faster along those sections - but the single carriageway bits at the ends are gridlocked, so all that does is change where the busses get stuck.

Meantime there's over £100m going on a white-elephant guided bus scheme between Cambridge and a couple of neighbouring towns. First estimate BTW was £54m, final budget was £116m, and latest report is looking at somewhere north of £120m.

As a colleague once said, the only skill that Cambridgeshire road planners apparently need is to be able to draw on maps in coloured crayon. Hanlon's Razor says, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Still, in the face of decisions which apparently require *so* much stupidity, it's difficult to believe that's all it is.

Video games linked to ADD? Say it ain't ooh butterfly

Eh?!

Gamers required less brain processing power to complete the task - so they have ADD? How does that follow?

After 15 years of playing guitar, I can read a sequence of chords and the playing just happens with virtually no conscious effort, so I'm damn sure someone brain-scanning me whilst I strum your standard 3-chord blues would see very little processing going on. A newbie player might require a 10-second gap between each chord to remember where their fingers went, and their brain would be lit up like a Christmas tree. Does that mean I have ADD?

What's more interesting here is that gaming is apparently training people to be more capable of solving the Stroop test. This has two implications. The first is to find out how the training is happening, because this kind of improved mental flexibility might be desirable. And the second is that any study using the Stroop test needs to be wary of including gamers in the study, unless the study first works out every individual's baseline ability in the test before carrying out whatever study to look for improvements.

That icon is me stealing the lab-coat off whichever pseudo-scientists thought this one up...

Liquid electrocar batteries could be replaced at pumps

@JassMan

Yeah, something like that'd work. Actually there's an even easier way, if I remember my chemistry lessons, which is ph-testing the solution. The more charge left, the more acidic it is.

That replacing-the-electrolyte idea really does seem like the way to go. The electrolyte might not be very user-friendly stuff, but it's not a major engineering step to have hoses and tanks which seal when refilling - it's mandatory for fuelling F1 cars, for example. And being able to spread the electrical load over the day will make it much better from the electricity company's PoV. With a bit of infrastructure and a suitable reduction in rates for the places doing it, they could even use the filling stations for load-balancing across the national grid.

Ultracaps aren't really a solution to the battery-charging problem - you still have the problem of needing megawatts on tap to do the charging. But they're a good solution to the problem of getting the most out of your regen braking. It's likely that a seriously efficient electric car would use a smallish ultracap as a reservoir to buffer rapid changes of current, whilst also using a large battery as the major energy store.

Hypnotist expands breasts, cures irritable bowels

Checked their website at home

Since the site was NSFW, I checked it at home.

Yes indeedy, the woman's breasts *are* bigger. But so is her waistline, and so are her arms, and so's everywhere else. In other words, she's eaten more calories than she's worked off, so she's put on weight.

If the reason you've got no breasts is because you're anorexic, then sure, maybe this would help. But for the average woman whose brain is functioning normally, it ain't happening - or if it does happen, it's as a side effect of damaging your health. Nice.

Rectal problems

"Hallo Doctor. I bought this self-hypnosis CD thinking it'd cure my IBS. And now I feel like a stupid bleeding arsehole..."

FWIW, self-hypnosis *does* work on changing your state of mind - I've used it myself to help me deal with stage fright. And for getting you to exercise more, or eat more/less, sure. But curing IBS? Sorry, can't see it.

Large Hadron boffin hit with terrorism charges

@Roger de Laborde

Well, if you're digging a massive tunnel, having a few moles on your staff would be a good thing, wouldn't it?

And he's working down the tunnel, that means he's one of the few people in the world who can truly say:-

"I am a mole. And I live in a hole."

Toyota Prius fourth-generation e-car

@Greeno99

"Why don't they make a diesel hybrid?"

Because the American car industry tried to foist too many lousy diesels on their consumers in the 70s, and consequently destroyed US public opinion of diesels for generations still to come. To be fair, public opinion has recovered far enough that if you suggested it to the average American, they might think for a couple of seconds before telling you to f*** off instead of simply shooting you where you stand, but it's no better than that.

I'm hardly exaggerating here. No American who was alive in the 70s, or whose parents were alive in the 70s, will ever buy a diesel car - it's really that simple. By my reckoning, sometime around 2050 the US might finally have got over it enough that a diesel car would sell OK, but I doubt it'll happen any sooner.

Cisco makes up term 'dark web,' fights it with appliance

Why TF?

The point of indexing is so that you can find things of interest. The chances of a bunch of weeny-blogs being interesting is so vanishingly close to zero as makes no difference. Which makes the whole thing pointless. What a bunch of muppets.

Almighty rumpus in Swedish lesbian enclave

But...

wot no Optimus Prime?

NASA tweaks killer asteroid's trajectory of death

Oh please send Bruce Willis anyway...?

Then he can stop making bad films.

US to export riot-roasting raygun

@AC, "no media present"

It's pretty likely that this has gone to an "ally" who's not to bothered about human rights - some barbarian country like Saudi Arabia, for instance. And the chances are pretty good that it'll never be used for crowd control. I'm sure the Saudis would love to have a way of torturing multiple people at once, so they can just cable-tie their political prisoners in a row, park this in front of them and zap them all in one go.

That's also a bit of a problem with "non-lethal" or "less lethal". Because all these "less lethal" weapons work by causing severe pain to the victim, they all work as torture devices too, and in that case the victim will be subjected to unlimited doses of it which probably will be lethal. And it'll only be lethal after a long period of agony.

So these things are very not clever, and the guys responsible for building it really do want to look at their consciences. Not the Raytheon bosses, they probably don't have them, but the lower-level engineers. Someone has to design the electronics, order the parts, build the vehicle, etc.. Nice day's work, guys.

Beeb unveils new Doctor Who logo

@AC and RTD

Not absolute shite, but very close to.

To be fair, he started all right, but the second series went downhill faster than a runaway bobsled. He's actually pretty good at doing characters and conversations. But he can't write plots worth a damn, and he *definitely* should be kept out of arm's reach of a music editor with access to an orchestra and choir (or samples thereof). The problem is that he doesn't seem to realise quite how bad he is at both of those.

Jacques Chirac ditches devil dog

Bit a human three times? Once is once too many

I have two young dogs (cocker spaniels). Neither would even consider biting a human, because they're properly trained and socialised.

If an adult dog bites a human bcos it's been seriously provoked and can't get away, I'll accept that. (Even if it's a kid - sometimes kids need the shock of the dog retaliating in order to be taught that it's not a toy.) But if it bites with no provocation, either there's something wrong with the dog and it needs to be put down, or there's something wrong with the owner (in how they behave with the dog) and they shouldn't have one in the first place. Most of the time, it's the latter.

Yes, that's my coat, the one with the dog biscuits and a roll of little plastic bags in the pocket.

Pluto still a planet, says Ronald McDonald

Since we're on the pedantry subject

... wouldn't it be an "occurrence", not an "occurance"?

Anyway, this is the same place which insists its food (and I use that word in the loosest possible way) is healthy. How much of their printed material do *you* believe?

US spontaneous human combustion raygun video released

@boltar

There's nothing wrong with the idea of laser weapons. (Well, not in a military way anyway. They're not good for many other reasons, but then that's the nature of weapons research.) The problem is the implementation. It's taken a very large amount of money (2002-2005 is quoted at $180m, and it's fair to guess that 2006-2009 would continue that trend) and a very long time (2002-2009) to produce something that still can't be used for any practical military purpose.

The problem is also the application. Putting something like this in an aircraft to shoot jeeps really doesn't seem a good use of it. It seems to me that the best use would be as an alternative to the existing anti-missile defences of Phalanx guns or Patriot missiles. A laser could target the incoming missile more effectively than either of those, and a ground-based or ship-based installation solves the problem of having limited chemical fuel for the laser in a C130. So instead of being an offensive weapon, it becomes a defensive shield. Trouble is that this doesn't sound so cool as the death-ray concept. And of course that assumes that your opponents are going to be lobbing missiles at your ships or at some ground locations. It's sod-all use against opponents fighting at the IED and AK-47 scale of things, of course, but then the death-ray doesn't work against them either.

Game censorship crusader sues Facebook for $120m

@Fishcakes

Superdouche...

Or maybe Reg, with regards to this icon.

Swedish parents win right to name sprog 'Q'

Hardly worse than the rest of his names

His third name, Jackrapat. Did any other 80s arcade addicts immediately think it might be from "Welcome to the fantasy zone Jackrabbit"? Still, if it is, kudos to the parents for game quality.

(For people too young to know, it's a quote from Space Harrier. The arcade version of Space Harrier is still the best game ever made - nothing's ever come close.)

Amazon Kindle fails test at Bezos alma mater

Not just for reading a single book either

If you're doing any significant work, you need to be able to cross-reference a whole bunch of things at once. Try doing that with a single screen the size of an A5 sheet with a 1s refresh rate. Hell, it's hard enough doing it on a PC with dual screens, never mind on a piddly little thing like that.

I've always been a firm believer in the power of a truly paperless workplace, and when someone can give me a 6'x3' touchscreen LCD display with 150dpi resolution, I'll gladly use it instead of the multiple books and printouts on my desk. Until then, my employer has a choice between paperlessness or productivity.

The Terminator icon, because I've probably got more chance of seeing one of them...

OMG! US science quangocrats surf porn at work!

Grew how much?

Yeah, they may say it grows by six times with the smut, but everyone knows they're looking at three times at best. Ain't that always the way...

i-mate boss blames 'fraud' for company's demise

Jim Morrison?

"This is the end, beautiful friend, the end..."

NASA: Tell us how to spend $4m pa on tech contests

FFS...

NASA mission needs. Hmm, let's see. We need a way of getting to Mars, and keeping the lads (and possibly ladies) alive whilst getting there and back. So, mission needs.

- A cosmic ray and fast charged particle blocker in a small enough package to launch, which doesn't interfere with computer operation.

- Sealed biosphere setup, with hydroponics providing full nutritional and oxygen requirements.

- Better space suits to replace the 1950s-designed ones with something lighter, smaller and more generally useable.

Do I win anything?

MAID: Where's the love?

Numbers, please

How much power is saved with this, really?

Sure, it takes some power to make a hard disk platter go round - that's beyond dispute. But in the context of a machine easting 400W, every second of the day, it's pretty damn minimal. I'd be more impressed if this marketroid could tell us how much power was being saved. Oh, and how much extra it cost to buy the kit with this option enabled...

Ammo rationing at Wal-Mart as panic buying sweeps US

@Rick Byers

Erm, no. In the UK, you're legally allowed to hit anyone, any time, and hit them first, if you're justifiably afraid they're going to hit you, and you're allowed to use as much force as required to stop them hitting you. If the only way to stop yourself getting hurt is to kill them, then you're absolutely at liberty to kill them. I have personally served on a jury where the judge repeatedly reminded us of this.

But if they're running away and hence are no longer a threat to you, you're not allowed to shoot them in the back or chase them with an axe. And you're not allowed to use more force than is reasonable to stop them hitting you - so once they're down, continuing to beat them with a baseball bat would get you locked up.

Yes, the case is likely to come to court, because you have to show you were justifiably afraid of what they were going to do. Deciding whether this was reasonable or not is rightfully a matter for a jury, not an arbitrary decision for some copper, and even then the CPS may drop it if it's clear-cut enough.

Plenty of examples of this. The best one I can think of is a bloke who tried to punch Alfie Lewis (ex UK karate champion). The bloke swung at him, Lewis blocked and countered, the bloke went down and died from hitting his head on the pavement. The case went to court and Lewis was found not guilty, because he applied reasonable force. Or the jury I served on - this lad was getting the worst of it until the other bloke fell over and landed hard. The lad who was losing then put the boot in once, and that resulted in a a charge of ABH. We had a hung jury, because enough of us knew that if you're losing a fight and some stroke of luck like that happens, you don't want the other guy getting up and starting again, and there was no way he could have known the other guy had hurt himself when he fell.

Honda develops motorised unicycle

But what are the other thingies?

Forget the Asimo and the unicycle - what are the other two? The first one looks like a single leg with tracks at the bottom, which is cool. But the second one - is that a pogo stick? Forget yer Segway - I want my electric robot pogo stick for travelling to work!

Archos punts 9-inch Windows 7 tablet PC

@Robert E A Harvey

"...Dear sir comma return, I would delete W-O-U-L-D like to delete T-O order bringbringbringbring Hello? Hi Jim, please can you submit that file in a different format? See? Return it to ARGH WHAT'S MY COMPUTER DOING?..."

Yeah, let's all go voice-recognition.

Oh, and yes, Kirk talked to the computer. But even on Star Trek, if you wanted something done fast and accurately, you used a keyboard. ST:TNG gave us touch-screen displays instead, but still everyone used keyboards.

Geordi LaForge video-to-brain rig built at MIT

"Difficult to tell how they work"? Not really

"as yet it's difficult to tell just how well they work - as the pigs aren't talking"

Remove both eyes from pig. Replace with these gadgets. See whether pig can navigate an obstacle course. Job done.

Swedish military bras burst, melt during 'rigorous exercise'

@John 62

Needs to not only be supportive but also fireproof. I doubt your average sports bra is made of Nomex - flamethrowers and IEDs aren't generally standard issue on the tennis court.

Highways Agency plans new speed cameras

@AC, "incorrect assumptions"

So incorrect you're not even going to mention them? Right...

Yeah, you drive faster, an accident is going to happen quicker. But you remove the 18-wheel bollards from the equation, and there's a whole lot less to get in the way. Cars are no longer less stable at higher speeds, and accidents are caused by closing speeds rather than speed per se.

For lorries overtaking, the only times I've ever seen a lorry have a valid reason for overtaking, it was when faced with a tractor doing 20mph up the A14. Other than that, they always only overtake due to 1mph differences on their speed limiters, while a couple of miles of traffic queue up behind them.

Hell, really we should have lorries off the road completely. Most car accidents only cause injuries in one car, two at the outside, whereas most lorry accidents cause multiple deaths and close the road for the rest of the day. But since Thatcher/Major/Blair flogged off the railways, it's cheaper to drive a hundred lorries up the M6 than it is to put a hundred containers on the back of a train, and the railways are in such bad shape they couldn't handle the extra load anyway.

Revenue streams, my mate? Ah, here's the sneaky bit - we're going to need lorry recognition cameras to catch them when they overtake.

"allowing more capacity"?!?!

Simple maths for politicians. Let's say we have one lane, and 50m between cars (which is actually pretty good on a busy motorway). 50m at 70mph equals 1.6s. So over the course of an hour we can put a maximum of 2252 vehicles down that lane if they're doing 70mph. Now let's say we have the same distance between cars and we're driving at 80mph. 50m at 80mph equals 1.4s. So over the course of an hour we can put a maximum of 2574 vehicles down that line. By similar working, we can only do 1930 vehicles at 60mph.

So in this example, if we could keep the lorries (typically doing 60mph) out of the way of the cars (typically doing 80mph), we can get a 33% increase in the number of cars going through. That leads to one simple conclusion - ban lorries overtaking, and you'll get better road links.

There's another reason too, which is that the biggest cause of accidents is having to rapidly respond to changes in speed of othe traffic, and the biggest cause of these changes of speed is dealing with overtaking lorries. Sure, it's the driver's fault that they can't react, but it's the lorry driver's fault that he's pulling out into a stream of fast-approaching traffic. In other words, if you ban lorries overtaking, you'll also reduce your accident rate practically to zero overnight.

So forget speed cameras. If no lorry is allowed to overtake anyone or anything, ever, then we'll have safer, faster roads. Job done.

Futuristic head-mounted PC launching in 2010

Universal Soldier

I for one welcome our undead Belgian chop-socky overlords...

(BTW Random Noise, the problem is most likely safety when pointing a laser at an eye. It's theoretically possible, but to do it with 100% safety is going to be rather difficult.)

Citroën redesigns the 2CV

Steal from someone else

Is it just me, or does the whole design look like a Mazda RX-8 squished lengthwise by about a quarter? We have suicide doors. We have a front grille that's identical to the Mazda. We have the bonnet curve. We have swoopy interior and seats. In fact, let's face it, we have the same car.

Except that where the RX-8 goes like shit, the Revolte simply *is* shit.

'Do You Want To See My C*ck?' asks budding author

Beware who you flash too

Reminds me of something my gran told us, ages back. Being a dog owner, she'd regularly meet other local dog owners on walks around the local woods. Anyway, the word went round the dog walkers that this lad was flashing women in these woods. An elderly friend of my gran's put a bit of a halt to his career though when he flashed her, she took a look and told him, "Young man, I used to work as a nurse, and I've seen a lot better ones than that!"

Grannies With Attitude. Can't beat them. :)

Society bible lectures students on etiquette

Top tips

Every club wants you to join. All of them want your money, and it looks *so* practical to join them all. Resist the temptation. In between drinking and the odd bit of coursework, you're not going to do half of what you thought you would, and the money you splashed on those is money you can't otherwise spend on booze.

For another tip, SU bars always serve "seconds" beer which the breweries flog cheap because it didn't pass their standards for selling to proper pubs, and it's always kept incredibly badly. Learn which beers survive this and remain drinkable. Murphys is a good bet (if they have it), and Guinness usually survives fairly well too. Both these have the extra advantage that you can't neck them quite as fast as ratpiss lager, so nights out are a little cheaper.

Learn to play guitar before you go there - start age 16 and you'll be in good shape when you get there. Being able to rattle out "Wonderwall" or some solid blues guitar is worth a ton of streetcred, even if you do happen to be a geek. And "Vincent" or similar mellow folky stuff goes down well with the girls.

Oh, and on the drink-assisted sex front, if you're a bloke then don't drink too much - it'll just go wrong. If you're a girl, you can get any bloke you want if you ask nicely, so that's not a problem.

And an open-door policy is great, but lock your door at night, especially after a drinking sesh. It's harder for your mates to do embarrassing things to you. Also lock your window if you're on the ground floor or your window is otherwise accessible (above a flat roof/drainpipe) - drunk mates can be very enterprising.

Google urges developers to get in loop with Noop

@Paul

Other useful assembly mnemonics:-

BNE - Burn Nearby Equipment

LDA - Lose DAta

DJNZ - Supplying Antipodean dance music

SUB - Incoming torpedo!

Of course, the ones more suitable to Google's purpose are:-

RTI - Randomly Troll Internet

BEQ - Beat dead EQuine

HP grabs web pioneer

First browser?

You n00b. Those of us who were *really* in at the start used NCSA Mosaic. Before that, text terminals and BBSes. I still remember being disappointed when the Harry Fox agency took down all the MP3s off the FTP mirror servers, because those were giving us background music during our late-night software sessions. Back when online MP3 sharing truly was sharing amongst a tiny group of people who knew about it, not an opportunity for ripping off. Those were the days.

And dial-up rates of 4-5KB/s slow? We always knew when the US had woken up, because transfer rates suddenly dropped to about 10 bytes/s at around midday, and didn't recover until about midnight when most Americans had gone home. If you wanted a serious MUDding session, that pretty much fixed what your waking hours were going to be.

(Cue the inevitable Monty Python Yorkshiremen gags. "I used two tin cans, a bit of string and an acoustic coupler." "I used a telegraph, and I had to tap in serial transmissions with a hand key." Etc...)

Peugeot looks to 1940s for quirky e-car design

If we're going to be traditional...

... isn't it traditional for cars to be at least slightly aerodynamic?

Doctor Who fans name best episode ever

More Moffat?

So the one in the library-world with the Vashta Narada shadows didn't make it to the top 10?! Now *that* was an amazing episode (pair of episodes actually). Not just carnivorous shadows, but also ghosts in mobiles, virtual worlds *and* a time-travel paradox thrown in. And the most impressive set ever used, because it was a real building.

For that matter, I'm surprised there weren't any Sylvester McCoy episodes in the top 10. His time as Doctor was when they finally managed to team up decent scripts with decent sets, and he made a very good Doctor.

Muse eye Bond theme

Maiden for the cup!

Sarah's a Maiden fan? Now I officially lust after her! :)

That's actually a damn good idea, since they're one of the few hard-rock/metal groups who know how to construct a more complicated tune than your basic "Am-G-F-C" kind of thing. Even better, could we get Bruce Dickenson to play one of the baddies? Then they could work up a swordfighting sequence (Bruce being an ex-Olympic fencer) which would be very cool indeed.

FWIW, I thought the last two Bond songs were OK, except for the presence of Alicia Keys. You want tinkly fluffy pop without any evident talent, Alicia Keys is yer gal. You want something with a bit of an edge, you've wasted your time. I still don't know why Jack White couldn't get sister Meg to do it instead - she'd have suited it much better.

Bus driver becomes Julius Andreas Gimli Arn MacGyver Chewbacka Highlander Elessar-Jankov

Eep

I'd have thought looking like that would be enough of an incentive for women to stay away from him. Why add more obstacles, dude?

Intel to EU watchdogs: 'It's AMD's fault'

Ad-hominem? Not exactly

Up to the point you're found guilty, you're due a fair trial on the evidence. But once you're found guilty, sentencing is necessarily based on whether you've done it before. If you've already been found guilty of something three times, and you do it again and are found guilty again, you can expect the results to be harsher next time.

And then suppose you moan about the fact that you've had a harsher result, without accepting that you did anything wrong, after having previously been done for it three times. Commenting on this apparent inability to accept the rule of law isn't an ad-hominem attack, it's a valid observation that the person/organisation has a well-established pattern of behaving this way.

Australia mulls botnet takedown scheme

Eyes failing

For some reason, probably related to watching Neighbours as a kid, I misread that as "Oz bats mullet takedown scheme". More coffee needed...

Government swiftly backpedals on vetting scheme

@John

And what was the answer, John...? For most charities AFAIK the problem is not that there's too few rules already, it's that there's too little effort put into enforcing them. So little Jimmy/Janey gets sent back from the hospital with the abusive father (or mother) who put him/her there in the first place.

Someone further up really nailed it. The problem is that social workers are so overloaded already, they can't deal adequately with the caseloads they've already got. If the government decides to put this scheme in place *and* funnels an extra billion to child welfare services to do the job properly, then great. But if they expect the people already on the ground to implement it with no new money, they're simply deluded.

Because we already have absolute proof that the system is currently only failing because it's under-funded, the answer to "how much is a child's life worth?" is "more than the government is spending right now". And no amount of new legislation or words in Parliament or in print will solve the problem of too few social workers with too many vulnerable children.

Loch Ness Monster surfaces on Google Earth

Eh?

"Just like the reports?" Last I heard, Nessie was supposed to be a plesiosaur kind of thing. That looks like a giant albino squid. Of course, a giant albino squid could well live in Loch Ness - there's no less evidence for that than there is for the plesiosaur, after all.

(And that's not a penguin, it's a plesiosaur with a grin.)

Boffins render full HD million-point animated hologram

@Steven Knox

Surely you meant...

"But then tha hologram s littl bettr currnt 3-d technology, n that it's only designd to b vewd from won ngl. (In fact, when yu add n tha low fram rat, ncredibly high processng powr requirmnt, nd lack f colr*, it's pretty much pointlss. You cn get much bettr results with stereoscopics on a midrang video card.)

Tha majr benefit f tru holography s tha ability to vew it from ny ngle. So f they don't hav that, they don't hav jack.

* That's right: I sed "color". I don't us unnecessry vowls. Brng on tha Britard backlash!"

(Want the consonants doing too? ;)

Orbital skydives to follow inflatable heatshield success?

So...

The inflatable bladder held up OK. Now how's about the bladder for the guys riding on it? I bet one or two of them are going to widdle themselves, coming down at umpty-tum hundred degrees at umpty-tum hundred miles an hour.

Still, it's a fine solution to the old "bail-out-of-the-Space-Shuttle" problem. So if your Shuttle gets a knackered wing on launch now, you can park it at the ISS and come back on your own little pod. Then the next Shuttle can bring up a repair kit.