Posts by Jolyon

Facebooking juror gets 8 months

Brains

"most people with a bit of brains will do anything to get out of jury service"

Not sure I'd want my fate to be in the hands of a bunch of self-serving arseholes like that, however clever they might be.

Creationists are infiltrating US geology circles

@davefb - how about the CofE?

I think the CofE is ripe for a takeover - it's been a bit of a 'lite' religion in a lot of parts for a while and congregations are falling.

A few CofE priests saying

"You know what? It doesn't matter if you really believe in gods, it's still a good idea to meet up once a week, have a chat about what's going on, reassure ourselves that it's not all bad and check that none of the old people has carked it while we've been at work."

would push things along nicely and if you could increase bums on pews then the higher-ups might think there was something in it.

There's a pleasant little church up my way not too far from the Nag's Head - could pick up a pint or two and a packet of salt and vinegar on the way past (or if they want to fund the events with an exclusive wine and biscuit sales setup I'd not complain).

A bit of a community update with no hymns wouldn't take too long, could carry on any discussions in the pub after.

@sabroni

"unable to respect other people's opinions"

I am utterly unable to respect these people's opinions.

Respect their right to hold and express these opinions, okay, the alternative is worse, but appear to condone these opinions in any way, such as not being rude about them? No. In my opinion that's not the right way to go about things.

I want it to be clear I think they are wrong and not worth listening to.

Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

@Gary Heard

There's nothing particularly 'denier'-ish about this article.

The only real link to AGW (and anyone that far into the jargon might want to consider how zealous they themselves appear) is that if this prediction is correct then it might be a good thing if man made global warming was real.

Cloud iTunes DESTROYS music business FOREVER!

Apple's service tempts me to pirate more

I'm meek enough that I prefer to be legit and I am not skint so at the moment I don't take for free things I can buy.

But they do seem to offer me the convenience of torrenting huge swathes of music and legitimising it all at a stroke for less than the cost of half a dozen CDs.

You might be sniffy about the AAC format but I doubt it'd matter all that much for me - I'm either listening out and about where there's plenty of ambient noise or through a far-from top end Yamaha receiver and a pair of Mission bookshelfs so I reckon it'll probably do - and presumably there's nothing to stop a similar service launching using a superior format.

I won't be doing this but I almost feel stupid for not taking advantage and cutting my annual music spend to a tiny fraction of its current amount.

HP WebOS tablet to ship early July

Connections

Yep, that's a baffling omission for a business device - I wonder if they're suffering from cross-division interference along the lines of "If they can do everything you could do on a laptop then who will buy our laptops?"

iTunes Match is iPiracy, claims loopy Oz industry troll

That's how it seemed to me too

It's clearly better for the industry than someone pirating and never paying anything at all but if I decided to switch from buying the few hundred quid a year of CD and vinyl that I do currently and went down this Persil Pirate route they'd lose out.

And seeing as the real freetards will resent even this small outlay it might more likely be people like me who prefer to be more or less legit who would be attracted to this sort of service.

DRM Free

If it is DRM free how come you can play it on 'up to 10 devices'? What is imposing that limit?

Sony unveils PlayStation telly

Remember, don't shoot food!

It's clever but presumably pretty horrific for anyone else in the room who does not have a linked set of specs.

Apple uncloaks top 10 tools of iOS 5

That

Was my first thought.

Otherwise it seems like an odd move with Twitter being less used than other social media (although perhaps there's a strong Twitter / iOS correlation).

What are the potential benefits for Apple in buying or strongly linking themselves to Twitter? More ways to push the networks into the background?

Student suspended for posting random satire on YouTube

I squish you.

If I didn't squish the many, many people who blight my daily business, I'd go insane.

Naked cyclist streaks through Suffolk village

Monkey business

Presumably £500 is the price a judge considers the going rate for a naked young man.

Bin Laden's porn stash: Too good to be true?

Steganography ?

Is that dinosaur porn?

Would putting all the climate scientists in a room solve global warming...

Entourage

Or just evening up the numbers if it ended up 50-50 skeptics and, what do we call them on here, Warm-Mongers? Morons? Scum? I forget what the current derogatory term is.

Don’t leak WikiLeaks: The NDA from hell

Straight @ IM Gumby

Um, that's not straight yet.

I was suggesting that _Wikileaks'_ actions, if they acknowledge this information has a financial value, can without too much of a stretch of the legal imagination, be considered theft (or handling).

Made public

It's not just made public though, it is also sold - or so this NDA implies.

The original holder of then information then loses the value of that sale as once revealed the information has no further value.

That pretty much makes it a chose in action and makes taking it without the consent of the owner a candidate for being classed as theft.

Shhh! HP's cloud is called, er, Scalene

Etymology

From the online etymology dictionary:

Scalene : "having unequal sides," 1680s, from L.L. scalenus, from Gk. skalenos "uneven, unequal, rough," from ... skolios "crooked," from PIE *(s)kel- "crooked, curved, bent; perverted"

Computers taught to sing using autotuning talent show

Tragedy

You'd also need something that generated tales of woe and triumph for these soft stars to get the grannies emotionally involved enough come present buying time that they could remember what they'd been told to buy.

Some kind of virtual rehab for them to head to when they can't generate publicity any other way would probably also help.

Intel's Tri-Gate gamble: It's now or never

Fudge

"The answer- to blow sugar up your ass."

I'm not sure that's all it's cracked up to be.

Everest climber finds 3G signal, sends Tweet

Did he pay

Peak rates or were they (snow) capped?

I'm aware this is a slippery slope . . .

Mine's the parka with the fur-trimmed hood.

Five amazing computers for under £100

San Francisco now £70

Plus a one-off £10 top-up from Orange.

http://shop.orange.co.uk/mobile-phones/san-francisco-from-orange-in-grey

So the £100 budget would stretch to some good apps too.

San Francisco - not £100

Sorry - mine was considerably less, didn't realise the price had risen.

http://shop.orange.co.uk/mobile-phones/san-francisco-from-orange-in-grey

Phone itself is £94.99 at present but out of stock (online - I haven't checked any shops) and with the mandatory top up being £20 now even if you could buy it you'd be right to suggest it didn't fit this round-up unless perhaps you could bring along a public sector payslip to get Orange's generous discount.

San Francisco

Agree the Orange San Francisco is a good choice for this £100 challenge.

Boffins develop liquid crystal solid-state raygun turret

Can

a super-villain *ever* have enough goons?

Farewell, Novell

Upvoted because of

Something Good.

Google Docs app lands on Android

What's so bad

Nothing that I have found so far. It's not exactly rapid but it does what you'd expect, looks fine and is pretty straightforward to navigate.

Would be more useful with offline editing, of course, but even as is this looks like an app I'll hang on to.

Behind Apple's record sales are signs of desperation

Boy wizard

A new Harry Potter book would be trouble but no one has passed off their non-Apple phone as an iPhone, they've just made a device which uses the well established features of the genre.

I don't see Rowling successfully suing someone who writes a book about a young boy in somewhat undesirable surroundings who, it turns out, is not only special but is in fact very important to some chain of events of major significance.

She'd certainly be a dreadful hypocrite if she did.

'Real' JavaScript benchmark topped by...Microsoft

@Sisk

"testing a not-even-released bleeding-edge product against current stable products is fair how? That gives IE a distinct advantage as IE10 SHOULD have more advanced tech in it."

Or does it put Microsoft at a disadvantage because their product is not yet finished?

Firefox needs heavy hitter Linux power

Good article.

Considering it's really just a simple tool for implementing defined standards it's mad that the nearest we've had to a standard browser was the dog's dinner that was IE6*.

A rock-solid, undeniable standard would benefit almost everyone from the consumer up and would probably cost less for the organisations that have the power to make it happen than the effort currently expended on ensuring the current competing browsers are all adequately supported.

--

*That is to say there was a period during which if you made something for general comsumption that was *not* happy in IE6 you were an idiot but if you made something that was *only* happy in IE6 you'd almost certainly get away with it.

So, what's the best sci-fi film never made?

Attempt? Do or do not. There is no attempt.

I just don't think I could stand someone ruining those books.

If it was only as bad as Lord of the Rings (decent films, hard to imagine a better attempt at an impossible task) then maybe.

Both

Was going to suggest both of those and would add

Skizz

The Ballad of Halo Jones

Despite Alan Moore's loathing of his stuff in the cinema.

Gaddafi's missus joins Lads from Lagos

Mummar Mia!

Some people will do anything Farkash.

Fired-up eco-boffin gives it '180 per cent'

Pedantry over poetry

Joyless but accurate.

No thanks.

300

Lester clearly underestimates footballers and / or humankind as Patrice Evra for one is capable of exceeding the articles stated maximum by half.

http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/southafrica2010/news/newsid=871869/index.html

360 Browser

Refund

Does their app store not allow refunds if you uninstall after a brief period?

Android's Marketplace app store does if you decide you're not happy within 24 hours - seems like an obvious service to provide; better than limited functionality demo versions.

BBC engineers see PLT knocking out DAB

Want

Do people actually not want DAB or is it just that people in areas with poor reception don't think it's any use?

For me it's a tremendous improvement over AM/FM - probably 80% of my media consumption is DAB radio (although the admongers would be less keen to know that 99% of that is advert-free BBC).

If I couldn't have it, I'd certainly miss it; frankly I'd probably even pay for it.

Mummy, mummy, there's a nuclear monster!

Concollusion

"As for the INES nuclear incident scale and Fukushima's new 7 rating – the highest possible – you could draw various lessons from that.

But the only rational conclusion to draw is that an industry which can have an accident at the extreme top of its possible internationally agreed accident scale without killing a single person is already so safe that it probably deserves to relax its costly precautions quite a lot"

This may be true but it's not a conclusion you can draw at all yet (as you half acknowledge with your 'probably) and it certainly isn't the *only* conclusion that can be drawn - that the rating system is flawed being one other.

We may be able to provide nuclear power more cheaply with relaxed safety regulation but we've not established this for certain yet.

This sort of jumping to hoped-for conclusions together with the sneering tone does not result in articles which give me a lot of hope that the argument will be swung in the right direction for the right reasons.

Is there any chance of a bland, unsensationalist Reg article by an expert plainly summarising the facts?

UK.gov opens Red Tape Challenge regulation-slash website

@David 39

Couldn't agree more, almost every day I am left stood there, sabatier in hand, squealing in impotent rage at the unperforated toe rag who has my nearest and dearest bound and gagged, my respect for the law utterly preventing me from swinging my arm.

Digital player maker 'incited consumers to break the law', says ASA

Yep.

Great advert.

Dell, HP badmouth Apple's iPad

Average

Average Joe Public is precisely the market that is not being talked about here.

It is not only tech heads that care about lock-in.

A business customer that might be buying hundreds or thousands of units is not going to go for something they don't have the ability to configure centrally and customise to suit their needs.

In that market Apple might find they lose out to Google and partners, and Microsoft.

And that's potentially a very large market indeed with the knock on problem for Apple that if work has provided you with a tablet device, you're less likely to go and spend your own money on another one.

It may be that Apple's happy to ignore this sort of customer - they don't sell a great number of their PCs into businesses either and have never had much of a presence in the server market either without suffering too much as a result - but that doesn't make all the claims reported in this article inaccurate.

Stylus

I have to say I quite like a stylus interface like on the old Psion netBook and although I was less happy with my MessagePad 110 I'd still have stylus input and handwriting recongnition on my list of ideal features for this sort of device.

Microsoft cofounder Allen unloads on Gates

You do wonder

How much richer Allen became as a result of those very traits of Gates' that seem to have made him angry.

Praying for meltdown: The media and the nukes

Tap

So in the absence of anything in the manual they turn immediately to the press and decide what to do based on how much journalists seem to be encouraging people to panic?

If they haven't run disaster drill they should have. If they come to the last page of the manual and have no idea what to do they should have.

And I rather suspect they do - the idea that they let media hype pressure them into making unsafe decisions is absurd. If they have then they are idiots.

Blam e

"The papers and people in general are also to blame for making the operators and staff feel they had to hold the gas inside."

If they allowed that sort of concern over-ride their training and procedures then they themselves are to blame.

Baa humbug

Good point.

No one even knows if he reads comments anyway.

What was I thinking?

More on that

Well, that's okay in itself - it's not unreasonable for the presenter to ask the sort of question the average uninformed person-in-the-street might ask as long as their expert then gives a proper answer.

Yeah

"the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12860842 (as suggested by an earlier poster)

"All energy generation entails risk, but nuclear is the least polluting, most dependable source."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8384196/The-world-shouldnt-panic-about-Japans-nuclear-problems.html

"The problems in Japan "could never have been a Chernobyl - that could not have happened," "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/29/nuclear-power-safe-sir-david-king

Goo goo

Yes, I googled. And yes, an online copy 'seems' to be the first result but as you will no doubt have seen, being the thorough sort of person you so clearly are, that's just the (rather impressive) front page. If the text content is available it would appear to be behind a paywall and I am too much of a freetard to take that route.

Firefox 4 for Android shuns ARMv6 phones

AdFree

It's AdFree Android and IIRC it's a hostfile update redirecting known ad hosts to the loopback connection.

Apple's 'App Store trademark': A farce of Jobsian proportions

Clutching at straw man.

Does this, and all the many other, examples of alleged Microsoft hypocrisy mean that Apple ought to be allowed to trade mark 'app store'?

Or are they just irrelevant whining?