Posts by Graham Bartlett

'Dragon's Egg' hurlable weeble-cams for US digi-troopers

So...

How long did it take someone to figure out putting a camera on a Weeble, then?

Aussie Sex Party bursts upon political stage

I can see the ads now

"The Australian Sex Party. Not only do we guarantee to screw you, but you'll enjoy it too!"

Kind of like being a Republican under GWB, I guess. (Well, not "under" in that sense. OK, maybe you were once, but I don't need to know details. Please.)

Shop risks legal action for posting 'shoplifter' CCTV online

@Frankly

You may genuinely believe it, but do you have anything in the way of evidence? No? Then don't be so daft.

I do like the way folks here think they're the first people to notice the potential problems. I'd be willing to bet that not only have they taken legal advice on this, but they have crystal-clear footage of these chavs filling their pockets. So "if you believe we're wrong, contact us and we'll take the pictures down" should actually be interpreted as "please do contact us, and we'll have Plod down on you so fast you won't know what hit you".

Or, this being Liverpool: "please do contact us, and our security guards will be round tonight to give you the kicking you so rightfully deserve".

(The bloke stashing things in his inside pocket, for obvious reasons.)

Campaign for official Turing apology gathers steam

@AC

I'll see your basilisk camera and raise you a severed hand with attached mirror.

(If you don't get the reference, read some Charles Stross. If you do get the reference, re-read some Charles Stross. :)

Woman charged with cyberbullying teen on Craigslist

Cyberbullying?

No need. In this case, we have good old laws against sexual harassment, especially sexual harassment of minors, and nice hefty prison terms to go with it.

I've no sympathy for Thrasher. Maybe she was abused herself, maybe she's got relationship problems, maybe she's just naturally a bitch. I don't care. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

Researchers forge secure kernel from maths proofs

All these folk checking the gift horse's teeth

I don't get it. I really don't. A group of people have gone to the trouble of putting together a microkernel that's provably without bugs in the C code, and they're getting slated for it? It's like SpaceX or someone saying "we've invented a rocket that'll get us to Pluto and back in 10 minutes, but we need to fire it up outside the atmosphere", and then everyone taking the piss instead of saying "cool, let's figure out how to get it in the Space Shuttle".

Sure, it requires a known-good C compiler. If you need this for your business, you can work on it. And if you want to move to a new platform, you don't need to develop a whole new microkernel, just a new C compiler. Certainly there are ambiguities in the C language, but they're known and well-documented, which is why coding standards such as MISRA-C exist to guide coders around those ambiguities. (Not heard of MISRA? Then you don't know enough to have an opinion on the subject of safety-critical software.) Actually, optimisation is usually the problem with compilers - provably-correct compilation from a line of C to lines of assembler is fairly straightforward (at least without interrupts getting in the way), but it's slower and less efficient.

@Annihilator: "Nothing is ever proven"? Sorry, but 2+2 still equals 4 and parallel lines don't meet in finite space, regardless of day of the week, phase of the moon, or 50 trillion years in the future. Get a grip.

Bug exposes eight years of Linux kernel

@AC 8:33

Yeah right. You're a comp-sci guy, right? So if it ticks all the latest buzzword boxes, that's good news. Never mind if it'll actually run your code in less than geological time.

Meat-cleavers are sharp. You can cut yourself, so that's why you have training, experience, and other people checking you're working right. But it's still better to use a cleaver for cutting through a T-bone than trying to use a spoon for the same job.

US Marines' Afghan robocopter-supply contest down to two

Slight problem

One glitch in this otherwise excellent plan is what happens to an unprotected chopper when it comes down in transit, given that unlike trucks it's likely to be crossing enemy-held territory. You've then just resupplied the enemy. I hope they're seriously considering fitting a bit of explosive and a remote-control detonator to all payloads.

It's also not quite as revolutionary an idea as has been suggested, given that troops have been resupplied by parachute drop since WWII. Granted, those parachutes haven't been remotely guided to their destinations, but that's a well-solved problem, and a parachute with a few motors pulling on the lines is a whole lot cheaper than a helicopter. Yes it needs a Hercules or similar to fly over and throw the stuff out, but we've already got those around.

When is an operating system not an operating system?

"OS" isn't the whole story

Even on the simplest systems (small embedded processors), the "OS" is typically divided into various bits providing various services. At the bottom you have the basic kernel, which gets calls from apps (or whatever you choose to call discrete software modules with defined interfaces) to send a message and then makes the appropriate calls to other apps to send them the message. Then you have timers, interrupt handlers and low-level drivers for ADC/DAC/logic-level/other peripherals, all of which need to do register-level operations to control real hardware. Then you may have high-level drivers to convert from real-world values to ADC/DAC counts. And finally you're into application-level processing.

So which part of that is the OS? The answer really is "everything that doesn't do application-level processing". It's a pretty vague question, and appropriately enough gets a vague answer.

But which part is the OS *kernel*? That's a very specific question, with a specific answer: the section of code which directly controls activation and deactivation of all other sections of code.

Microsoft at a loss in Word patent case?

@George Schultz

That would be a "point and lick interface", right...?

"Side-step the patent whilst paying them off"?

Erm, did I miss something here? The point of the patent is to *get* paid for your invention. i4i said "you owe us this much". MS said "we're giving you nothing". Court said "MS, pay this much". At some point, MS and i4i will meet in the middle. If MS are smart, this will involve paying i4i a price which i4i are prepared to accept. If MS aren't smart, they'll dig their heels in and the court will beat them with a big stick until they *do* pay something.

MS vs. Netscape is a good example of this. It tends to be presented as a victory for MS, which of course it was in terms of user-base. But AOL (who by that point owned Netscape) got a $750m payout from MS in exchange for dropping that one. Had MS settled earlier, that figure would have been a whole lot lower.

And even on American lawyers' rates, I doubt Netscape used three-quarters of a billion on the lawsuit, so that represents a solid profit. Sure you've lost your user-base - but do you really want to own the most widely-used web browser, which has precisely zero income (because you're giving it away) and which still needs a team of developers employed (because there are still new features to implement)? Or would you rather have a tax-free three-quarters of a billion dollars in your back pocket which you can invest somewhere that'll turn a real profit? Hmm, tough call...

Ditching ID cards would save £3bn

"it gives a distinctive noise"

Ah, the sound of your tax money at work...

Robot cauliflower harvesters to replace vanishing migrants

Shouldn't be too hard

I mean, if people can invent a chicken hoover to automatically collect up the contents of a barn and convert them into McNuggets, surely a cauliflower machine would be easier? After all, cauliflowers don't flap around or anything.

(And seriously, there was a chicken hoover for collecting them up. Amazing bit of kit.)

Perseid meteor shower set to dazzle disappoint

Cue the Lou and Peter Berryman song...

"From Persy-ersy-ersy-ersy-erseus,

They radi-adi-adi-adi-adi-adiate,

Too many-many-many-many meteors

To esti-esti-esti-esti-estimate"

(If you like funny/strange songs, and you've not encountered Lou and Peter Berryman before, check them out. It's like pairing Fred Wedlock with Victoria Wood, and then feeding them both immense amounts of psychoactive drugs.)

Tourist magnet blows off Speedo-wearing men

Budgie smugglers

Just make sure they're adequately restrained, is all. Budgie smuggling is OK, but if you're packing a pelican and a couple of fat baby birds, please make sure it's all under control.

And yes please, do also put in place policies requiring mingers to be suitably covered. I don't want to see bingo wings or beer guts jiggling on the roller-coaster, thanks.

(The "troll alert" because there are some seriously hideous people around at Alton Towers.)

El Reg space paper plane christened Vulture 1

Just thought

Since it's Paris, would this have a Blonde Box instead of a Black Box?

(I may be one of the few blokes around who's not bothered looking for the photos/vids, so maybe someone else can confirm whether collar and cuffs do indeed match.)

@Jasmine

Uou mean turn *on* the current, right, Jasmine?

You could improve on that basic design by liberally coating the tether with black powder out of devil-bangers (or the contents of a firework), although this might pose some danger to a paper-based aircraft.

In the interests of helping the plane fly, it'd be a plan to put the separation mechanism on the balloon side of things. OK, you won't get it back, but that's not a major issue, whereas adding extra payload weight to your paper plane probably is. And it also solves other problems like wires and batteries getting hot.

As regards "assisted" paper, it's worth looking at how hang-gliders are built. Lolly-stick kingpost and kite-string luff lines to ensure it automatically recovers from a dive. Plus a decent amount of dihedral on the wings held in place by futher kite-string lines on the underside, so that it's stable side-to-side. Oh, and plastic-coated paper might also be a plan, to prevent condensation and general papery sogginess causing a Mission Fail.

The Internet's most evil company?

@Lu, John186

Maybe you can choose where you want to look online for news, but the news has to *get* there somehow. And contrary to your opinions, there *are* journalists risking their lives to get the important stories. It's not uncommon for these journalists to be freelance locals - (a) it saves money getting folks out there from London, and (b) your average white journalist tends to stand out a bit, which reduces their life expectancy and limits where they can go to get accurate reports. Sure, they're doing it for the money, and they know the risks. But they're still putting their lives on the line so that you can get accurate facts.

Yeah, there's also plenty of so-called "journalists" getting the latest so-called "news" about Paris Hilton or Jordan. If muppets choose to buy their turdspurtly output, that's their choice. Ditto, if you choose to buy papers run by Murdoch, or subscribe to TV channels run by Murdoch, again that's your choice. "Choice" means that some people will choose that, but you have the right not to.

Ridley Scott signs up to direct Alien prequel

Prequel concept

Not too tricky. 2 and 3 both involved people killing themselves and taking aliens with them. Extrapolate to the scale of a film, realise that in "Alien" the Company do know about the xenomorphs but haven't their hands on one, and it's simples. Last scene becomes the last survivor pushing the "blow-up-the-ship-in-a-really-big-special-effect" button just as the aliens break through the door. Add in the Company overriding control of the ship so he/she can't stop it coming back to Earth, mix in a little slicing-and-dicing action, and that's yer film.

And in four sentences, I've still covered more plot than the whole of Alien: Resurrection managed. What a singularly pathetic waste of celluloid *that* turkey was.

Government slashes final Eurofighter order

RAF still needed, Typhoon not necessarily

Air superiority is still good. Trouble is that it can only achieve so much, as Iraq and Afghanistan have proved - you can carpet-bomb the Swat valley as long as you like, but there'll still be fellers in caves with Kalashnikovs ready to shoot you when the bombs stop falling. And the existing planes, old as they are, are still superior to what all potential opponents have.

Thing is, the actual "major assault" element of all recent conflicts has always been incredibly short. What's taken the time since then has been taking and holding ground from guerilla fighters. Air power and naval power are only any use in the initial "assault" stage; what's needed after that is foot-soldiers shooting individual opponents, avoiding shooting civilians, and generally making it safe to walk down the streets and run your life. Bosnia proved that air superiority means precisely nothing if you won't back it up on the ground.

So faster air-to-air fighters is pretty damn low on the agenda. And a Trident replacement should be *way* down the list, because we simply don't need mutually-assured destruction.

What we *do* need, and now, is more foot-soldiers, and better equipment for them. For $3bn you can get a whole lot of working helicopters, armoured cars, and proper body-armour. Some decent bomb-disposal/detection systems wouldn't go amiss either. They might even be able to afford a proper pension for injured soldiers too.

Villagers cut off as dripping thong sparks brown out

Sounds like the pre-action "script" for a porn film

"I need an electrician, and I've got damp knickers. Can you help me...?"

Paris, because - well, if you need to ask then there's no hope for you.

El Reg to launch space paper plane

Re Mr Branson

On a side note, I think Virgin Galactic is a very suitable name for something that involves being strapped to a rocket. Because you may start with Virgin, but sooner or later you're going to get proper f*cked...

Small biz warns on contractor law

@Chris

Tescos pay more than £5/hr. Mickey Ds pay more than £5/hr. If you're getting paid less than a Tescos shelf-stacker, you're letting yourself get screwed over.

Oh yeah, and word up, guy. As a school leaver, you *are* the smallest cog, because you know FA about anything. Breeze into a well-paid job and get a mortgage? Not happening. You get paid according to what you've got to offer, and if you've got no skills or experience, you get paid to match.

Me, I did four years of degree in electronic engineering (so a course with a career at the end of it), had summer jobs all the way to keep myself financed, got a good grade, and got straight into a job to get myself experience as quick as poss. It was still 3 years after that before we could afford a house, and that needed both my wife's wages and mine - we could have paid the mortgage on mine, but we'd have had literally nothing left for food, never mind a car or petrol for it, or a night at the pub. Hell, it was 6 months after I graduated before me and my wife could afford to move out of the shared house where we rented a room. A flat where we didn't have to share a bathroom and kitchen was like paradise. I wasn't pissing and whinging about that though, bcos I knew I didn't have the experience to make myself worth the extra money. But I *did* moan when my mates elsewhere in the company were getting paid more than I was for the same skills and doing the same job, bcos I wasn't prepare to be a doormat.

Now I've got experience to trade on, I'm contracting. And on that score, I'm with the AC above. Yes, the hiring company pays my company twice what a permie gets. But from that I have to subtract company tax, accountant's fees (mandatory for running your own company), liability insurance (mandatory again), personal tax, NI, sick days, holidays, time between contracts (which can be a long time), pension, and any training I need. And the biggest thing there is the time between contracts - if you can keep that small then you're quids in, but if the economy goes to worms then you're stuffed. For 4 months over Xmas there were about a dozen contract roles going in my field in the whole of the UK, and several hundred people chasing each one, and I'd just had my contract terminated with two weeks notice. It sucked, but I wasn't pissing and whinging about it, because I knew that risk was *why* I was getting paid better when I was working.

Wildcard certificate spoofs web authentication

I can't believe...

that no-one's commented on the bloke's name yet. Moxie Marlinspike? Jeez.

Gotta wonder if the rest of the family are named after Swiss Army Knife accessories too. Carl Corkscrew? Terence Tinopener? Fred Frigginguselesslittleblade? Timmy Toolforgettingstonesoutofhorseshooves? (Or, of course, Philip Screwdriver.)

OK, sure, maybe it's an assumed name for the purposes of his research, so that the black hats don't come and get him in the night. But if you're choosing an alias, wouldn't you go for something good? I mean, Moxie Marlinspike? Jeez.

Security elite pwned on Black Hat eve

@Keith T

Like the security on your house, there may well be ways in, and possibly ways which you'd not considered. Regardless of that, though, you'd still lock your doors and shut your windows before you left the house, right? If we accept that criminals will always be with us, regardless of how many laws we get our governments to write, then we also need to take at least basic steps towards keeping our possessions secure.

As regards where you keep data, hackers aren't the only risk to your server. Lightning strike, fire, flood, or simple anno domini on your hard disk are a lot more likely to lose your data. So although the hacker may be the one who wiped the data in this instance, any permanent loss of data is due to a failure on *your* part.

And sure, if someone's deliberately bollixed your system, then being able to arrest them would be nice. However it's not always possible. That's not "possible" as in "practical use of time", but "possible" as in "physically able to do it". In some cases (regimes in China, Burma, Egypt or Saudi Arabia which will happily violate anyone's human rights) being unable to trace someone online is a good thing. In other cases (idiot script kiddies) it's not.

Paris, because she's got multiple online backups of her home movies and pics

Greenpeace unleashes Captain Kirk on HP

@Bill Gould

"Why haven't they been marked for death yet?"

Nah. "Marked for Death" was Steven Seagal, not Shatner. Admittedly they're both fat, ugly and can't act, and their surnames both start with "S", so I can see how the mistake came around.

Open source API dreams of The Meta Cloud

Performance?

Of course, this is going to be a nice fast system, using Python as the programming language and running over a zillion indirection layers...

That's the problem. CompSci says "ain't this a neat idea?" Real world says "physical time involved in processing and communication". Users say "jeez, this sucks - how can this be so slow?!"

Truck drivers! Don't go texting now

Why have an extra law?

Don't know what the US equivalent is, but in the UK there's "driving without due care and attention", and I bet they've got something similar. And looking at your phone whilst driving certainly qualifies as not putting due C&A into your driving.

I wish people would stop inventing new laws when there's already existing ones that cover it. People do stuff when they're driving which distracts them, and if it causes an accident then they deserve to be done for it. Whether it's texting, changing a CD, turning round to shout at their kids, or scratching their testicles (or their partner's testicles), if it stops you watching the road then you shouldn't be doing it. You don't need a separate law against "glancing down to see where that M&M you dropped happened to fall, in case it landed on the seat and you could retrieve it and eat it".

AMD records 11th straight loss

"mired in a deep funk"

Dig that 70s wah-wah guitar and the wide lapels. Groovy, man.

Nissan ponders Pré-like cordless charging for e-cars

@AC

Yup - good old council, eh?

We want efficient transport into town for everyone to use, to avoid congestion. Should we cut the prices on the buses so that people use them more often? Should we even put park-and-ride sites where they might be useful, and make sure there's easy access to them from major routes? Or should we fix the traffic lights so they're phased properly and don't cause mile-long tailbacks through town?

Nah - let's spunk millions on something which failed the last time anyone tried it, isn't going to help much, and connects nowhere to nowhere. And let's bollix some of the major link roads through town while we're doing it. And for extra pointlessness, let's not put in any stops on the way through nearby villages, so that anyone living there needs to drive to somewhere else.

Way to go...

Try Cambridge

Cambridge has just (at considerable expense) installed a guided bus system, where the aforesaid magic bus runs on concrete tracks outside the city. Or will run - as usual with this kind of stuff, it's over budget and over deadline. So if they're pumping money into a black hole anyway, what's a few million more between friends? It'd certainly make a good test site anyway.

Would you leave your child alone with a cabinet minister?

CRB not relevant for one-off events?

Oh no it isn't.

Last year I joined in with a couple of blokes trying to set up a world-culture festival, organising the music side of it. (It didn't happen in the end, but anyway.) It was going to be a one-off event. But CRB checks all round please, because (a) there were going to be student bands playing and (b) there were going to be kids attending the event.

Oh, and Fillipo, you say you don't know what the anti-God stuff is about with Pullman. Read the other two books in the series. Ignorance isn't a good starting point for opinions.

California skateboard dude swipes Reg logo

@AC, "oh the irony"

Erm, do you actually *read* El Reg? When did El Reg last do that? Last I heard, it was all about ridiculing TPB et al. Whilst also ridiculing the majors for failing to provide alternatives, to be sure, but that doesn't equate to standing up for piracy.

Airbed-fixing German blows up mattress flat

I doubt it...

Maybe Der Spiegel reported it, but that doesn't mean it happened. I'll wait for a report from Snopes or UrbanLegends.

Chrome OS: Windows killer?

@censored

Too right.

WinXP was the "Baby Bear" Windows. Win98 gave you lots of flexibility and decent speed, but crashed too often. Win2K locked everything down too tight and tended to be slow, but was more reliable. WinXP was the first one which let you get on with things, but also kept a good level of reliability (in its final incarnation, it's *way* stable).

I just don't get the whole Vista/Win7 thing. What do we want an OS to do? Answer: run stuff efficiently and reliably. WinXP was a done deal on that front. If MS had had some balls (instead of some Ballmers), they'd have said "Our work here is done" and put their dev team onto something else. Instead they've gone with the marketing glitz to put an unnecessary pretty interface on it all, which totally saps processing speed and RAM.

Meantime, what do we want Office apps for? Mostly it's just typing in docs or spreadsheets. Forget Office 2003 - there's nothing much significant since Office 97 on that score. And BTW, Google's much-touted "cloud" apps aren't even as capable as Word 6 or Excel 4.

All we really want is to get stuff done. Until 2 years ago, I was still using a 6-year-old AMD Duron 800 with a mobo that still had an ISA slot on it. The only reason I replaced it was because the processor died - it was still doing its job perfectly adequately. I now do a lot of sound mixing, and my single-core Athlon 1600 with 1GB RAM is just fine.

Unless you have very specific requirements (and that's mainly gaming), you simply don't need multi-core PCs with huge amounts of RAM, and you don't need the latest Windows, and you don't need the latest Office. This has been true for at least 5 years, and will only become more valid in future.

Yeah, Google can throw a new OS at us. But why bother? What we have works. Until Google can make theirs work better, they lose. And so far they don't have better apps, they don't have a better browser, and it's impossible to run most other apps on their setup. How stupid would you have to be to buy that?

Long wait for health records

What am I missing?

Hang on a mo. It's cost a fortune, it's costing more to maintain, it's less accurate and it's not even fully working yet. In what way can this be described as better than the previous system?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for my records being available on computer instead of relying on some dodgy scrap of paper in a filing cabinet. There's all sorts of good things you can do then, like automated prompts to the doctor based on symptoms to narrow down the possibilities, which is proven to work much better for oddball problems that most doctors would be unlikely to see often (if at all). Or statistical analysis of outcomes so that incompetent or plain evil doctors/nurses are more likely to be spotted early.

But I do want those records to be correct and to be in a database which works. Pretty much every company in the country went through precisely this exercise in the 80s or at worst in the early 90s, so it's not like it's something that's never been done before. All this shows is that the NHS is incapable of hiring competent managers.

Italian bride's bouquet downs ultralight

Oops

Links on the web (in Italian) say it was an autogiro, and typically they have pusher props. You don't have to be too clever to figure out what's going to happen to anything you throw out of the plane when you've got a pusher prop behind you. Well, I guess you do have to be more clever than these Eyeties.

Still, score one for flight safety in that area, now these muppets are downed for a bit.

ESA to develop cargo-lander space podule

Shame that...

... all that research on parafoils has apparently been forgotten about. Rogallo's original incarnation of this in the 60s never went anywhere space-wise, although it was eventually "repurposed" for hang-glider and paraglider design. More recently, the X38 design used a parafoil to allow controlled re-entry and soft landing within an amazingly precise target area, and that'd work anywhere with a viable atmosphere (including Mars). But we're still stuck with poorly-engineered space shuttles that need mega-runways, and NASA's "new" designs seem to have wound the clock back to using dumb re-entry capsules under dumb round parachutes that can't land anywhere more specific than "somewhere in the Pacific", or old-stylee retro-boosters that require you to load a whole lot more fuel.

Don't get me wrong - I don't mind NASA, ESA and the rest spending money on research. I *do* mind when they've spent on a load of research and then thrown away the results.

Easter Island dirt may hold key to longer life

Older population and finances

The standard response to improved lifespan stuff is usually "great, I get a longer retirement". Things don't work out like that though.

First obvious move is that the retirement age will go way up, so you'll be working for longer. You'll probably still get a longer retirement though, and there'll be more people surviving to that age, so next obvious move is major reduction in pensions from public money. Anyone starting work at that point will have plenty of time to build up savings for a pension, but anyone already retired will probably get majorly screwed over.

$1m for seethrough vidspecs in DARPA VR war-graffiti plan

@JJ5

Mebbe so, but IIRC Gibson's specs (and indeed Stephenson's Metaverse equivalents) were all just an immersive alternative to monitors, not overlays or augmentations on the real world. I think Stephenson's "gargoyles" were the first major reference to linking cameras, glasses/goggles and online databases, and automatic identification and geolocation overlays based on hooking those all together. But Stephenson has gargoyles lugging around loads of clunky crap connected by wires, where Stross is looking more at the model of people today having a tiny phone in their pocket and an earpiece/mic worn permanently, with the two connected by Bluetooth and using voice recognition.

Sci-fi writers

"described by sci-fi writers too numerous to mention here"

But Charles Stross's book "Halting State" probably deserves special recognition. Neal Stephenson was probably the first to portray augmented-reality properly, with the "gargoyle" systems in "Snow Crash". Stross took this concept into the mobile-phone era.

Almost all other sci-fi takes on this (including Space-Marine-type stuff) have just been head-up displays, not actually augmented-reality.

Google laying off more 'second class citizens'?

Reality-check: that's what being a contractor is

What's a contractor? Answer: someone you take on because they cost you less in overheads than a permie, and who you can get rid of at a moment's notice if the work dries up. As such, a contractor has no commitment to the company beyond doing a good job, because both sides know that they can be out of there next week.

So why should a contractor be invited to company strategy meetings? If they've got no stake in the company, they're unlikely to be seriously involved, so you're wasting their working time *and* potentially risking leaks of confidential information. And why should contractors expect perks? They're paid significantly more than regular employees because they *don't* get all the benefits (pension, etc.) which a regular employee does.

As a contractor, I don't expect job security, or benefits, or a stake in the company, or anything like that. I *do* expect to be assigned work to do, and my invoices to be paid on time. Beyond that I don't care. And not only that, I *shouldn't* care.

Orange calls up LG watchphone

Re: Hell-ooooo wrist cancer.

Cancer of the palm? That should be the least of your worries - most people carry their phones in their trouser pockets, in close proximity to rather more, ahem, *sensitive* areas...

Although for those who do reproduce this fact-free scaremongering, we can but wish that their phone would irradiate their nads sufficiently to render them sterile, thereby preventing stupidity being inherited by the next generation.

Paris, because she knows what to do with her palm...

Plasma rocket in new test with Brit supermagnet fitted

Big magnet + spaceship = good, perhaps?

One of the biggest problems for getting to Mars and back safely isn't necessarily the food situation, or oxygen, or even landing a spaceship. It's cosmic radiation, which can do seriously nasty things to your body with long-term exposure. On Earth we're protected from this by the Earth's magnetosphere, and it extends far enough out that the ISS is within it too. The only human exploits beyond the magnetosphere have been the Moon missions, and those only lasted a few days so no big deal. On a multi-month mission though, this is a deal- (and astronaut-)killer.

With this in mind, a spacecraft design which uses a sodding great electromagnet would seem to be a bit of a result - not only can you get there faster, but your drive system will inherently protect you from radiation nasties during the trip. It may need a bit of rethinking to make it happen, but it seems like you can kill two birds with one stone. Or more accurately, stop any birds (and blokes) being killed.

Tory plan for MS, Google, others to hold NHS records floated

I for one...

... welcome our new African overlords. Although a link-up between Google and the country of Cameroon seems to be something of a non-sequitur in the context of the article. Unless, heaven forfend, someone at El Reg got a little too happy on their "O" key.

Amiga Forever updated for Windows 7

Ah, the Amiga

The Amiga was a truly great machine, scuppered by truly appalling management. The Commodore bosses of the time deserve some kind of award for Most Consecutive Lousy Business Decisions. I was 14 at the time, and even I could see that over those few years, every new idea Commodore produced was rubbish.

The rest of the computer industry at the time also deserves a share of the stick for failing to buy out the Amiga tech when Commodore crashed and burned. It took the better part of 10 years before a PC at the same price as the old Amiga could match it. Anyone with the Amiga technology could have made an absolute killing, and chances are we'd all be using Amigas at home now instead. Remember that the main reason home PCs took off wasn't particularly email or Word, it was Doom and other classic PC-based games - and in the late 80s there wasn't anything that could touch the Amiga for games, especially when Atari finally bit the dust. When Doom came around, you needed a £1K machine to do anything much on a PC, and all that bought you was something with lower-quality graphics and sound than the old A500.

If you're too young to remember the Amiga, let's give you an example of how far ahead it was. Let's talk about a game where you're wandering round a country (something like 20 miles each direction), with full open-ended freedom of movement. It's done in an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective. You can steal cars, bikes, tanks, boats, helicopters and even windsurfers for transportation. You can talk to civilians but security forces will try to shoot you. You can shoot people, and steal weaponry. And in this environment you've got a series of missions to accomplish. "Grand Theft Auto III, released in 2001", you say. "What an absolute classic - a huge step forward for games."

"Hunter, released for the Amiga in 1991", I say.

Conviction overturned in MySpace suicide case

No laws against it?

Erm, yes there are. Good old-fashioned harassment laws. Send poison-pen letters, make nasty phone-calls or whatever, and you'll quickly find there are laws against it. There's absolutely no reason for those laws not to apply to harassment via email/MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/Web2.0-badgers'-paws-system. Had the prosecution gone for this instead of trying to stretch for the use-of-internet thing, they'd be home and dry.

Marie Curie voted top female boffin

Why only female?

As Pete 2 touched on without actually saying, the problem isn't so much that female scientists are undervalued, but that *all* scientists are undervalued. Managers get the fat paycheques, whilst the folks who actually achieved stuff get not a right lot. And yes, play the name-a-scientist game with anyone in the street and you'd be lucky to get more than Einstein.

Added to which, the real irony is how pointless this poll is. Science and engineering is the one area of society with the *least* discrimination, and always has been. Amongst fellow geeks, raw talent and ability to apply that talent have always been more highly valued than what you look like and how you behave, so all these competitions for "top female scientist" or "woman engineer of the year" are utterly pointless. Sure, there are less women in engineering, but it's not because the guys are discriminating against them - it's because less women *want* to do it. Straight men are massively under-represented in the fashion business, but I don't see people setting up "straight male fashion designer of the year" competitions. Ditto male nurses, or male physiotherapists. If you want to do something, you'll do it - if you don't want to do it (or have no natural talent for it), then some poll of "top female whatever-job" isn't going to help.

Rogue Atlantis knob removed by hand

Automatics

A few years ago, I did a number of liaison stints at Ford in Detroit. Company policy at the time was to hire cars about 2-3 steps up the rental scale, so the first time out there, I was given a 3-litre V6 Ford Taurus. "Great", I thought, "this thing will really shift."

Nope. A good 5s lag between applying foot to pedal and the power reaching the wheels, due to the wonders of the automatic transmission. Fuel consumption which emptied the tank in two days of half-hour-each-way commutes. Suspension which gave such a poor grip on the road that moderate braking (on a bone-dry surface) caused the ABS to kick in. Turning circle like a tanker. And performance which was noticeably worse than my 1.4l Peugeot 309 back home.

Thereafter, I made a point of telling our travel organiser to book me the lowest grade car that the rental company had in stock. That got me a succession of Escort-sized cars which handled reasonably well, gave reasonable fuel economy, accelerated and stopped fairly well, and could be parked in a space smaller than a basketball court. They still had fairly bad suspension, and crappy inefficient and laggy automatic transmissions, but at least I didn't get a Taurus again.

It's not that Europeans like to pretend they have sports cars, it's just that they like driving. There's a reason that American racing drivers are an absolute rarity on the international motorsports scene, and that when Europeans enter American motorsport they stomp the locals - that reason is that the roads and cars in America quite simply don't allow you to take pleasure in driving, or allow you to develop any skill at driving.

NASA reacquires original Moon landing footage

Getting stuff off tape - no worries

There are companies all over the place specialising in retrieving old data from mag tapes of various varieties and vintages. If NASA seriously can't find someone to retrieve data off mag tape in the whole of the US then the entire agency needs closing, because an agency too thick to look in the phonebook is too thick to get a rocket into space. Of course it's always possible that the tapes are too knackered to get anything useable off them, but that's another problem. If they're useable, and they're in any commercial tape format ever, someone somewhere will have a machine to read them.