Posts by IR

Mystic Met Office predicts neighbourhood Thermageddon

Meh

"They are claiming that they can predict what will happen in individual regions of the country - down to a 25km square. You can enter your postcode and find out how your street will be affected by global warming in 2040 or 2080."

It's not exactly complicated to interpolate between areas, not matter what the original resolution. It might not be particularly accurate on a tiny scale from large areas, but it is certainly better than leaving the general public to guess a value from the original data and nearby values (like I have to do for my weather forecast). I don't imagine that there are huge differences between adjacent areas anyway. Plus you can cross reference with more accurate local data with the height above sea level, river level, etc, to work out new values without having to increase your margin of error on the results. It's not rocket science, don't make it out to be so wildly inaccurate (not that I'm claiming that the results of the model are accurate in any way).

NASA takes stick over feet and inches

UK pint vs US pint

"As others have noted, the US Gallon is smaller than an Imperial Gallon -- ours is 3.8L.

Likewise US Quarts are smaller than Imperial Quarts. As you might guess from the above tidbit, a US Quart is very nearly the same as a liter (or litre if you prefer.)

But a Pint is a Pint, or IOW a Pint is a Pound the World Around. Our Pint is the same as your Pint."

No. A fluid ounce is the same everywhere. A US pint is 16oz, a UK pint is 20oz. Everything above a pint is scaled up from that, which is why US quarts and gallons are smaller than UK quarts and gallons. Not that anyone really uses quarts in the UK, it is a silly unnecessary measure - even more so when used to denote the sizes of containers. Why call something a 20 quart pot when 5 gallons makes more sense?

Please don't eat your horse, EU asks owners

So many comments

and not one about Prince Charles giving oral sex. Shame on you!

Be broadband denies BitTorrent ban

Be?

Stupid name for a company.

iPhone owners are superior beings, says survey

Something not right

So almost 50% of people with an ordinary "dumbphone" earn more than $70k? That doesn't sound right at all.

Ignoring the deliberate baiting (which I'm sure hundreds will fall for anyway), it seems to make sense that rich people are more likely to own an expensive product, and make sense that college educated people tend to be rich. So another "stating the obvious" survey.

Google Squared - the Cuilest search app ever

Hoorayish

After the last article where Ted decried Wolfram Alpha is being poor compared the how great Google was (in his opinion), in this one he says how crap a Google product is, and it seems like more people got the joke this time. How many Paint-scrawled images with the word "wat" does it take before people realise he isn't 100% serious?

This one is not a great example of Ted's work though; it's too sympathetic and almost understands why Google Squared is crap, rather than decrying it and making stupid comparisons.

I'm guessing it will take another couple of articles before the dumbass people who leave comments will be outnumbered by those who get it, even if they don't find it all that funny.

Wolfram Alpha - a new kind of Fail

This is hilarious

Hundreds of people complaining that Ted has missed the point about WA, unaware of the irony that they have missed the point of the article. Quite clearly (or at least in my case, how so many people missed the Paint-scrawled screenshots I don't know) he is playing the part of an idiot doing stupid things, for the amusement of the reader. The whole "ego" thing makes it even more obvious. It is a modern whimsy. It might not be the best out there, but it seems it is far too subtle for the common Reg reader. It seems that a few of you got it.

Either that or it is really is a man's desperate attempt to find fault with a new internet device led him to write contradictory statements with bizarre evidence and piss-poor graphics done by a 4-year-old.

I weep for the state of IT and how it relates to humour.

Eurofighter Tranche 3: Oh please, God, no

Yawn

"Blah blah blah, Typhoon is awful, blah blah, BAE Systems are evil, blah, blah, blah"

Page, change the record, or at least get a little more informed/unbiased about what you write in your articles. Inaccuracies litter it all over the place. I notice the article is listed as a "Comment" because it doesn't contain any actual news and is mostly opinion, while the facts are misleading and incomplete. It's worse than the Daily Mail. Yet again.

US journo school mandates iPhone, iPod touch

So

What do they need an iPhone for that you can't do with the regular internet device (apart from being able to stick it in a large pocket)? Is there some kind of over-zealous Mac user in the high-ups of the institution?

US prosecutor orders Craigslist 'erotic listings' shutdown

Dumb

How hard is it to arrange to meet these lawbreaking users of Craigslist and arrest them? You'd get convictions galore if the evidence is good enough to prosecute Craigslist.

Torture case against Boeing subsidiary resuscitated

@ People reacting to Miami Mike

Sense of humour bypass? I mean, some of you seemed to take it seriously!

What is wrong with you? An American picks up irony and whips your butts with it, then you complain about the look in his eye as he does it because he /might/ be a troll or half-serious. Hilarious!

Homeless Frank and Microsoft's cookie-cutter PC campaign

This pot is really black, ignore the blackness of that kettle

"It's telling, though, that Microsoft's approach to advertising on Windows is as uniform as its approach to selling Windows. One-size-fits all pricing, rigid brand policing, control of the channel, and restricted access to code. It's a restrictive and controlling model "

And this is different to Apple how? The "I'm a Mac" adverts were exactly the same in both countries but with different actors. There are a handful of Macs available, but a million different PCs can install Windows. If you are going to talk dirt on Microsoft by comparing them to Apple, at least pick out something that Apple doesn't already do and much worse.

NASA: Clean-air regs, not CO₂, are melting the ice cap

Yay, pollution

That graph poses more questions than it answers. No mention of why it went up so high between 1920 and 1950, what caused it to drop just before the clean air regs.

As for the whole "water displaces its mass", while it is true, you should try the calculations for ice in salt water. They don't cancel each other out so neatly. And then consider the masses of ice sitting on Greenland and northern Russia. And then consider how much water expands when it is heated up by a few degrees and multiply that by an area the size and depth of the arctic.

I guess the conclusion of the article is "We should start polluting with this as much as we used to, since it covered up the effects of a different pollution". Excuse me I I don't find that to be an appealing prospect. I'm just glad that people are discussing things other than carbon, which the media and politicians has been so obsessed with lately.

MPs battle to save great British pub

Not exactly a recent thing

Before the smoking ban was even scheduled, I knew 5 pubs near me that closed in a year. The pub industry has been on a steady decline for more than 10 years. Gone are the days of a man blowing half his pay check on a Friday night after work (he will now have to wait in line at an ATM since it is all paid straight into his account now).

The UK economy has drastically slowed in the last year and if a pub was going to close due to the smoking ban it would have happened long before now. There is a noticeable lack of proper stats for before and after to back up anything about the effect of the smoking ban.

I don't know what is funnier. Smokers admitting that they were the only ones stupid enough to pay the outrageous prices, or admitting that they are so addicted that they can't go a few hours without a fag.

Microsoft draws fire for taxpayer handout

Also

The non-Microsoft people using it are very likely to be working with Microsoft. Nearly all the other companies there are only there to be in walking distance of MS while they work on collaborations.

Battlestar Galactica eyes 'technology run amok'

@AC - FF Advent Children

It would have been nice if they'd put that on the DVD case, rather than giving the impression it was a standalone film with the same characters. Oh, and added some plot that made sense. And some half decent dialogue. Looks good though!

I never got into BSG. I started watching the first season and it wasn't really going anywhere so I gave up. Then I discovered that there was a mini-series before the first season that sets it all up so it is more enjoyable, except that it wasn't broadcast on normal tv. By the time I had got enough time to start again from the beginning, everyone was saying how rubbish it had become, so I didn't bother. Maybe I'll sit down with all the DVDs and get through them, but maybe I won't.

Bush Obama sides with RIAA in P2P fight

Waste

"Fortunately, however, the US executive branch can't tell the judicial branch what to do. It can only use its legal arm - the DOJ - to make its opinions known."

So the Obama-bashing is pointless in this context, and that makes 90% of the article pointless. Thanks for wasting my time!

If only there were a few more news articles that can actually criticise Obama for reasons other than not bringing world peace in the first few weeks of taking office.

Sadville transports shaggers to porncentration camp

Erm

I think you'll find it's called Paedov Isle.

Latest subject for peer review? You

For those not in the know

Nearly everyone in there so far is at least slightly well known, mostly politicians and journalists, even if only locally to the area. I'm sure they just culled all the info and pics from wikipedia.

I'm somewhat disturbed by how high a rating Christine Gregoire got for sexiness.

Superfast-charging batteries? Whoa there, MIT

Meh

So how is it any better than ultracapacitors (which you mention, but no more)? They might not be widely available, but they charge and discharge very quickly. You don't want to stick them in your pocket with your keys though, unless you don't mind catching fire.

Neil Young posts angry YouTube missive

The big deal

All Young said was that Youtube is being unfair when it comes to artists on Warner/Reprise, and that there should the same payment policy for all artists. I can certainly agree with that, if only for the smaller labels who get next to nothing because they can't do the hard negotiations like the bigger companies.

It really isn't clear to me whether the bad party is Youtube or Warner, so maybe Young is blaming the wrong guys or maybe he knows more than me. Overall, I agree with his sentiment.

Barclays heralds new wave of wallet-waving

Okay

This is the same system that was advertised by having a zoo elephant steal the zookeepers card and buy a load of stuff. Okay, so it was all cold medicine for the zookeepers cold, but it was a pretty blatent show of how easy theft can be with one of these.

Arms biz glovepuppets Parliamentary kit probe

Another anti-BAE rant

"The same old bankrupt arguments get trotted out again and again"

Let's dispel some:

BAE only employs so many Americans because it has spent the last 5 years buying up every small American company it could. Most contracts from the MOD actually specify how much work has to be done in the UK. If I remember correctly, BAE is one of the largest single employers in the country.

Defence companies have notoriously low salaries compared to similar tech skills in entertainment/banking/etc. The only reason they get paid more than military personel is because military pay is awful. I'm surprised that Page used this as an "evil company pays workers too much" rather than "hardworking soldiers on breadline".

I'm rather amused that he says we should source our kit from abroad, then complains about the massive restrictions on the equipment that we do.

Yes, I used to work for BAE, and no they aren't faultless (several reasons I left). I was one of the guys on the frontline who had to redo code for the thousandth time as the MOD changed their minds yet again about the requirements and happily paid the price in project delays and wads of cash from the taxpayer. Government spending is stupid across the board on big projects, not just defence, so blaming BAE for having the gall to run a successful business is just silly.

Storage breakthrough could bust density record

To tie it in with another current story

A quarter used to fill a small bag of Woolworths pick'n'mix.

Gadget-buying Taliban 5th column in Blighty - shock!

Another non-story

So explosives are really easy to get hold of, but basic electronics are so rare that they have to be bought from far off lands when they go on holiday?

This article is just a stupid leap of conclusions. Terrorists MIGHT be getting friends and relatives to get them stuff. But why bother when it is so much easier to just get them for a fraction of the cost locally (and no risk of being held at an airport for being a middle eastern man with a suitcase full of dodgy-looking stuff).

What is this site coming to?

2008 a top year for UK games sales

It must be piracy!

Oh wait, sales went up? It's the great use of DRM stopping piracy!

Google axed Android multitouch at Apple's request?

Almost

Almost worth becoming a patent troll, given how you can patent any obvious next improvement in technology and have half a chance of winning.

Anyone got a patent for controlling electronic devices using brain waves, eye movements, etc?

I'm guessing that patents are the reason why no one makes tissue boxes that fit in the cup holders of a car.

Big labels or Google - who is the songwriters' worst enemy?

Looking in the wrong direction

As much as he goes on about it, illegal downloading is not the big issue here. Basically, songwriters aren't employed so much because fewer songs need to be written by specialised songwriters. Real music came back, songs written by the artists themselves rather than the generic pop songs performed by a pretty face. Pop music became a cover version by a reality show contestant. It's the same in any industry; the labels thought that they weren't getting much profit from employing songwriters, so they got rid of them. Even if the profits stayed the same (even after the temporary high of the 90s) they would have been cut. Music sales haven't fallen even nearly as much as the record industry would like you to think, and with legal downloads they are making even more profit per album by keeping the prices almost the same but without any costs for manufacture/distribution. Not that the artists or songwriters get any of this additional revenue.

I guess what goes around comes around. We got shafted for years by the turgid generic pop music put out by the publishing houses, and now they are crying that people aren't buying it anymore. Blame filesharing all you want, but it's really because people wanted something else. It's not the public's fault that the record companies sunk their cash into advertising their bland product and didn't make it back. Wait another ten years and I'm sure the market will be ripe for that awful stuff again.

Father of Playmobil dies at 79

The company motto

A bit like Lego, but without being able to build anything new.

Vladimir Putin bitchslaps Dell-boy

Okay

Russia needs no help? Pull out the internet cables that connect you to the rest of the world, and then tell us how far you get. By snail mail obviously.

Russia would still be in the hole if it wasn't for the rising fuel prices. If no one bought it from Russia then they'd quickly go back that way until they managed to rebuild a proper economy. Buyers and sellers outside of a monopoly will always be helping each other, or they quickly go out of business. If Putin thinks that Russia doesn't currently receive help (in the form of knowledge about new technology/science/medicine at least) then he really doesn't understand anything about how the global community works - and WW3 is coming.

NASA ponders Spirit's erratic behaviour

How long

Can't be long before some dumbass suggests that it runs on Windows.

Obama reverses Dubya's tailpipe emissions

US cars

I was looking to buy a car in the US last April. I saw the fuel prices starting to rise so I narrowed my search down to cars with a high MPG. Only Honda and Toyota made cars that actually got higher than 30mpg, excluding hybrids. I got a Corolla in the end.

Cue the massive fuel price rise over the summer, more than doubling. Trucks remain unsold everywhere. Suddenly, US car makers manage to change their cars to go from 24mpg to 32mpg almost overnight. Not just one either, nearly all of them. Either they managed to do some creative accounting with the mpg figures or they had an efficient design ready to go and sat on it all this time. Something smells fishy, either way.

Microsoft Songsmith ad trumps Seinfeld shocker

Took a while

This cringeworthy video has been doing the rounds for a while. My ears are still bleeding.

Royal Navy warships lose email in virus infection

So

So some people lost email access. Nothing else. Where the news?

Sales show SanDisk's SD-not-CD player a hit with punters

Girls

The biggest sellers will be for groups popular with teenage girls. How many albums have been released in that format?

Asus Eee keyboard opens CES

No one else has said it

It's a laptop without a main screen!

Albeit, shaped like the keyboard rather than the screen, which is usually the largest thing on a laptop. Seems like it would have been better to just build an EEE with some of the TV features built in. But then you wouldn't use it as a media centre because you'd always be out and about with it so it couldn't record any tv. Seems like a mixed purpose device that isn't good at any of them. I can understand people wanting a single box device but a separate box and keyboard seems much more sensible (and has longer battery life).

Reminds me a lot of my old speccy +2. How long before someone creates a program to run the image of a tape playing in the little side screen while your tv flashes, gurgles, and bleeps at you...

Harvard prof slams US nut allergy hysteria

Now and then

Reasons why people have allergies now, more than before:

1. People with severe allergic reactions would just die. There was no medical intervention. If your throat swells up then you'd die in minutes and no one knew why. If you had a minor allergy to one of the few foods you had, then you either put up with constant symptoms or you starved. Life was a constant fight for survival, and kids who got ill/weak from an allergy were less likely to make it into the 20% that survived into adulthood. Medical science is much more widely known now, it has moved on a bit from the Will of God being the main cause of illness.

2. Exposure. We are probably exposed to a thousand times more substances than people even a hundred years ago, let alone 500+ years ago. We touch more substances than Victorians had even named, we eat foods shipped in from around the world. The chances of finding out you are allergic to something is therefore much greater. people who live in mud huts eating only turnips, berries, and goats milk, aren't getting the same exposure as someone who eats Mexican, Thai, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Cajun food every week.

3. More people. We meet more people every day than people used to meet in a year. Chances are that we find out about at least one person's allergies through one of those casual conversations. Plus we have much more leisure time, the 7 days a week, 12 hour work days, aren't so common now.

4. Lack of germs. The more disinfectant used around the house, the more the kids get lots of minor illnesses and allergies from an underworked immune system. This probably gets more credit than it deserves, but it is still a factor.

Indian court urged to 'ban Google Earth'

You've all missed the most obvious

Just blind everyone who wants to enter the area, so they can't see anything that could be a potential target

Oz men's mag recovers inflatable jubs

You couldn't make it up

unless you wanted tons of free publicity

Logitech Digital Video Security System

Me

I haven't come across a single video security system that doesn't email/text you. Unless you consider an ordinary webcam...

Supersonic fighters could snuff out hurricanes

Waiting for

Superman did this years ago!

Teen-bothering sonic device now does grownups too

Get rid of cats

One of my neighbours got one of these to stop kids hanging around the side of his house (he was on the end of a terrace). I was 26 and I could hear it pretty clearly (despite being a fan of loud music, seems that my hearing of that range is still good). His cat went missing the day he installed it and didn't come back until he removed it weeks later.

YouTube virals must play by US ad rules

Standards?

You mean that there are actual advertising standards in the US? Judging by the claims made in diet pill and "male enhancement" commercials on US tv, I'm surprised that they are enforced at all. The blatant lies in political ads are even worse, but they supposedly come under free speech laws (which basically mean that you can say whatever you like about someone as long as you don't prevent them from replying - i.e. the person with the most money for political ads wins)

Royal Society of Chemistry defines perfect Yorkshire pud

High altitude

Boulder is about a mile above sea level. You have to change the cooking instructions for everything up there, I think usually you add a little extra self raising flour for cakes but I have no idea about Yorkie Pud. Bisquick used to have a good Yorkshire Pudding recipe on the British boxes, but they stopped putting it on there for some reason.

Halliburton seeks patent on patent trolling

Well

It looks a lot like they want to stop patent trolls from attacking them, possibly because they want to do a bit of infringing. It isn't a valid patent though, they even admit that the method has been used in the past. They do include the following in the patent though:

"The inventor and the assignee of this patent have no intention of applying the techniques described herein offensively but instead intend to use the patent defensively to discourage patent trolls and the like from extortionist practices. "

Jacqui Smith prints seized by No2ID in daring dabs grab

License to kill

Now she can get away with murder, leaving her fingerprints everywhere and saying that her fingerprints are public so anyone could have done it.

Michael Crichton dead at 66

Whoops

I didn't mean to say that King was a good writer (although a couple of his books turned into films were pretty good, and only a couple, Pet Cemetary has to be the worst film ever), but that the authors share the inability to make a half decent ending.

It's not true

It's all just a conspiratorial fraud to make money. I've written a book about it, please buy it.

Michael Crichton falls into the category (along with Stephen King) of having interesting and well written books that just end badly every time. Sphere was the worst example of his I read.

Barack Obama will be president

A new battle begins

It's all over, hooray. Now begins four years of the new media presidential fight of Clinton vs Palin. Gah!

I'm very sorry, says gay health warning clergyman

Oh, for the love of crazy internet people and freetime

FO: Whatever the "exponents of the art" submit as normal it was never natural to attempt to service a same sex person into parenthood

Me: In case you haven't noticed, gay men can't reproduce with other gay men. Likewise for gay women. I'd never thought of gay sex as being an art either.

FO: If you follow their beliefs then you would have only one sex and, logically, it would be capable of feretilising itself in the manner of a hermodaphrodite.

Me: The similarity of beliefs between two gays are generally no more similar than two straights, other than the attraction to people of the same sex.

FO: can the exponents of "the art" explain to me the need for same sex marriages which they undertake to the potential detriment of those who, like my wife and myself, have been together for almost 50 years. If they find marriage to another person so repulsive WHY DO THEY DO IT?

Me: How does it potentially detriment you? And it's not that they find marriage to another person repulsive, they just don't want to do it with one of the opposite sex.

FO: We have seen what happens with natural selection when species evolve by becoming more diverse. With their beliefs there would be no developement of species and we would be left with the brutish original, not a happy prospect.

Me: Gays falling in love does not mean they have any control over their reproductive systems in order to produce both egg and sperm. Unless you envisage something even weirder when it comes to gays reproducing...

FO: It is the beauty of infinite variation which marks the human race and the real beauty is that you cannot, other than very basically, plan your offspring and that is what attracts the male/female together. Viva la difference.

Me: Except for differences between gays and straights, you mean? You are so misinformed about gays that it is hilarious. If I didn't have a chunk of free time to write this then I wouldn't have even given it a second glance.

N.B. I think Ms Bee accidentally misspelled "poof"