Posts by GrahamT

El Reg celebrates 10th birthday

Happy Birthday

All those PFYs in one place.

and in my best Leslie Philips voice to Sarah Bee: Well, Helllooooo.

Cow turds fuel Blighty's hydrogen filling station embrace

Bullsh*t

It doesn't have to be cow manure for the anaerobic digesters - it could be human. There are far more humans than cows (here in London, anyway) and we already have the collection facilites - sewers and sewage works. Just convert the sewage works to turn the brown stuff to methane and Bob's your mother's brother.

Using the methane in vehicles like LPG/LNG (LSG?) is more efficient than converting it directly or indirectly to Hydrogen. (LNG ships bringing methane/natural gas from the middle east burn the boiled off gas in their diesels, so its hardly new technology)

This has several advantages:

- the CO2 given off would have been anyway so no net gain

- the methane is captured instead of adding to the greenhouse effect.

- the waste product is an odourless compost that can be used to improve arable land (for growing biofuel crops!)

- Less waste to be poured into the rivers and seas.

- there are far more existing filing stations with facilities for handling LPG than hydrogen.

You could even brew your own : Me-Thane™ to use in your "Bog-standard" <groan> car, otherwise fill up at pump number 2!

Sorry if this all sounds a little faecesious <sic>

Mines the brown-stained orange overalls and waist-high waders.

Oldham murders owl with whalesong

She was only a Lancashire lass...

but she knew the way to Oldham.

Ok, I'll gerrit misself.

Pub jukebox delivers playlists, blogs and twitters

How long would it last...

when some joker phones in a death metal playlist to Ye Olde village local ?

- or Gangsta Rap to the local BNP hangout?

- or C&W to the biker pub?

All accompanied by their videos.

Swedish lag's wooden todgers fail to impress

Bad pun alert

So what was he originally dildoing time for?

The grey one with the arrows, please

Adobe opens Photoshop for freetards

It's not the free that's the problem...

The word retard is not acceptable. Disguising it as freetard no more so. There are some words we don't use in polite company any more (OK, including El Reg readers in that category is stretching it a bit) like queer, cripple and "the N word" (see, I can't even type it)

I don't object because it is an insult to me, but because retard is a word I am not comfortable with. I don't think I am alone in this.

Before anyone comes in with the "Political correction gone mad" argument (and that should be Political correction gone psychologically challenged, btw</joke>) it isn't. This is having some respect for people who aren't as lucky as us, rather than throwing insulting words around.

Another vote..

..to stop using Freetard.Not that I'm freeligious about it, or a freequent downloader. I like to think I am a freesponsible adult with a freesonable atitude - and other stupid portmantau words.

I use Irfanview for simple viewing, editing and manipulating (like it so much I contributed) and GIMP for layers and more complex stuff. I have used Photoshop, and it is good, but not £570 good.

I am not a freetard I am a FOSSy bear.

Wombat rape ordeal turns NZ man Australian

Wombatting for the other side

For a Kiwi to be left speaking Strine must be the worst thing that could happen to him. He should sue the Wombat for every penny it has.

The rest of the world still wouldn't be able to hear the difference though.

(ducks rapidly approaching ANZAC flames.)

Arthur C. Clarke dead at 90

Childhood's End

Rest in Peace Arthur C. Clarke.

After Verne, it was A.C. Clarke that led me to my lifetime love of science fiction. He was one of those people that had been around for ever (born the same year as my dad) and would be around for ever - I thought.

He was a Humanist, so all the religious stuff is out of place, but may his end have been peaceful and painless.

His geostationary telecomms satellites and "Islands in the Sky" came to pass, (though not as portrayed in 2001) so let's look forward to the space elevetor.

Some cracking comments above - I'm sure he would be pleased that he still engenders so much affection.

Sad Alien, because the whole Universe is a sadder place without him.

Digital TV sales soar as Brits flock to Freeview

@jai

I think the Freeview tuners have got better recently, too. I have had two set top boxes - the first one when it was ITV Digital - and got a Panasonic TV and DVR in January, both with integrated Freeview.

The TV and DVR are miles better than either set-top box with far less freezing and pixelation.

Shame there are so many crap stations.

The station IDs for Film Four show how good the image can be given a good signal and bitrate.

Should Europeans pay to receive phone calls?

TPS and no mistake

When I signed up for it two years ago it was a definitely a BT service, and is still advertised in the current phone book under "Receiving un-wanted calls? BT can help" I hadn't realised it had been rebranded, but it still appears to be a free *BT* service.

It works well for me with almost immediate effect from signing up. The few cold calls I do receive now, I tell them I have signed up for BT's TPS and they immediately apologise and hang up. OK, block was the wrong word, I should have said "stop" but the effect is the same; from 1 - 2 cold calls a day to 4 - 5 a year.

A few mistakes here...

@Charlie Clark "Cold-calling is already illegal in the UK .."

No, it is not illegal, however BT offers a free service to block it. (Telephone Preference Scheme - TPS - register. see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/12/bt_privacy/ ) If you still get cold calls, the caller is in breach of their contract with BT and can be refused a license to operate, though I doubt it ever happens.

@AC "EU operate without popular mandate" So what are the European elections for? Every voter in every European Union state has the right to vote for their Euro MP. It's called Democracy. The European civil service though is like every other national civil service, so not elected, but is answerable to the elected government.

Local calls in the US are not really "free" - TANSTAAFL - a fixed cost is rolled into the monthly subscription, so if you don't make many local calls, you pay for your neighbo[u]r who does. Similarly BT's "free" weekend and evening calls are not free - they are fixed cost by subscription.

Whatever WIK says, this is only a consultation paper, and in such a competitive market as the European mobile phone market, it will be the consumers who call the shots. Which operator would be the first to "offer" pay on receive - and watch all its customer change to a different supplier?

Vote now for your fave sci-fi movie quote

@snafu

War of the Worlds; H. G. Wells.

Yet another HHGG quote:

My favourite (from memory, so not accurate)

Ford: [teleporting]... is unpleasantly like being drunk.

Arthur: What's unpleasant about being drunk?

Ford: Ask a glass of water.

Of course, from the choices given, my vote had to go to Bladerunner.

Sleeper:

OK I know it was just a sci-fi vehicle for Woody Allen jokes, but

"I'm what you would call a teleological, existential atheist. I believe that there's an intelligence to the universe, with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey."

"Perform sex? Uh, uh, I don't think I'm up to a performance, but I'll rehearse with you, if you like"

"I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. I'm 237 years old, I should be collecting social security."

"Luna Schlosser: What's it feel like to be dead for 200 years?

Miles Monroe: Like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills. "

Armed robbers target Oz biker shindig

@Ishkander

Real bikers do wear leathers. Pretend bikers wear denim until the first off, then they are smeared all over the tarmac so don't count as bikers anymore.

(And real bikers don't ride tractors - aka Harleys - they are for people with more money than sense. Who wants an underpowered bike that won't go around corners?)

Mine's the Dianese one-piece with the Shoei

Elonex £99 Eee PC rival to arrive in June

Condoms for computers

I see there is an optional interchangeble rubberised external skin... snarf!

For those complaining about Photoshopping on the Asus add, take a look at the image on the Elonex Visons page, then follow the link to the NLI website; same image; different laptop. I hope Elonex got permission to use NLI's intellectual property.

Asus Eee PC gives Sony the willies

@but it's an Asus

Re:"It'll be in the bin in 6 months. My Sony is still going strong..."

Wish I had the same experience. All my Sony stuff has broken down just after the warrenty expired (or before in the case of my PDA) My Asus stuff, in contrast, is still going strong. Definitely a case of YMMV.

Nice to see Ms Eee again.

Gov boffins to carry out simulated London dirty bombing

I screwed up

I used atomic number instead of weight.

Should have said "...molecular weight of 40 compared to 28 for N2 and 32 for O2..."

duh. I hate getting old!

In my defence, it is 40 years since I did 'O' level chemistry.

@What gas

Some odourless, invisible gases are fairly rare in the wild, but are harmless. If the concentration of one of those gases was artificially raised, it should be measurable against the background levels.

My bet is on Argon. With a molecular weight of 18 compared to 14 for N2 and 16 for O2, it should hang around at ground level for long enough to be tracked.

Treehuggers lose legal fight to solar-powered neighbour

Oh Dear..

Two people working toward the same ends end up fighting each other in court over who's solution is best. I despair.

Trees are a sink of CO2, and solar cells mean so much isn't produced in the first place. There is room in the world (and need, perhaps) for both solutions.

There appear to be a distinct lack of common sense in some court cases. Maybe it came as a surprise to the solar cell owner that trees continue growing, even after he has placed his panels, but the judge should have used a bit of common. After all it should be easier to resite solar panels than a bloody great Redwood.

They say "Good fences make good neighbours". Not apparently in California, where they would sue each other because the fence casts a shadow.

Geordie cops arrest two for Wi-Fi squatting

It's not real Wi Fi..

This is the Geordie version,

Way aye Fi

Mine's the raincoat and flat cap, next the whippet.

Restored Vulcan hits financial turbulence

Top Gear

This sounds like just the project for Jeremy Clarkson to get involved with;

old British technology, ahead of its time, fast, historical, and he might get a ride in it. It ticks all the riight boxes.

Come on Mr Clarkson, get your hands in your pockets, and do a Top Gear special or something, to raise the profile.

There is even room for you, Hammond and May in the back.

Northern Rock FOI gag 'out of order' say Tories

FOI Act

Of course Northern Rock should make all their secrets public - just as soon as all the other banks that survive on OUR money do the same thing.

Banks borrow money from some punters to lend to other punters. Profits go to the shareholders, so none of the money in the bank is actually theirs - it's ours; on loan.

At least with NR some of the profits will get back to us as the Government is now the major shareholder.

For those saying we should know everything as we are the shareholders now - no, the Government is the shareholders on our behalf, just as pension and insurance companies are shareholders in other banks, on our behalf. Why don't the banks give us all their commercial secrets as we own them through our pension funds? Both arguments are as fatuous as each other.

I directly own a few shares directly in a bank, and I don't remember them giving me any secrets. (that's why they are secret!)

NR is now classed as a Gilt Edged company. Everyone seems to forget that the government already runs National Savings, and used to own the Post Office Bank. both considered safe but boring investments, and Gilt Edged (i.e. Government) shares are considered the safest investment possible.

The Money Programme on Sunday was saying that people will now start putting their money in NR as it is the only bank in Britain that is now guaranteed NOT to go bankrupt.

Trying to apply the FOI act is a deliberate attempt at sabotaging the rescue, at the cost of the bank's savers and mortgagees, for political point scoring.

Shame on the Tories, shame on you.

Piscine killer menaces UK rivers

Re: "They attack anything in their path..."

Maybe if they get into the same rivers as the escaped American Mink and Crayfish, they'll wipe each other out.

Mine's the fishy smelling mink coat.

Physicists fire up strontium atomic clock

Time is an illusion...

... Lunchtime doubly so.

Douglas Adams

Inventor promises bottle-o-wind car in a year. Again

External combustion, pt 2

If this air car will only work efficiently if the air is heated, then let's get rid of the air altogether and use a Stirling engine. This uses pairs of cylinders, one heated and the other kept cooler. These are used in Africa for pumps, where a wood fire is lit under the hot cylinder and the cold cylinder is air cooled.

In a car you could use multicylinders, water cooling and any portable fuel - ethanol, methanol, LNG, Hydrogen, waste oil - even a fluidized bed coal burner. Unlike the air car these would run more efficiently in winter and the heat from the cold cylinder could be used for heating the car, though warm-up times might get a bit long.

Why aren't they already used? Long warm up times, (minutes rather than seconds) difficult changing the speed, so better suited to constant speed applications like pumps or generators. So, put a generator on one, a battery under the hood, and electric motors on the wheels, though then you introduce conversion losses, so back to square one.

External combustion

If the air has to be heated, then this becomes an external combustion engine. Why not carry the gas as something that is liquid at room temperature, like water, to save on the compression losses, then heat that to its gaseous state and use that to drive the pistons, or a turbine. You can use anything to heat it, ethanol, methanol, diesel, even coal. You could call it a "steam engine"

Mine's the dirty blue overall next to the shovel and oil-can.

Pr0n baron challenges Google and Yahoo! to build better child locks

'...it is about protecting children'

No, it is about protecting your market.

Kids get to see porn; parents get upset; parents lobby their politicians; politicians make life hard for pornographers.

Blaming search engines for letting kids find your adult-only product is commercial cynicism at its worst.

Oz teen elephant pregnancy sparks protests

A spokesman said....

"lack of maternal ... experience make this pregnancy very risky."

So that would apply to every childless female of whatever species. Paraphrasing " You shouldn't have a first child unless you already have experience of being a mother." duh, how does that work?

Paris, because that's the sort of logic you would expect from a sleb

Academics propose carbon-capture kit for cars

Liquid CO2?

Hang on; doesn't CO2 go directly from gas to/from solid (deposition/sublimation) at normal temperatures and pressures? There is no liquid state at pressures below 5.1 atmospheres.

I'm not too hot on pressure containment - do SodaStream bulbs really contain liquid at > 75 lbs/sq in? (sorry, don't know what that is in bags of sugar / olympic sized swimming pool)

Armed police swoop on MP3-packing mechanic

@greg

Re: "a legal reason to have a gun"

There is no legal reason to have a handgun on the streets of Britain, unless you are an officer of the law, and then only in response to a firearms incident.

(sports pistol shooters can only use them at licensed clubs, and must carry them in gun cases, not their pockets) So any handgun being waved by a member of the public is de facto illegal.

The police acted correctly on information received, but then went too far by not releasing him without a record when they realised the mistake.

@CrashIO

There was a picture of the guy on the front page of Metro this morning - he is white and fair haired. I don't think racism can be blamed in this instance. Of course he might have been wearing a hoody, and he is young - so obviously a gun-toting hoodlum.

The nasty bit about this is that the police will keep his DNA on the database even though he is completely innocent of any crime, and he is now permanantly on their records as "arrested on suspicion of a firearms offence" (according to Metro, which is not the most reliable source)

Our civil liberties activists should be up in arms (oops! not literally) about this. This is far more an erosion of civil liberties than being inconvenienced by a high frequency tone. (<off topic>I have tinitus so have that 24 hours a day, so don't understand all the fuss about "mosquitoes".</off topic>)

Once they have all our DNA the black helicopters can pick us off at will.

French motorwonk savages hybrid cars

@ Quiz Time

AC, there this thing about spelling: if you put different letters in a different order it's a different word!

Citeron - never heard of it.

citron - French for lemon

Citroën - French for good value car

Your "joke" makes as much sense as "Ford is American for Fraud" or "Prius is Japanese for Pricy"

I have had Ctroëns for over 20 years and have had one breakdown in that period. My wife drove the same AX for 15 years until the MOT cost more than the car was worth. It was ungaraged for all that time and had moss growing on it but it still went like the clappers and gave 48 mpg even when thrashed down the motorway at full speed (85mph)

The latest petrol C1 is exempt from the congestion charge- like the Prius - as it is so low emitting .

Load of Microsoft software falls off back of lorry

...theft of computer software worth a five figure sum

IF Microsoft have deactivated it, then the software has zero value; the discs and packing have minimal value.

If it is a distributor that was robbed, then Microsoft have already sold the software to them, so how can they deactivate it, legally? Presumably the distributor's insurance will cover their loss. ( £100 for scrap discs and boxes or 5 figures for zero value software?)

IF it is NOT deactivated, then the purchasors of the booty are not likely to be Microsoft's normal customers, so few sales are lost, and Microsoft can replace the lost "software" for just the media and packing costs.

The only losers appear to be the insurance companies, who are probably right now wriggling to get out of paying for worthless junk. (deliberately doesn't specify whether de-activated or not)

English language succumbs to Symbiotic Ephemeralization

Symbiotic Innovation Nodes ?

It s easy to criticise: Let he that is without S.I.N. throw the first stone.

You don't understand it?

As my old dad used to say:

A slight inclination of the cranium is as adequate as a spasmodic closure of an optic, to an equine quadroped deprived of its sense of vision.

Boffin says Astronomical Unit should be binned

Mr Fahrenheit @Rich

Hear, Hear,

I was bought up with Fahrenheit and have now managed to almost forget it.

Apparently Fahrenheit based zero degrees on the lowest temperature he could get - his equivalent of absolute zero - a salt and ice mixture, and 100 (Wikipedia says 96) was that universal constant, the temperature of the human body - he must have had a fever (or a chill). The freezing and boiling points of water were just extrapolated from there. (I was taught this at school, so it must be right!)

Anyway, 0 for freezing, 20 for a nice spring day and room temperature, 30 for a hot summer's day, 40 for a heat wave or a hot bath, and 100 for boiling water. What could be simpler?

Taking this to its (il)logical conclusion

The yard should be scrapped as it is based on the length of Henry VIII's arm, and that arm has now withered away;

the mile because it is 1000 double paces of a Roman Legionnaire, and there aren't too many of those marching around;

and the metre was originally based on 1/10,000,000th the distance from the pole to equator, and we all know the Earth is not a sphere so that is not a standard distance.

The point is, many units are (or were) based on things that are no longer available/accurate/realistic, so a new basis of measurement is agreed, e.g. the wavelength of light at a particular frequency, or a bar of Invar in a laboratory, and we carry on as usual - this "issue" is much ado about nothing.

(Of course frequency is based on time being constant, whereas time can be bent, so nothing is 100% accurate.)

btw, good to see MfM firing on all cylinders - straight to the point as usual.

Boy burned in PSP trouser blaze

Why does the song...

..."Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" keep going around my head?

Pod slurping licks a*se antlers to claim Oz word of the year

@AC

"There's probably a new "double" word that means jamming words together "

Not so new; Lewis Carrol invented the phrase "Portmanteau word" in 1871 for this. A portmanteau was a case with two compartments, and is itself a combination of porte (carry) and manteau (coat). The word he used it for was "slithy" a blend of lithe and slimy.

Ryanair battles ASA over 'saucy schoolgirl' ad

@Morley Dotes

Yes most kids do stay on after 16 in the UK, (and start at 5, not 6) but they normally stop wearing uniform at 16, so any one in uniform would be under 16.

And universities don't have desk filled classrooms - nor uniforms.

Also there are still nearly $2 for £1 so the economy is doing fine thanks.

Unelected?

What has that got to do with anything? The Police, army, civil service, judges, lawyers, doctors, teachers, the BBC, and lots of other people working in public service aren't elected. Are "Communications Officers" elected? (the NG in QANGO stands for "non-governmental" so obviously they are not elected - doh!)

It only matters if they are doing their jobs properly: I don't know if the ASA are or not: I would guess that if they are pissing Ryanair off, then they are.

Anyway, I won't be flying Ryanair any time soon: I don't want to sit with their apparent targetted demographic. *shudder*

Miserable? It must be U

41 for me

So depressed on my 41st birthday I got paralytic and had to be poured through the letter box.

Now I'm late 50's and still depressed (I've got this pain in the diodes all down my left leg) First Great Western and the Underground does that to you.

Grumpy old men, don't talk to me about grumpy old men.

The 'blem wit' error messages

Airline systems

In the olden days of command driven green screen reservation systems, typing *RAPE gave the error message "ILLEGAL ENTRY"

I wrote a system using these green screens with just 32 characters for error messages. My first attempts were turned down as "Too terse and technical" and I was told to rewrite them to tell the user what to do, not what the problem was.

I set up a dummy system with the new messages and showed it to the QA guy for his OK, telling him that I had had to use the live production system with 3000 users. He entered a sequence he (and I) knew would pop up an error. It now said "PHONE JOHN xxxxxx ON 01nnnnnn" with his name and home phone number. Oddly he didn't find it funny that 3000 users now had (he believed) his home phone number. He saw the joke when I explained that only he had that version.

ABC fined $1.43m for NYPD Blue a*se flash

watershed

I wonder what age a US child would be that would still be up after 9pm on a school night? (25th Feb 2003 was a Tuesday - And why did it take 5 years to get to court?)

The Watershed in Britain is 9pm, and we show much more than buttocks after that time, since school age children are assumed to be in bed by that time. (In reality they are probaly watching on the set in their bedrooms.)

The Continent is even more liberal - I have seen bare-breasts on a French circus show on children's television, and a naked opera singer on German TV early in the evening. Their kids seem to grow up as sexually undamaged as any other kids - though less hung up about nudity.

As a matter of interest, are kids allowed to see killings and violence on US TV pre-watershed? Our latest outcry about pre-watershed shows, concerned someone being stabbed in the leg.

DuBreq Stylophone pocket organ makes a comeback

Re:Space Oddity

No, really, a Stylophone. Dubreq used the fact in their advertising.

Instrument of the stars

Not only Rolf - Bowie features the Stylophone on Space Oddity.

Critics split over DDoS attacks on Scientology

@Because?

"...people stupidly think that "religions ought to be respected". So politicians don't want to be seen disrespecting anything remotely associated with religions, cults, whatever."

And how does that work with with Islam? A large, ancient, organised religion that has its branches growing from the same roots as Judaism and Christianity.

Oh.. you mean *American* religions!

EU moves to establish gibberish as lingua franca

253 combinations, but 506 translators

It is a rule in translation that you only translate *into* your own language. (you only have to read foreign translated instruction manuals to see why this is a good idea.), so for each language pair, you really need two translators - one for each native language. However, there is no shortage of translators in modern Europe, so finding them - at least for the major languages - is not a problem

While politically, it might be necessary to have EU documents translated into Gaelic, practically, most Irish understand English as well as us natives (if not better,) certainly far more than understand Gaelic

James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Spike Milligan, et al, bear witness to that facility with our mother tongue.