Posts by Arthur

Now Google tracking follows you out of cyberspace

The Google version of the MS paper clip

"You appear to have suffered a high speed head-on shunt. Would you like me to call the emergency services?"

JavaScript battle enters final round

Link is to old standard

Following the article link to ECMA-262 gives me the 1999 3rd edition standard, not the new draft. The draft is at

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/drafts/tc39-2009-025.pdf

Yes, OK, I'm a sad git who reads language specifications. Live with it.

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

Oh dear Lewis

You're normally so good at technical things. It doesn't matter a toss if the Arctic ice cap melts, as it's already floating in equilibrium with the sea. It's if the Greenland ice sheet melts that Londoners will have to start interbreeding with Fenlanders to get webbed feet.

And I'll have a lovely beach front property here in Cambridge.

Vatican endorses Darwin, slights intelligent design

Vatican and aliens

Actually the Vatican has had a policy on alien contact since the 1930s, so their astronomer wasn't going out on a limb but was simply repeating old news. The policy was thought up by the Jesuits, who are often nearly as far ahead of the curve as the more benighted orders are behind.

I've only shagged two blokes, insists Paris Hilton

She forgot a bit of the sentence

There should be "at a time" at the end.

Boffins bust web authentication with game consoles

Insecure certs don't match list

The insecure certificates in my Firefox (3.0.5/Windows) do not match the list in http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/. Some they say use MD5 use SHA-1 in my FF, others they don't mention do use MD5. Check the lot if you're as paranoid as I am.

Profs: Eating Belgian truffles will make you buy a Mac

Homemade meringues != Linux

Sorry to wreck the theory, but my other half makes amazingly good meringues, and she uses Mac OS for her personal machines and Windows Server for most of her consulting work. I, on the other hand, cook Sichuanese and Middle Eastern and use FreeBSD.

Icon in recognition of the vast numbers of chillis in Sichuan cooking.

UK.gov says extreme porn isn't illegal if you delete it...

Wallace & Gromit???

When I followed that IMDB link to "Visions of Ecstasy" under the section "If you enjoyed this title, our database also recommends:" it had Wallace & Gromit in "The Wrong Trousers". WTF?

Boggly eyed icon for obvious reasons.

Group Test: electronic book readers

@rafael

I've had an iLiad for a couple of months and use it for reading PDF copies of academic papers, free online PDF copies of text books, etc, so seem to have the same sort of use as you want. I find the average paper formatted for A4/US letter quite readable on the iLiad, especially if slightly resized to strip off all the margins. The screen is roughly A6 size, so font sizes are effectively halved with an A4 original. Because it's a reflective screen lighting is important (this applies to all E-Ink displays). Reading in broad daylight is no problem even with small fonts. Reading in bed with a dim light so as to not wake up the other half can be problematical if the original font was 11 point or less. Most books are smaller than A4 so are no problem, especially if you lose the margins first. This is something you only have to do once, and the iLiad remembers the setting for subsequent pages. If my current one broke, I'd definitely buy another. My only complaint is that the battery life is still relatively short (12-5 hours solid use in my experience so you have to recharge after a full day's use), but as it's actually a Linux box under the hood (I have the shell extension installed, so can run pretty much any software I want) it's a big step in the right direction.

Big Blue to build DARPA cat-brain machine

60s science fiction

Anyone familiar with Cordwainer Smith's SF stories from the 60s will remember his starships were controlled by "two c.c's of laminated mouse brain". Why use synthetic substitutes when you can just laminate the real thing?

[I want both Stop and Go icons because his starships had a Go Captain *and* a Stop Captain.]

Women turn on to a throbbing Maserati

You are Jeremy Clarkson ....

and I claim my five pounds.

Brit firm to demo serious flying robo-saucer in 2009

"And how much bang does 5Kg give you"

If it's 5 kg of antimatter, annihilating with 5 kg of the saucer, 215 megatonnes equivalent.

First catch your antimatter ....