Posts by John Hughes

France demands Skype register as telco

Re: Follow the money?

Maybe you should be dialing 112 instead of 211?

En Garde! Villagers FIGHT OFF FRENCH INVASION MENACE

Re: Ancient news.

But was it cellular?

Apparently yes:

"C'est avec Radiocom 2000 qu'apparaissent les premières notions de téléphonie cellulaire avec, peu après son lancement en 1986, l'apparition du hand over (capacité de changer de cellule dynamiquement) et de l'attribution de fréquences au sein d'une cellule. Le réseau couvre la quasi-totalité du territoire."

So I'm wrong.

Of course "En 1988, il compte 60 000 abonnés" so I guess I can see how I missed it.

Re: Ancient news.

"As you say, this is a well known thing, my fathers Vodafone analogue breeze block carphone would regularly lock on to France on a clear day back in the distant past."

But France never had an analogue cellphone network.

Gnome cofounder: Desktop Linux is a CHERNOBYL of FAIL

Re: FreeBSD

You must have some serious hate for FreeBSD users if you want that clown to use it.

MWC 2013: The Chinese are coming - and you ain't seen nothing yet

Huawei have he rights to run iOS

RU Sure? Got a source for that?

Climate scientists link global warming to extreme weather

Re: Dispassionate

"I know that there is just as much literature picking apart AGW theory as supporting it (of course paid for by Exxon)."

You may "know" that, but can you cite any of it?

Re: Dispassionate

"People - climatologists, are doing that. And coming to the opposite conclusion to the AGW crowd."

Who. When. Where.

Drone quadracopters throw and catch inverted pendulum

BAE's "Gorgon Stare"?

"BAE's "Gorgon Stare", for example, can track multiple objects within a 4KM radius beneath a drone."

Wikipedia says:

"Gorgon Stare is a video capture technology developed by the United States military. "

and

"Gorgon Stare is being developed and tested on the MQ-9 Reaper at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. with the 53rd Wing. These sensors pods have been in development since 2009 by the Air Force’s Big Safari group and Sierra Nevada Corp.[9]"

Where's BAE in that?

Multi-billion Euro broadband fund obliterated by EU budget cut

Re: The title should be different

"Farming is indeed a industry with a bright future, where our tens of millions unemployed youths in the EU will find long lasting career opportunities and self actualization."

Yeah, we'll make lasagne out of 'em.

Re: french cow

Romanian horse.

Dutch spiv

Luxemburg food processor

French cardboard box maker

UK cheap food buyer.

Re: We can't annoy the farmers!

Of course the CAP couldn't be cut.

The only way Cameron could get his tiny 20-30 billion "cut" was by promising not to touch the CAP.

None of this is real, it's just electoral willy waggling.

Climate watch: 2012 figures confirm global warming still stalled

Re: Trust the satellite data

"Draw your own conclusions using the Mk. I eyeball."

Please do.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/mean:13/from:1972/plot/uah/from:1972/trend

France stalls plan to make Google and pals foot broadband rollout

Re: Backwards people?

You request ads? Bizzare.

Inside the new climate row as Mystic Met Office goes cool on warming

Re: Good news and bad news

"If natural cycles can completely mask the global warming signal for 20 years, is it not likely that they can *enhance* the global warming signal for a similar "

Well, yes. but the problem is that the warming has been going on for rather longer than 20 years.

Remove the cycles and look at the underlying trend.

British armed forces get first new pistol since World War II

Re: The point is not always to kill

That wasn't a Desert Eagle, that was a Beretta 93R

http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/RoboCop

Forget fluorescents, plastic lighting strips coming out next year

Fit for purpose?

"I reckon about 1 in 10 or so don't make it through the first couple of weeks"

Then you take them back to the shop and get a refund.

What's the problem? Don't have consumer protection legislation where you live?

Twenty years of text messages: We've reached Peak SMS

I guess that's why my provide gives 'em to me for nothing.

New science upsets calculations on sea level rise, climate change

Re: Bah!

"So the ice loss, although not accelerating *is* a fact then? There is a steady, non-accelerating rate of ice loss over Greenland's surface?"

You've mis-read the Lewis's article in the way he hoped you would.

Lewis reports the paper as claiming the annual acceleration is 8 billion tons plus or minus 6.28 gigatonnes.

I.e. the annual accelaration is between 1.72 and 14.28 billion tons per year.

This is lower than other estimates, but not zero.

UN: Greenhouse gas emissions gap is out of control

Re: Sorry, third world, you need to STAY POOR

"Unless you house is powered and heated by fairy dust.."

Mine is.

Of course I live in France.

Sacre Bleu! US fingered for Flame attack on Élysée Palace

Re: There are some problems with your post.

"But given that the French so distrust the Yanks that they [...] won't commit French forces to NATO (unlike the UK), "

Not very up to date are you.

Those French troops in Afghanistan were some kind of a mirage?

How can the BBC be saved from itself without destroying it?

Thanks for that thouht Rupert.

Last month ties for WARMEST September on RECORD

Re: Nice graph, however... @ Lars

Soot is not a GHG.

How Nokia managed to drive its in-house Linux train off the rails

Re: N800 and N900

"Part of me still wishes I could've got one - for all I know, N900s are probably going for chump-change on eBay these days"

Between USD 200 and EUR 300.

Re: Resistive, not capacitive

Uh, the N9 is not the N800.

The N9 has a goirilla glass oled capacitative touchscreen.

Don't panic, but UK faces BLACKOUTS BY 2015

Re: maybe for england....

"I can't imagine the average Scot being very happy when they go to their bank and say "I'd like £500" and the teller replying: "we've sent our manager down to Newcastle to flog a car. He should be back tomorrow with a few thousand in notes. You'll have to wait."

Uh, you do know that scottish banks print their own notes?

"Printing and minting Scottish pound sterlings? Okay - these already exist"

Oh, you do. So what exactly is the point of your wierd story?

Salt marshes will suck CO2 from air faster and faster as seas rise

Oh, the bit Lewis didn't feel like mentioning.

"Our simulations suggest that the net impact of climate change will be to increase carbon burial rates in the first half of the twenty-first century, but that carbon–climate feedbacks are likely to diminish over time."

Wonderful. Nothing to worry about then.

Or maybe we should?

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2

"could" is a nice word.

Don't panic: Arctic methane emissions have been going on for ages

Dad's Army or Hitchhiker's guide?

I'd go with Clive Dunn playing the role of Lewis.

Made for each other: liquid nitrogen and 1,500 ping-pong balls

Re: Liquid Nitrogen Safety

There was a story at Hull Uni about a large dewar of liquid nitrogen that was left in a lab - one day someone noticed that the neck had frosted over. Panic ensued, the dewar was carefully dragged out onto a sports field and the TA took shots at it. in an attempt to reduce the pressure.

Turned out to be emptty.

(Story probably bollocks).

Re: There will be a quiz tomorrow...

Wooosh.

Re: Lessons you remember

"also remember big fun with sticks of magnesium in high school. An experiment called for it, and the teacher brought it in, packed in gel in metal casks, explaining why this was necessary to keep the magnesium from contacting air or water until ready, telling us the story of what happened to a kid who tried to sneak some out in his pants pocket."

Not magnesium.

Sodium, potassium or lithium probably.

Amazon cosies up to Nokia for Google Maps alternative

Re: Google Maps abandoned

"The problem with Google Maps is not the quality of the data"

Oh yes it is. Look at the western Ivory Coast for example, loads of errors, whole missing towns...

Even openstreetmap is better.

Boffins confirm sunspot-weather link

Re: "Sunspots still don’t account for climate change" orly?

No the fix is:

"We have absolutely no reason to imagine that sunspots account for any climate change since there is no trend in sunspot activity".

Cosmonauts step out for six-hour space walk around ISS

Spationauts.

US county named 'area of outstanding natural stupidity'

Re: Firearms, personal liberty and the USA...

<blockquote>To be sure, EU denizens have a vastly different perception on personal firearm ownership. </blockquote>

Well, no.

UK denizens have a vastly different perception.

Firearms are much more common in the rest of the EU.

(I'd contend that the UK and US are both, in different ways, insane on the "gun question". The rest of the world is much less crazy.)

Re: Agreed

There probably was.

El Reg is about as reliable on environmental issues as...

On second thought I can't think of anything as unreliable on environmental issues as El Reg.

Apple pulls in TomTom, kicks Google off iPhones

Re: "the most up-to-date". Really?

On the little square that I know best, OpenStreetMap shows a pedestrian street (with steps) as a road and, what's worse, it also shows a road that simply doesn't exist - there is a 5 metre high and 1 metre thick wall where the 'road' is supposed to start.

So why don't you fix it?

People-powered Olympic shopping mall: A sign of utter tech illiteracy

Re: Just what I needed...

Uh, torque is force x distance, i.e. newtons x metres.

I guess you meant to write kilograms x centimetres rather than kilograms / centimetres, but that's still wrong, the kilogram is a unit of mass, not force.

Sounds like someone has been doing stupid translation from non SI units, pound feet, forgetting that the pound is a unit of force and not mass.

Only global poverty can save the planet, insists WWF - and the ESA!

Re: haha

"Well, not really. Unless you take the solar system as 'the system', and even thats questionable. (where do you think tides come from?)"

You think tides come from outside the solar system?

Minister blows away plans for more turbines

Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.

"In the meantime, Fukushima has shown PWR's to be faulty by design (containment vessel unable to withstand the pressure of hydrogen buildup),"

Uh, the Fukushima reactors were BWR's, not PWR's.

And the hydrogen problem was that the idiot Japanese didn't fit hydrogen recombiners like sane (non Japanese, non American) people do.

As for storing the fuel rods on top of the reactors...

20 years?

Why? In 1974 France decided to go nuclear, the first plant was comissioned on December 1, 1980. 56 plants were built in all.

Six years to build the first plant.

Britain would take 20 years to do what France could do in six?

Come to think of it you're probably right. Glad I got out of that defeatist shithole.

Amount of ice in Bering Sea reaches all-time record

Re: here in the Alps

"The climate varies year on year".

I think you'll find that that's called "weather", not climate.

Re: Oh dear, death by statistics

Bizzare. You claim the IPCC is "publishing reports with scientists names [...] that hadn't agreed to their use"(*) then you recommend that we watch "the Great Global Warming Swindle" that includes contributions from scientsts who complain that they were "completely misrepresented" by the program.

Projection?

((*) by the way, [citation needed]).

Re: More straw for Lewis, please.

"(* is that more tolerable than "deniers"? I don't want to set anybody's twisted knickers on fire)"

Since it's obvious that the pros (Lewis, Andrew) are smart enough to know that what they are writing is shit the correct term is trolls. I'm buggered if I understand most of the commenters, I think they're probablyt just loonies.

Re: Suggestion To TheReg

Don't know about you but my computer is nuclear powered.

Not everyone lives in the underdeveloped world you know.

30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on

Re: What does this really tell us?

Re-read the article.

The different scenarios are based on our behaviour, not the science. As we seem to be in the "burn all the fossil fuels we can get our hands on" scenario we'd expect the warming to be at least as much as the worst case prediction.

And it is.

ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. - Humans begin artificial CO2 emissions

"politicaly" incorrect?

"Way to go Lewis! =) My favourite reg journalists who seems to be the only one woh dares to write politically incorrect stuff."

Or just plain bollocks?

Possibly the worst article ever posted to El Reg.

What is the point? For ideological reasons you don't want to accept AGW, but you recognise that there is no scientific reason to reject the theory. Ok. But why publish crap like this?

"Fossil-furtling boffins have announced that the human race was burning things - and irresponsibly releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - fully a million years ago, some 300,000 years earlier than had been thought."

No, as you recognise yourself burning wood has no effect on atmospheric CO2. You've got to burn fossil fuels for that, and prehistoric oil refining was minimal.

"Many people feel that reading, writing, and other such non-food-gathering, energy-related activities are a big part of what make us human - like socialising round the old camp fire. However all this has led to a lot more CO2 being emitted, which some say means we should go back to windmills and waterwheels: though nobody is openly advocating a return to universal mass illiteracy."

WTF. Do you seriously think that the publishing industry is a major cause of our CO2 output? Are you really so deluded as to think that people who'd like to cut CO2 emissions want us to stop reading?

That MYSTERY Duqu Trojan language: Plain old C

Re: wtf is object orientated C?

"however it [SOO] could not have been used in Duqu, because it was only published when the Trojan was already in the wild"

Well, it could have been used by Duqu if Duqu was written by the same people who wrote SOO.

Enormous Apple market cap swells and swells ... like a bubble

Re: The 550bn is for the stock shares.

Ass backwards again.

Apple don't own Apple shares. Apple shareholdsers own Apple shares.

At the current price it would cost 550 billion to buy Apple - the shareholders get that cash.

Then you, having bought Apple, own all their assets - inluding 100 billion in cash.

So you are only out of pocket 450 billion.