Posts by Jolyon

Praying for meltdown: The media and the nukes

Might argue about some of the sports reporters

but in general this is spot on - it's acceptable on BBC radio (and as commercial radio is worse in every other respect I doubt it is any better here) for a presenter to laugh about their ignorance of science and their inability to do trivial arithmetic.

Even their professed experts treat the subject as though it is something no one could possibly ever understand which has to be dumbed down to the level of the inattentive halfwit rather than being presented properly and allowing the audience to reach for understanding.

Dirty

"("like a dirty bomb" we were told)"

Who told us that?

Also a link to an online copy of the Daily Mail's "Nature's Deadly Rage" would be great if you could provide it; Tim Black couldn't either although he did link to other quoted articles in his similarly themed piece on Spiked. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10325/

Nokia talks Pure typographic cobblers

Snog Lew? Ha.

I assume (and hope) the whalesong is a Reg-specific addition hastily and clumsily stitched together.

Nokia launches new corporate font

Wordsearch

Feel connected, fluid inclusive . . . . MERK

Fukushima: Situation improving all the time

Tremendous

That's very helpful. I'll add that my friend worked at Cadarache. He drank only mineral water, ate salad every day and died of pancreatic cancer before all of his children reached adulthood.

I really don't think these small parcels of anecdotal evidence add a great deal to the debate.

Ash sat

"people are dying in their thousands as a result of all the other fucktards like me doing the same thing"

Sorry, are you saying paranoid Reg readers are killing people in Japan by over-reacting to Lewis Page articles and calling him a shill?

Career

He's after a career in journalism - never a bad thing to be good box office on a heated (if you'll forgiver the pun) issue if you want people to pay you to write or say what you think.

We're not being lied to, it's just a different spin on the same information everyone else has - it's not like he's on site and knows something no one else does and is not telling us about it.

Guardian Anger

You'll need to expand on that for those of us that haven't read that paper's coverage - what has it said?

Is their unbalanced reporting the reason Lewis Page hasn't written anything for them for over a year?

Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

Should be possible

To calculate the cost of fossil fuel generation over the lifetime of these reactors to see if they've been any cheaper - there must be comparable clean-up operations going on at non-nuclear plants in Japan at the moment to provide the whole-lifecycle comparison.

Not that economic considerations are the be all and end all for energy policy decisions.

Honest about it all?

I'm all for the honesty but are you honestly able to say the greenhouse effect from the waste products of fossil fuels is *sure* to lead to desertification the loss of cities due to sea level rise?

There seems to have been an awful lot of debate for something that is so obvious and inevitable.

Lewis Page for example might disagree with you (but don't call him names if he does).

Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good

Compare

There are a lot of posts inviting comparisons with other events or with hyopthetical disaster scenarios for other power scources which is all fine for the longer term decision-making process* but these don't mean that there is no current problem with the reactors in Japan.

I'm not an expert on the subject and don't in any case have any relevant data that I trust to be accurate so it's a great relief to know that "the actual health impacts of this have been, and likely will be, minimal" but that doesn't mean we have to consider the current state of affairs a 'triumph' and abandon any suggestion of rethinking energy policy.

* although I suspect that nuclear power's future depends at least as much on the lack of long-term alternatives as on the reasonable arguments in its favour

Reasonable?

Did you reply to the wrong post by mistake?

There's lots of perfectly rational discussion on here but suggesting anti-nuclear religions and conspiracies puts that post into a different category, surely?

Mind you I don't think there are any anti-nuclear lobbyists here either (would seem like a curious backwater for their work) so maybe you are on the same wavelength.

DNA can be repaired.

And damaged DNA does not necessarily pass damage on to new cells.

You should read up on it, it's interesting.

Google "DNA repair" and also senescence & apoptosis.

Fukushima situation as of Wednesday

Coped

Arguments about whether or how well these plants have coped aside there's a distance between "a good job" and a triumph in most people's eyes.

Even if this is indeed a triumph my point still stands that it is describing it as so when many people believe otherwise that has generated the volume of negative posts.

It's definitely a triumph of building the Lewis Page brand.

Why people are having a go at Lewis.

I guess in part it's because his first article on the subject proclaimed this situation as a 'triumph' which even stauch supporters of nuclear power and western engineering practices in general thought was perhaps a bit strong and almost certainly premature in any case.

Anti-religious campaigners smack down census Jedis

Results

Of course if there was funding for an explicitly atheist school with similar selection privileges to faith schools (which as far as I am aware there isn't and couldn't legally be) you might find similarly superior results.

Half a point

Yes, a lot of perfectly sensible guidelines have passed through one or other religion at some stage but there's nothing in that to suggest that without religion we wouldn't have them.

If you want to bring evolution into this (and there really isn't any reason to do so) you should probably consider how behaving in contravention of these laws would affect the chances of becoming an ancestor even if the laws themselves had never been formulated.

What sealed Nokia's fate?

So you are saying I might as well stop flogging it?

"A donkey with the front torso of a horse grafted surgically onto it is guaranteed to die regardless of the amount of immunupressants you stuff it with."

I wish you'd told me this yesterday.

Could Coraid be readying for takeoff?

ATA

Would be a lot less confusing, thanks.

Cornish pasties awarded protected status

Nish

You might want to call them 'Cornish' so that people understand what type of pasty they are buying.

Presumably they were only originally called 'Cornish' outside of Cornwall and this was meant in the sense of 'like they make in Cornwall' rather than 'Made in Cornwall'.

Radiohead surprises fans with early online album release

That's why

These models work for Radiohead - huge publicity and people who don't mind buying music they've never ehard.

Fine if you're established already or have a really dedicated fan base (like Marillion who funded an album by getting people to buy it in advance of them actually recording it).

A bit like the music it seems to me this distribution method was innovative once but now is just re-covering well trodden ground.

London councils reveal joint IT jobs cut plan

Simple

What is your estimate of the ratio of licence costs to staff costs?

Boffins demand: Cull bogus A-Levels, hire brainier teachers

Obvious, simple and useful.

and therefore unlikely to happen.

(If only we could teach science as well as we do cynicism)

English Defence League site pulled offline after defacement

Wrong wing

I disagree with your definition of the politics of the right.

Albuquerque shopper samples free man oysters

Come off it.

I don't understand

a) How you know so much about the levels of and motivation for spunk in food.

b) What on earth makes you think people would behave differently if this had happened to a man.

but you are certainly livening up the comments section single handedly.

So well done for that.

'You don't even know what change management is'

( ^ - ^ ) / \ ( ^ - ^ ) High Five

"an administrative function trying to sound like an executive one"

Best insight of this author's that I've ever read.

Microsoft issues temp fix for serious Windows security bug

Bitter and wrong

If there's a potential problem we, all of us, benefit from it being removed by whatever means.

As it is clearly unrealistic to expect all users of IE to switch to a different browser in the short / medium term it is clearly sensible to explore all avenues when trying to prevent / reduce any real world impact from this vulnerability.

Windows and Internet Explorer may or may not be useless and responsible for any number of ills but either way it does not mean we have to be irrational about the whole business.

Netgear CEO sorry for 'when Steve Jobs goes away' bit

Last post

Mine's been fine for at least three.

Assange relishes US banks 'squirming' over 'megaleak'

Yesbut

I'm in favour in general but I am not sure why there needs to be an identifiable, high-profile leader for wikileaks and I don't understand why they have information that they aren't publishing - if this bank leak is important then get it out.

Man knows when you're signed in to GMail, Twitter, Digg

Mostly harmless

So you already know about it - thanks for telling us all that you don't need the AC telling you.

But at some point we all heard about these things for the first time and they are worth knowing about so perhaps we can let people bring them up in relevant threads.

Shocked mum muzzles foul-mouthed toy mutt

Wrong kind of cynicism on the line?

Fame hungry twit mum or viral marketing for irritating toy?

Steve Jobs takes 'medical leave of absence' from Apple

Keyboard

Those IBM keyboards were great and if Jobs had a major part to play in the deterioration of keyboard quality over the years (and Mac keyboards are pretty awful, particularly on their laptops) then that's a rare black mark on his record of changes to the user interface.

Cunning

You sound just like ratfox.

Sainsbury's techie jailed for loyalty card scam

Caught by the fuzz

I don't suppose it is in anyone's interests that we all sit around imagining how he might have got caught and how we might avoid the same mistakes - last thing we need is to come up with a load of theories we can't resist putting into practice.

My guess is he . . .

Drat.

Yank fires up iPhone-controlled beer cannon

Fire

a Broadside?

Android's Gingerbread finagled onto iPhone

You have our permission

I've always thought that Hillary could just have gone up to the top of the Malverns - they're the tallest things for miles around and generally nowhere near as troublesome as the Himalayas in terms of snow and breathable air, not to mention the friendlier inclines. The views from there are every bit as good in their own way and if it was good enough for Elgar I don't see why anyone would feel the need to go traipsing off all that way to get a bit of fresh air into their lungs.

Motorola uncloaks 10.1-inch Xoom fondleslab

Xenophobe?

Faux intellectual?

Or just anxious?

Microsoft Kinect goes gangbusters

Surf ace

I reckon a coffee-table browser could be the thing.

Becks offloads Posh Porsche on eBay

Eptiome the fool

Yours would be green, I take it?

'Porn lock' heralds death of WikiLeaks, internet, democracy, universe

stooge-agitator

Stoogitator.

Merry Christmas.

Channel Five to air Walking Dead

¯\(º_o)/¯ ٩(̾●̮̮̃̾•̃̾)۶ zombie protest (•̪●) ٩๏̯͡๏۶

What do we want? Brrraaaaaiiiinnnnnnnnssssss!

When do we want it? Brrraaaaaiiiinnnnnnnnssssss!

Microsoft ends year with Patch Tuesday bang next week

(\/) Ò_ó (\/) furious crabs (\/) Ò_ó (\/)

There are plenty of tools to partially or completely automate this process.

if it takes you until Christmas then that's ... very ... dilligent ... of you.

Google gets physical on Hotpot

(\/) Ó_ò (\/) terrified crabs (\/) Ó_ò (\/)

Is it?

Terrifying?

Really?

PayPal banned WikiLeaks after US gov intervention

There you go

"if posters dont conform to the opinion of the US is evil and Wikileaks are saints they are slated"

They are downvoted if it is even possible to misconstrue their posts as a slight on Assange / Wikileaks.

It's clearly something that matters a great deal to (a particualr subset of) the Reg readership.

PARIS concocts commemorative cocktail

(๏ Y ๏) Name

One Flight In PARIS?

Virgin opens kimono, flashes box

Here's another review

I've got a V+ box, works fine, thanks

.

Ten... budget Android smartphones

Predictable Reg / San Francisco crossover

It's a top geek phone, well specced, easily unlocked, hackable, with good community support and being so cheap means there's no need for excessive misuse of beer tokens in its acquisition.

Orange blundered with the pathetic 'unlimited' internet allowance.

Global warming is actually good for rainforests, say boffins

Thie title brought to you by the letter T and the word adiós

Is greenhouse damage to the rainforests something people have been all that concerned about?

Or is this a bit like telling gullible mums how much milk they'd have to drink to get as much iron as there is in some lab-created substitute?

I can't believe that many people would be surprised that tropical plants would be happy in a greenhouse.

On the other hand chopping them down and growing cows in their place has been flagged as something we might want to avoid.

Co-op cashier's breasts overcharged for fruit and veg

║▌║█║▌║▌││║▌║█║▌│ - TITLE £ 0.02

I guess they are all old enough to get out of accompanying their mums to the supermarket.

Strange, blobaceous 'alien pod' lifeform found in Virginian lake

Chuck Schmuck

Is referenced in the article text too.

I'd like to buy his parents a beer.