Posts by Dr Patrick J R Harkin

Hackers break Amazon's Kindle DRM

I did not know that.

"Texas Instruments has also been known to take action against customers who reverse engineer calculators."

Thoses would be Polish notators I assume?

Official: British telly really is almost all repeats

I'm amazed it's only 50%

Just about everything I watch is repeated within a week (on the smae channel) and/or an hour later on SquareEyes Plus 1. Even Dave, a channel founded on repeats, has Daveja Vu.

Loud sex woman coughs to ASBO breach

As in the seasonable joke

I got a sweater for Xmas.

I would have preferred a screamer or a moaner.

Unused phone lines to be taxed for rural broadband

Must get new glasses

I read the first line as "Unused landmines will be taxed". It's what the People's Princess would have wanted.

LINX failure slows UK net traffic

It was terrible.

For nearly an hour the internet was cut off from me.

LHC pulverises previous record: 2.36 TeV surprise collision!

You just wait until the junior techies get bored...

Boxing Day. 2:37pm

"Jeff? What do you think would happen if we sent a sprout round one way, and a Terry's Chocolate Orange round the other?"

Hacker scalps NASA-run websites

The old techniques are the best

http://xkcd.com/327/

Service cracks wireless passwords from the cloud

My password is very secure

It's "mickeydonaldgoofyplutoheweydeweylouieminnielondonmammamia" It said in the book that a secure poassword has at least seven characters, a capital and a memorable number.

'Doctor Dark Energy': The Ultimate LHC eccentric?

It'll open a portal, I tell you, a portal!

But to where? Well, Google have announced their public DNS at 8.8.8.8 and the LHC is on the interweb, so they're connected - it's Dungeon Dimensions time, I tell you!

So the earth's crust will be thrown into outer space?

Just where is it now?

Space butterflies invade ISS

Flying in zero g must be confusing

All your effort gives accelleration, instead of just cancelling your natural tendency to plummet.

Smut-ladened spam disguises WoW Trojan campaign

We all think these scams are obvious

because we've seen them before. But there are new users starting on the internet every day, so there's always a fresh, naive target audience .

NASA to develop haptic air-typing spacesuit gloves

"air-writing accelerometer "

Won't work in space. No air.

MIT boffins invent robot clam-grapnel

Surely that's a live razorclam in the video

But I still want to see a Playmobil reconstruction

Atlantis astronaut flying high over baby's birth

Mommy, was Daddy there when I was borned?

"No dear, daddy had to go to work."

Now, if only he'd had access to an LHC Portal, he could have popped down to hold her hand.

Triumph in Geneva! LHC beams up and running again

Something might come through" says Bertolucci,

"or alternatively we might sent something through to the other side."

Can it be the entire cast of I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here? Pretty please?

Michael Jackson planned 'robot duplicate' of himself

May I be the first...

...to welcome our 50-ft tall moon-walking overlord?

The x-texting Metrotextual comes out of the closet

I never end SMS with x

Though I do use

.

#send

#save

^v

^k

^q

Turkey whacks Google with £28.7m fine, claims tax dodging

I wonder what you get...

...if you type "GOOD TURKISH TAX LAWYER" into Google.

Or Bing. (which goes the internet, apparently)

Non-Latin web addresses approved

Non-Latin?

OK, but what about Braille?

California man accused of DOSing site he founded

I wonder if there's an app...

...which catalogues his other apps.

Giant iPhones invade Florida

Yes, but...

Can you cut and paste from one screen to the other?

Exoplanets dubbed 'Vulcan', 'Romulus' and 'Female Pigeon'

@TeeCee

"At the rate they're discovering exo-solar planets at the moment, we're going to need to get the Greeks and Romans to invent some more low-order deities. Lots of 'em and quickly too."

Hence the opening paragraph of "Rendevous with Rama", IIRC.

Japanese algorithm 'can tell if you're about to die'

From the full report

"If the estimated life threat risk was higher than 10%, the triage form categorized patients

into A+ (the probability that the patient faced a risk of dying was very high), and an

ambulance, a fast response car, and a fire engine were dispatched."

And yet none of the questions they asked was "Are you on fire?"

45th Mersenne prime revealed

Is that actually prime?

I think they forgot to carry the 7.

Large Hadron boffin hit with terrorism charges

Gotta be a wrong 'un.

When they searched his office, they found documents referring to an organisation apparently called the Strong Nuclear Force. Looks like we got him just in time...

One in three kids believe Google measures truthiness

Truthiness?

You can't handle the truthiness!

Beeb unveils new Doctor Who logo

"What are the mysterious canisters?"

That'll be the last of the Daleks. Again.

New antimatter atomsmashers 'may destroy themselves'

Nope

Didn't understand a word.

iPhone developer stamps out calculator profanity

Want a calculator which knows which way up it is?

There's some crap for that.

Only on iPhone. Well, and other phones which support installable programs, Which, now I come to think of it is quite a lot of them. And it doesn't load this quick in real life. Hmm. Anyone got the phone number for the Advertising Standards Authority? Oh, hang on, I can look it up in my 118 app! Oh that's odd - they seem to be ex-directory.

Gas mask bra secures Ig Nobel prize

I like the beer bottle one.

It does actually seem to have some real-world forensic relevance. Although an eveningin one or two pubs round here would probably give them enough data to last a lifetime of analysis.

Manned 'Surrogate Predators' fill in for robot assassins

Manned unmanned planes. Unmanned manned planes.

Is airforce HR playing the shell game with pilots? "Come along now! Three planes, one pilot, we put the pilot in here, we move 'em around and now all you gotta do is guess with your SAM which ones he's in! This one? Oh unlucky, you've shot down a drone - now come on, I'll tell you what I'll do - double or quits!"

Twitter tests Tweet nests

Two useful categories

1. Stuff worth reading

2. All the rest

Anyone think of any others?

Ammo rationing at Wal-Mart as panic buying sweeps US

You know ammo's getting scarce...

...when the mugger shoots you, and then takes the slug back.

Society bible lectures students on etiquette

How do I lose my virginity?

Virginities are like expensive laptops. All the freshers have got one, all the local scrotes are after them and so those who get wasted in the bar and don't lock their dorm doors find they're gone in the morning. So get one of those Kensington security cables, and don't forget to write your postcode on it in UV marker.

IBM tries to patent teleconference sound effects

How about this?

1. Monitor lines for sound?

2. Silence threshold exceeded?

3. If yes, play pre-recorded mesaage "Get back to work you idle slobs!" and hang up all lines.

Proposed change in libel law may shield websites

@MinionZero

Delivering to two different houses in a street doesn't represent two offences; printing the same article in two different issues of the paper does.

It is tempting to regard an on-line archive as the same as a paper archive, but it is not. If I go to my local library and get a copy of The Times from January, it is obvious that I hold in my hand (on on microfiche) an old publication. If I retrieve an article from the web, it is not obvious whether I have today's hot gossip or last years tired hackery. Attempts to argue by analogy are therefore likely to run into problems.

My feeling is that the first web hit counts as a "publication" and all subsequent hits count as additions to the size of publication (just as a libel in a national broadsheet with a readership of millions might be regarded as more serious than a libel in a local newsletter, a publicationin The Register would be more serious than a publication in The Islington Parking Meter Spotters Association homepage). Publishing another web page with the same information, however, would be a second offence.

However, I suspect this might be regarded as a sensible approach, and hence inevitably will be rejected out of hand by a legal tribunal.

CSI boffins: You can't ID crims from bitemarks on victims

@AC

"In the US, they only have 3 different molds for your teeth."

What does that even mean?

Nokia brings Braille to SMS

Impressive...

but why display the Braille?

Italian Job sat nav driver cops £900 fine

We've all seen where he ended up

I'd like to see the turn *into* that road - which he took after dark in an area which probably doesn't have streetlights. Once he'd turned in, he was committed and probably spent a mile going "Surely this isn't right? It's a bloody farm track. Damn councils just don't maintain these minor roads." until the horrible truth dawned.

Incidentally, did he "hit a fence" as in "crashed into a fence" (not an indication of good driving) or as in "go straight on until you hit Sheffield" (which is conceptually quite a nice idea, and doesn't imply careless driving)

Japan torture flick sickens UK film censor

Torture videos

My local video store has a DVD which prodly describes itself as "Saw - Uncut". Would that be more extreme than the cinema version - or much, much less?

Old-school virus threatens Delphi files

@Doug Is SysConst.pas normally required to be writable by

Don't use Delphi, but as SysConst.pas is a source code file on a development machine, I'd expect the logged in user to be able to edit it regardless of whether they have admin rights or not.

Aussie Sex Party bursts upon political stage

"Sex is deeply rooted in the lives of all Australians"

From the very beginning, I'd say.

Georgian blogger calls for Twitter attack probe

As the typical Twitter user would think of it:

"It was terrible. For nearly two hours, the internet was cut off from me."

Apple denies censoring App Store swear words

he only sensible comment I can think of is...

Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers!

Powered robot suits make debut on Tokyo streets

Looks like the morning after a Stormtrooper stag night

Man, where's my helmet? Vader's gonna kill me!

Helmet - dude you're down six sections of armour; you look like a "protocol droid" know what I'm saying?

Tiny typo blamed for massive IE security fail

I've made that mistake when coding.

Can I now claim to be working to the MS standards?

Cameron condemns Tweeters as tw*ts

I am reliably informed by my grammar coach...

...a Mr David Lister, that the word "twat" is a verb. One exmple of its use, with which he has kindly provided me, is "Let's get out there and twat it!"

Landlord sues tenant over moldy Tweet

Does Google index Twitter?

If so, then the 20 followers is a red herring - it'd be found by anyone who type the company name into Google.

NHS Direct wrongly emailed patients' data

@Dale Richards

If it was emailed, it *should* have gone over NHSNet (which has been renamed, but I can't remember what to, N3 I think) which has a separate encrypted backbone and shouldn't end up going through any unapproved ISP's.