Posts by Stevie

BAN the ROBOT WHORES, says robot whore expert: 'These AREN'T BARBIES'

Bah!

Robot Totty must:

a) Look like the real thing (or not, if you want to go All Soryama, All Night).

2) Do whatever one wants behind closed doors enthusiastically instead of screaming and throwing kitchen implements one's way whenever one says "how about a fashion show?"

#) Not phone anyone afterward to "tell all".

Once those Three Laws of Robot Crumpet are in play we can safely move human partners to where they want to be: raising kids (or not) and focusing on work (or not). Whatever, other human beings will not be needed for quick, fun, naughty/kinky sex and neither will they need bribing with dinner and flowers for "undergoing" same.

I see no downside, and I'll take the Cherry 2000.

Sierra Nevada snow hasn't been this bad since 1500AD

Bah!

Some of you are missing the point. Tree rings say nothing about global climate, they indicate local weather conditions.

Those conditions allow one to interpret the prevailing climate once the database is geographically large enough.

Deniers, of course, will silt chant "need more data" to any conclusions drawn. It's not science to such people, it's a wait-til-the-claimant-dies insurance scam.

Quite why this site allow this individual who has zero qualifications in any related science subject

And last I checked he hadn't put out a single rock album.

Like you say, no cred.

FBI dumps on IoT security

Bah!

All your pacemaker are belong to lightbulb.

DMCA takedown bots must respect 'fair use' of copyright – US appeals court

Re: How the heck can they believe that?

Because they are computer-unsavvy and like all such people believe that Trektech is real.

I mean, the computer on the USS Enterprise == Siri, no?

Disney's light-bulb moment: build TCP into LEDs for IoT comms

Bah!

All your pix of giant mouse are belong to lightbulb.

Curiosity Rover's OS has backdoor bug

Bah!

All your laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy data are belong to us.

Doctor Who returns to our screens next week – so, WHO is the worst Time Lord of them all?

Bah!

Peter Cushing was the worst doctor. Like all the other "terrible Doctors", mostly because of the scripts he had to work with.

But somehow he didn't make your poll.

3D printer blueprints for TSA luggage-unlocking master keys leak online

Bah!

Manually operated Portable key fabrication and copying jigs have been around in the automobile dealer world since the 1970s. How do I know? Because the miracle of Netflix brought me the episode of Columbo where such a device was shown in use.

Why do El Reg geeks always run for the most expensive and complicated solutions when it comes to bending metal in the real world?

Dremels. 3D printers. Casting paraphernalia.

Tch!

The remote control from HELL: Driverless cars slam on brakes for LASER POINTER

Re: The lidar is susceptible to a trivial replay attack

Requires a portable computer to do so not *so* trivial, but I get your point.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation should have an award for the least worthwhile use of the Raspberry Pi. They could use a well-hammered timex mounted on a dinged-up wooden plaque for the trophy.

Bah!

Ah, an Asshat Hack.

Batteries on wheels are about to reshape our cities and lives

Bah!

The last problem solved unambiguously by IT was the payroll, and I'd be willing to bet that went over budget. Traffic flow is not going to be sorted by the same codergeeks that give you routes from London to Sheffield that involve a small diversion through Norway or insist that any trip off Long Island pass through Manhattan even if waypoints explicitly denying such a route are laboriously punched into the bloody GPS/Satnav.

While I can see the many advantages of a mass transit solution that is deployable in small packets and extremely flexible when it comes to destination choices I have some serious reservations about the technology, chiefly the one where a Google car with a Realdoll crew is barreling down I-95/the M1 with a trunk/boot full of fertilizer and diesel fuel bound for somewhere about to have some of its people and infrastructure thrown about with scant regard for life and limb.

Re: Also could present savings in aged care.

Not unless they get a lot bigger and easier to get into and out of they won't. Old people don't "do" the Honda Speck or Ford Iota very well. They need at a minimum the height of a typical SUV to manage getting into the seats comfortably

It ain't about the IT, it's about the arthritis.

Heigh ho, oh no! Politically correct panto dumps Snow White’s dwarfs

Bah!

If Willow don't object I don't see how anyone else can (unless they are Tyrion Lanister or a Time Bandit).

This just makes lankies look stupid as well as too tall.

Apple's iPad Pro: We're making a Surface Pro WITH A STYLUS over Steve Jobs' DEAD BODY

Re: A9

Well spotted.

Bah!

Well, you can get excellent third party styluses and keyboards for the iPad at less than half those process quoted.

Apple missed a trick here by not copyrighting "iPad Legal" and "iPad Foolscap" as possible names for the beast. "iPod Pro" is so 2005.

iPhone 6 gives bloke 'painful, lumpy' skin condition in trouser storage

Re: You forgot the obvious.....

Yeah, but there are only three places in the world that can smelt pure gold on account of no-one else wanting the bother and toxic pollution the PITA process causes.

Well, what d'you know: Raising e-book prices doesn't raise sales

Re: An e-book is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it.

Which Mr Worstall's sources suggest is $4.95.

I've paid more for PDF textbooks and willingly (my pdf library numbers around 60 bought and paid for volumes, about half of which cost in excess of $25), but that's because there's no DMA lockdown with a pdf and because the editorial whitespace gets preserved in a pdf and typically does NOT in an e-book format, obviously because the publisher can't be arsed to re-proofread the results of e-markup on existing body of type (reading the combat scenes in an Honor Harrington e-book which has stripped out the whitespace the author put in to delineate who is saying what while retaining the sense of breakneck pacing is a tedious act of mental re-editing that breaks immersion in the story and is definitely not worth 5 bucks to experience).

Eventually the prices of E-books will fall again to what people will pay without mentally saying "Wait, what?" first - about $4.95.

Because that's what they are worth, and because that is the price at which secondhand paperbacks in good condition can be had for the asking, a format which the author can sign when you meet him/her to prove you did and give you an additional fond (or not) memory.

Bah!

Two points:

a). No e-book is worth more than five bucks.

2) That goes double for any book by an author who has been dead for a quarter century Mr Heinlein.

$) Higher prices mean fewer units sold? Well, duh!

‘Dumb pipe’ Twitter should sell up and quit, says tech banking chap

Bah!

Hell, I have a twitter account and I don't understand why people like and use the service.

Dell CEO: Very few will survive the PC bloodbath

Bah!

Well, Dell, you certainly will be last on my list of proposed vendors since I had to deal with the twin idiocies of "Dell Lock-In Electronics" and "Locked-in Part Obsolescence" with my aging but still giving 100% laptop's power supply. If not for this I'd be a big Dell singer-upper.

I'll buy elsewhere for my next computer, which will run Linux because the arse-faced abortion of Windows 10 is a straw too much for this camel's back.

With any luck the said computer will feature an ARM-derived architecture too, so I won't have to worry about hardware lockdown elsewhere in the machine.

And you, dear Dell, have only yourselves to blame.

America's crackdown on open-source Wi-Fi router firmware – THE TRUTH

Bah!

FCC offline for a firmware upgrade?

SPACE WHISKY: Astro malt pongs of 'rubber and smoked fish'

Bah!

Was this tasting done "blind" or are we witnessing another case of stereo cable hysterical bias?

A Dyson car? Don't rule it out. We're suckers for innovation, says CEO

Bah!

Unnecessary. We already have many cars on the market as unfit for purpose as the Dyson DC25 vacuum cleaner.

Security for those who know they can't win the security war

Bah!

"passwords". Feh. The weak link in the entire house of cards that is IT.

The future lies in the past: the PID.

Scrapheap challenge: How Amazon and Google are dumbing down the gogglebox

Bah!

"...should know better ..."

Perhaps the trick in picking a "smart" TV or disc player is in choosing one made by big players in it for the long haul, not flibbertigibbet "web economy" Johnny-come-latelies.

After all, a Samsung or Sony smart disc player will connect almost effortlessly to your WiFi and cost around fifty dollars from Costco.

Which last time I checked was about what it would cost to set up your own set-top-box (without a disc player).

French woman gets €800 a month for electromagnetic-field 'disability'

Bah!

Had a colleague who complained for years that sitting next to the breaker box made him ill from all the EMR.

When I moved to his desk it didn't pass my stringent cleanliness standards so I started cleaning.

I pulled the desktop computer out of it's corner and found - and I am not making this up - a basketball-sized dust-bunny nestled on the desk at face-level.

Gotta watch out for that unhealthy EMR. Much more dangerous than plain-old dirt.

Password 'XXXXairocon' pops Wi-Fi routers from ASUS, ZTE and others

Bah!

Just Bah!

The Raspberry Pi is succeeding in ways its makers almost imagined

Bah!

I don't care if it's made of Lego, just give me a flying car, dammit!

Devs are SHEEP. Which is good when the leader writes secure code

Bah!

So ... developers will use security tools if someone else shows them how?

Britain’s device-theft capital is now … lovely Leicestershire

Bah!

"Leicestershire – slap-bang in the middle of rural England "

or

"Leicestershire – 18 miles from decidedly un-rural Coventry and a stone's throw from the urban blight that is Birmingham"

Now I understand all the Phone Pheft, dunneye?

C For Hell – Day Two: Outage misery continues for furious C4L customers

Bah!

"We are continuing to work as quickly as possible"

Reminds me of the time a colleague in another city on whom I was waiting wrote my boss to say that they had been working diligently for six months.

But hadn't actually done anything.

Why Nobody Should Ever Search The Ashley Madison Data

Re: Every time personal data is made public is a fuckup.

I agree. I meant "This time no-one will be on your side as there isn't a single part about it that can be pulled under the umbrella of 'Public Need To Know'."

Sorry for the confusion.

Bah!

Extremely well done!

Swinging between hysterically funny innuendo and seriously serious moralizing so quickly I cannot tell if the article is a spoof or real.

But I agree with every single point made.

What two consenting adults get up to is nobody's business but theirs (and their "life partner").

Sorry, hackers. This time you fucked up. Maybe if you think for a bit you can figure out why.

Fiery old geysers FOUND ON MOON: Volcanic past explained

Bah!

Dinosaurs Gassed Into Extinction By Moon In 8 Trillion BC!

I miss the Weekly World News.

FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America

Bah!

I guess a few people didn't enjoy Fahrenheit 451.

I'm not finding Shameless as riveting as it used to be. Why do those pinko writers hate America, and who do I call to denounce them now Uncle Joe and that nice Mr Hoover aren't here to act as the Bureau of Moral Climates?

Canadians taking to spying on their spies

Meanwhile in the US, voters are getting stupider all the time

Point of order: NO ONE has voted for the lunatic Trump and I doubt anyone ever will.

I believe his function is to corral the loony right under one banner so they can be transferred to the real Republican candidate's ticket at an appropriate time. That way they will vote for the right guy instead of sitting at home drinking and cleaning their guns.

I don't think for a minute the lunatic Trump is going to run. If - after the Republican primary is over and he is an Independant or nothing - by some belch in the Universe's laws of probablity he does run, he won't win.

Biz that OK'd Edward Snowden for security clearance is fined $30m for obvious reasons

Bah!

No doubt they had to wait until the OPM information was made available by Sino-Soviet hackers before they could confirm the forms were incomplete.

LA explosion knocks LogMeIn's British customers offline

Bah!

Wot, no generators?

Microsoft will explain only 'significant' Windows 10 updates

Bah!

KB012576 - Device may spontaneously explode due to all the fish in the atmosphere

GIMP is, or at least has been enough of a match for most of what PhotoShop did

Yes, if you can figure out how to get it to do anything.

Photoshop is difficult to get to do anything clever for a newcomer, but GIMP makes even relatively straightforward tasks opaque and the help is a programmer's idea of what is needed rather than a proper user guide.

Much better than it was. A long way yet to go in the UI and workflow/tool presentation fronts before beginners can pick it up and run with it easily.

And yes, I use both GIMP and Photoshop.

4 Michael Habel: At least it doesn't (As far as we know!),

Aye, there's the rub.

Mobile 'fault' forces BA flight into unscheduled Russian landing

Bah!

"Nahnahnahnahnah. It wouldn't do that. Nah."

"But we have actual in-plane GoBlow camera footage showing someone screaming as his hand is engulfed in a fireball while doing his e-mail and the cabin staff squirting him with fire extinguishers."

"Well, it did that, yeah. But he had broken the unwritten law".

iOS storing enterprise credentials in directory anyone can read

Bah!

Interesting, mostly because the exhortation to upgrade from Apple I got blithered only about "improvements" to the music ap.

Antiques in spaaaaace! Retired space shuttles cannibalised for parts

Bah!

Well they won't be getting any parts from the one in New York, that I can tell you!

Mainly because the one we got wasn't actually a real shuttle and doesn't have any real shuttle bits to scavenge.

In your face, NASA!

Now Ashley Madison hackers reveal 'CEO's emails and source code'

Bah!

First: A website aimed at helping cheaters run around on their spouses has no reputation to protect.

Second: Does anyone really give a fuck about this?

Linux boss Torvalds: Don't talk to me about containers and other buzzwords

4 Boltar: Shills

You are aware of the difference between a tech conference and a marketing junket, aren't you?

Curiosity rolls over onto Martian WET PATCH, takes satisfied selfie

Bah!

So that's what, three to four molecules of water per scoop of pulverized rock?

YouTube bloggers told to slap 'advert' stickers on their vid posts

Bah!

Which idiot came up with "vlogger"?

"I'm a vlogger. I vlog for a living."

You know, there was a time when computer-originated buzz-jargon was cool. The Internet has age has leeched that out and left us with McBuzz.

I blame Google, Yahoo et al.

In fact, I think I'll post a vitriolic vlogspot about it.

Camera-carrying DOLPHIN SPY caught off Gaza

Bah!

Weaponized dolphins.

Riiiiiight.