Posts by Steve VanSlyck

45th Mersenne prime discovered (possibly)

Thermodynamic Turtles

@AC

>Heretic! There are only 4 elephants! It's *turtles* all the way down!

One Turtle only, please. We don't need no stinking extra universes.

@Paul Buxton and @AC

The end of the world is not in September. It is in December. 12/12/2012, to be precise. As to everybody else, .999 &c. clearly is equal to 1. I have Excel open right now and it says so right there.

Send the money now!

I have calculated the largest prime, also the largest Mersenne prime: infinity. You may send me my check now.

Ohio official sues e-vote vendor for sloppy counting

Screwed Up from Day 1

This would have been so easy. Here's my thoughts from the time when "they" first started spouting the electronic voting idea:

1. Go into a booth.

2. Do the touch screen thing to select various candidates/issues to vote against.

3. Your ballot prints out on a laser printer

4. You look at it to confirm it's right.

5. You put it into an OCR reader.

6. Ballot pops out the other side.

7. You toss it into a lockbox and go to Waffle House.

The ballot is counted electronically twice and left on paper for audit. What could be simpler? What could be cheaper?

MS takes Windows 3.11 out of embed to put to bed

@Ron Enderland

GEOWORKS WAS FANTASTIC. It worked - and worked well.

Come Children - BELIEVE!

"[E]veryone who actually remembers using this operating system is long gone."

What?

I clearly remember seeing the "Windows Toy," as I liked to call it, start up on a computer I purchased when I was in college. It was an accident - I hadn't yet edited it out of autoexec.bat.

But I do remember! I do, I do, I DO remember!

Final Arthur C Clarke novel on the way

Let's not to be condescending

It's SF, not sci-fi. Sheesh!

US regulators lapse into state of approval for HP's EDS buy

No Anti-Fuss

Well of /course/ they're letting it go through without oversight. That's what the Bush administration is /for/! Jee willikers, sometimes I just have to wonder whatever happened with WOW & Co. that el Reg doesn't have anything better to report on.... <uncontrollablesmirk>

Uncontacted rainforest tribe caught from the air

Bottom Line

Let's step back a moment here. The most essential right of human kind is the right to be let alone. A little less cultural arrogance in the some of the comments to this story would be well taken. "We" are not "better" than "them."

Microsoft gives XP an extra two years to live (kinda)

@Dave

OK, fair enough, Dave, but don't forget that your son's loss of his password is final. Without the User Tools and Groups snapin that comes only with XP <strike>Standard </strike>Pro you cannot reset his password without headache or $$.

Such an offer - NOT!

Who in their right mind would want to install XP "Home" Edition on anything?!

Mobo maker builds 'powerless' processor cooling fan

Not Perpetual

It's not totally efficient. No problem. But shouldn't it still run so long as power is provided (i.e., hot processor) and the parts don't wear out?

Is this the world's most expensive desktop PC?

2GB

TWO WHOLE GIG of memory?! Wow. They have spared NO expense!

Germans send teen tearaway to Siberia

Yonks?

"Anyone who makes any comment whatsoever even lightly suggesting that the Germans have been sending large numbers of ne'er-do-wells to other people's countries for yonks wil be banned from reading El Reg for, let's say, 1,000 years."

Wot's a "yonk," then?

Heavily armed cops raid IM chat

Steve Roper

Understood - my point is that they should call it what it is, and if El Reg must use the term, at least do so with irony rather than playing on the criminals' gameboard.

That's a paddlin

The term "social engineering" - particularly without quotes - should not be used in reputable journals. Doing so imparts to this intentional criminal activity an aura of respectability which it in no wise deserves. Stop it.

Apple keeps critical security fixes to itself

El Reg?? Anybody Home?? Anybody??

So where's the link to the Java update?

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's

Aw, Crapulence!

The hands-down best Destroyer of English (and Gluminosity) in decades. P. Anthony could not hold my interest, but book-after-book-after-book - and let's not forget Good Omens - Terry kept creating. Yes, he IS a British national treasure, and in fact a national treasure of English writing and English literature. Keep on writing, Terry!

El Reg fires up online standards converter

A LITTLE HELP HERE?

Sheep in a vacuum. Big deal. What about the speed of a swallow carrying a coconut across the ocean? Now go away with your newfangled standards or I shall taunt you again.

Motorola Razr 2 V8 mobile phone

Yawn

Great review, but it discussed everything *except* the most eagerly anticipated item for any Motorola cellular telephone: A decent contact/address book system* combined with software that (1) has even a modicum of usefulness and (2) has had its field mapping actually tested before being released to production.

*Defined as one that allows at least two telephone numbers and one email address in each contact entry, that doesn't split such entries when saving to the SIM card (as opposed to the phone), and has zero difference in application regardless of whether an entry is saved to the phone or to the SIM card.

World's most gullible supermarket chain falls victim to online scam

What?

"Supervalu [is] arguing that the company should recover the full amount...." Get the money back from WHOM?

Reg Standards Soviet defines temperature and force

Back to COCONUTS!

I *STILL* say we should go back to swallows, oceans, and coconuts. There is no need for all this new math! I shall be writing a very firm letter to The Times tomorrow - and I don't even live in the U.K. So there.

California teen offers GPS challenge to speeding rap

Kudos to all

Anonymous Coward: Speding is a strict liability offense. Intent don't enter into it.

Frank Bough: If you don't have an expert witness, you lose. The state, however, gets off scott free because *it* gets to "prove" reliability in a single state or district wide case and forever after the defense gets to prove itself innocent, or at least not guilty, while the state rakes in the cash.

Filippo Negroni: Yes, take EVERY case to court. In my experience, in Ohio you'll get out of about 20% of them if you do.

Hedley Phillips: BECAUSE THE LIMITS ARE WRITTEN TO PATRONISE THE LOCAL NEWS AND OTHER CHIKEN LITTLES, THAT'S WHY! Speed limits have nothing to do with the design of the road or the objective conditions. Your point, however, is well taken.

Sun grabs patent for magneto-hydrodynamic heatsink

What moving parts?

Last time I looked at a traditional heatsink, there was only one part (apart from the greasy part), and it din't move at all (at least not until I started fiddling with it).

PC superstore puts Microsoft on sale for under £150

No U.S. Sales?

Not available for dollars then? What about the export laws? Not to mention passports, visas, &c.?

Quantum computing spectre looms over ecommerce

Come again?

"The difficulty of factoring the product of extremely long prime number...."

What? I can do that in less time that it took to read that sentence. Let's see.... OK! Prime number times anything gives the product! Voila!

No wait - Let's go the other way. Prime number divided by itself equals 1. Voila!

So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum?

Who authorized a change to SHEEP?!

Who is El Reg to start measuring stuff by sheep?!

For aeons the standard measure of speed has been the SWALLOW; the standard measure of distance has been the OCEAN; and the standard measure of weight has been the COCONUT. Not sheep, stars, and grapefruits of all things! Traditional measures area clear, precise, and understood by all. There's no need to go mucking about and getting Science involved.

All this sheep stuff is just gonna confuse people, not to mention making life difficult for lonely adolescent shepherd boys who might not be able to keep up. Now let's have no more of this.

Psst - wanna buy a pirate MPack toolkit?

Not Legit?

"[L]egitimate software suppliers"? Do you mean that as a software supplier they're not legitimate, or that they don't supply legitimate software? Either way, what is your def. of legit? If they're doing a better job at support than "other" soft suppliers, then whose the blacksheep struggling to come in from behind the cold eight-ball?

Oz boffins tout Trekkier-than-thou teleportation system

Not Gonna Work

This scheme is absitively posilutely NOT gonna work if they attempt to use BEC's. Everybody knows you gotta use BEM's for this kinda stuff. They'd be well advised, and much further ahead, to just bite the bullet and use correct terminology.

Motorola sharpens Razr

Crap

Cell phones are too damn small already. Leave 'em alone and fix that incredibly annoying non-silenceable low battery alarm!

Jesus appears in Samsung Flash memory chip

GANDALF IS NOT FICTIONAL

How DARE you say that Gandalf is fictional?!

I have several books Right Here that talk all about him! Crap on a crutch, where have you guys been?!

As alleged journalists you should KNOW by now it couldn't be published if it weren't true!!!! MOREOVER, there's only ONE book with Jebus in it! Sheesh!

Hunters bag one of last Amur leopards

Disgusting

Disgusting. Just simply disgusting.

Dell: vertical lines, what vertical lines?

Yes, Customer Service SHOULD Know!

With all due respect to our venerated first commenter, Dell's customer service people /should too/ be fully aware of this issue.

Every agent should have a comprehensive, searchable database of known issues. Even a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet would be fine.

But there is no excuse for Dell not having completed a weekly update training of their telephone staff. And if they're not doing such training, well, then, they have no business even publishing a customer support or customer service telephone number.

ISP ejects whistle-blowing student

Their Time Machine Didn't Exist Until It Was Used, Either

Hmmm. There was no vulnerability until the kid discovered it.

No, wait! There was no vulnerability until he proved that there was.

No--that's not right either. There was no vulnerability until BeThere stepped in it.

No, that can't be it . . . . I guess there just wasn't any vulnerability. Therefore there is no vulnerability . . . .

Didn't we already do this in quantum mechanics class? I'm getting a headache.

Hormonally challenged teens refrain from abstinence

Gee

"teens refrain from abstinence..."

Golly gee. Who'da thought.

US businessman makes $9m selling lunar real estate

Send Bush to the moon

". . . when he announced the US would return to the Moon by 2017 . . . ."

George Bush is no John Kennedy.

US deploys cloaked airliner

I don't see it.

What's the big deal? It's an airplane and it's shadow. Hardly a BEM chasing after a girl in one shoe.