Posts by Dale Richards

Man could face prison over six second 'extreme porn' clip

And...

Don't forget to keep your Junk clean!

Ad industry OKs climate porn

Re: Cyanide

Dave, if the atmosphere is a glass of water, and the CO2 is cyanide, what we're actually talking about here is the difference between drinking a 0.037% concentration of cyanide or manually topping it up to a 0.038% concentration of cyanide.

Of course, the atmosphere is nothing like water and CO2 is nothing like cyanide, which is probably for the best.

Maybe, maybe not...

Here's another simple observation that could throw a spanner in the works...

In a controlled laboratory mini-arboretum, increasing the concentration of CO2 in the air also increases the rate at which the trees grow. In turn, the Increased rate of tree growth decreases the concentration of CO2 in the air.

A fool could quite easily conclude that increasing levels of man-made CO2 emissions mean that trees and plants will grow more vigorously, and eventually the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will balance out, while the rate of petroleum generation increases.

Unfortunately for this theory - and for yours - there's a great deal more to science than making a few simple observations then drawing a logical conclusion.

Global warming may be normal at this point in glacial cycle

Hmm..

More likely it won't make the slightest bit of difference, other than to to lighten taxpayers' wallets.

Music biz unites to save 6Music

Hmm...

"...one of the things I like about DAB is the ability to show the track that is playing..."

That's one of the "benefits" of DAB the marketing types are throwing at us, but in truth this has been possible on FM since the 80s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System

DAB

I've had some exposure to 6Music via digital TV, and while I think the content is good enough to be the saviour of radio, I simply don't listen to the radio when I'm at home. Like a lot of people, I listen to the radio in the car and at work. It's no good having 6Music on DAB only - if I'm going to listen to it then it needs to be on proper radio. Stick it on FM - either of Radios 3 & 5 can bugger off right away. Stick Asian Network on FM while you're at it, I'm sure it'll pull the listeners in once it's on a platform people can actually receive.

It's absolutely retarded for the BBC to put 6Music on DAB then complain about listener figures. It's like building a website that only renders in Lynx then wondering why you don't get many visitors.

Or if we really must have a tired car analogy, it's like building a car that only runs on goat urine then... wondering why all your... customers... erm... smell so bad?

BBC confirms death of 6Music, slashes online budget by a quarter

No

"I'm sure I read something about the Asian Network costing the BBC more per listener than a prime time TV show, so it has to be a failure"

As a public service broadcaster, the BBC has little need to be motivated by ratings. As long as they have enough support across the board to keep the license money coming in, the number of listeners/viewers for each individual service should be of little consequence as long as there is some demand for it.

I say "should", of course, because the BBC has gradually drifted so far away from its original purpose that it's a wonder the government hasn't intervened.

Microsoft slams nails in Windows Vista, XP SP2, 2000

@Lionel Baden

You are incredibly naive if you believe that antivirus software can protect you from all past, present and future threats. In fact, signature-based antivirus software is entirely reactive, and is therefore useless against new and unknown malware.

Similarly, Windows updates alone aren't enough to protect your Windows PC from all threats. Installing OS updates and running an up-to-date antivirus solution and both essential layers of security. Neglect either one and you are exposing yourself to unnecessary risk.

Aussie censor balks at bijou boobs

Urinary incontinence?

There's an iPad for that.

Title

"...possibly enabling someone to imagine that someone or something else might be a child..."

Notwithstanding the sarcasm of your post, I think you may have hit the nail on the head there. The real "crime" we're talking about here is the crime of *thinking about* inappropriate conduct with a child. Young children should be protected, but when a government starts telling you what you can and can't think, something has gone very, very wrong.

If a paedophile finds they can get their kicks by looking at adult women with small breasts and pretending they're little girls, then I'm all for it. Better that than having them pursuing actual children.

Windows 8 possible July 2011 release?

Not just exabytes

64-bit architectures allow for a byte-addressable memory space of just over 18 exabytes. Anyone predicting the rise of 128-bit computing by 2012 is out of their fucking mind.

As an interesting aside, a 128-bit address space will give you 3.4 x 10^38 bytes of byte-addressable memory.

There isn't a word for for how mind-bogglingly massive that is, but it's about 340 trillion yottabytes, with a yottabyte being a thousand zettabytes and a zettabyte being a thousand exabytes.

It's a pretty safe bet that there isn't that much data on the entire planet.

Mozilla buries heels on un-YouTube open video

iPod comments

"I feel most sorry for the iPod users out there. The iPod is lovely to look at, well made but jeez - so locked down it is untrue."

I take exception to your comments about the iPod. I recently bought my first iPod (Classic) and I can say with some confidence that it's definitely not well-made. Also, being such a scratch and fingerprint magnet means that within about a minute of opening the box, it's no longer lovely to look at either.

Amateur goof makes Twitter account hijacking a snap

Come on...

Where's your creativity? Where's your seizure-inducing colours? And the all-important line 40 to stop it from halting with the "scroll?" prompt when the screen gets full!

10 RANDOMIZE

20 LET x = INT(RND * 7) : LET y = INT(RND * 7) : LET z = INT(RND * 7)

30 PAPER x : INK y : BORDER z

40 POKE 23692, 255

50 PRINT "Dixons is crap ";

60 GOTO 20

And they called it a mis-spent youth....

Bloated Office 2010 kicks dirt in face of old computers

Heh...

These articles always remind me of the "bloatware all the way" song that was doing the rounds in the 90s:

http://humour.davintech.ca/microsoft-bloatware.phtml

The hypothetical MS Word 15 requires unimaginably vast system resources for comic effect - in this case, they've gone for a whopping 60 MB of RAM and an incredible 900 MB of disk space. It's funny now because even given these ridiculous comic exaggerations, Office 14 is still managing to exceed all expectations in terms of system requirements.

Wrists playing up? You're shagging too much

Well shit the bed...

"A parallel decrease in the frequency of sexual intercourse and the incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome between the sixth and the seventh decades of life suggests a possible cause and effect relationship between sexual intercourse and carpal tunnel syndrome"

Correlation implies causation? Who knew?! To think all us "proper scientists" have been doing it wrong all this time!

Bob the Builder slapped with CGI rendering

Stop motion

CGI animation used to about pushing the boundaries and creating animated works thought to be impossible with more traditional methods. Now it's little more than a cost-saving exercise in many cases.

You need only watch Coraline to see some of the amazing things that are possible with modern stop-motion animation. Much of the modelling and SFX were computer-assisted, but the animation is pure stop-motion, and the result is one of the most visually stunning films of the last decade.

It will be a real shame if we lose this artform altogether.

Is Mandy right to cut science funding?

Axe falls everywhere

Is the axe also going to fall on the publicly funded War On Vapour?

British government ignores MS browser fears

Meh..

I know it's the governments duty to "defend the realm", but I believe this responsibility stops short of telling its citizens which web browser to use.

Exploit code for potent IE zero-day bug goes wild

IE6

IE6 was built into Windows, but seriously, what else would you have used in 2001?

Firefox wasn't around then, and Opera was ad-riddled crapware. Safari didn't even exist on the Mac, let alone Windows. Netscape was dead in the water and Mozilla hadn't reached a stable release.

I know we have a rich and competitive Windows browser market now, but this simply wasn't the case 9 years ago. As much as you'd like to deny it, IE6 really was the best solution back then.

Yes

When Firefox, Opera et al can be installed, configured and locked down via Group Policy, they may have half a chance at reducing Internet Explorer's dominance in corporate networks.

Until then, most companies will take their chances with IE, ours included. Say what you will about alternatives being safer, faster or more user friendly; sysadmins working on a Windows domain would have to be crazy to use anything other than IE.

China's doomed attempt to hold the world to ransom

Or...

If you want to be slightly less "up and coming" about it - what about phosphors for plasma displays?

Is it art or is it pr0n? Australia decides it's ALL filth

Erm...

When?

Fail

"...a growing tendency in some legislatures to regard nudity – particularly nudity of children – as sexual and therefore, by definition, pornographic, irrespective of the content of the picture"

That really says more about the warped and twisted minds of the legislators than the arbitrarily-labelled "criminals" this sort of thing is meant to catch.

US airport body scanners can store and export images

@Bilgepipe

If you have nothing to hide, why wear clothes at all? Just take them all off, and then we can all see that you're (probably) not concealing any weapons.

Zuckerberg: 'I am a prophet'

Hmmm

Call them "dragons" and maybe our AC will understand.

Italians take the 'p' to fight back against Big Brother

Yep

I'm with you on that one. My car was vandalised three times in three months while parked in a heavily CCTV-protected street. Requests for footage were declined, and the police said they had no leads. You have to wonder exactly what they're watching for.

Will a service pack for Windows 7 rock up anytime soon?

Duh

Microsoft's "million reasons" bullshit is still bullshit, but they're hardly contradicting themselves by saying a platform with 145,958 apps isn't as good as a platform with over 800,000 apps.

BT names 63 more exchanges for fibre upgrades

Hmm...

Maybe because BT, like all other ISPs, is not a flipping charity. They care little about the quality of life in rural areas or the technological advancement of the country. They will install their upgrades wherever they think it is profitable, and that's all.

Y2.01K bug trips up Symantec

Uh-oh

We're running SEP here - current definitions are at 31 December 2009 r116. What happens when they get past r999?

PANIC!

2016 bug hits Windows phones

Moh

Judging by the reports I've seen, it looks like the problem is actually with specific mobile carriers rather than devices.

Apple ejects Dalai Lama from Chinese iTunes

Business

Businesses aren't set up to create an ethical utopia where everyone's human rights are respected and no-one has anything to fear from anyone or anything. Like it or not, businesses exist solely to make profit. Despite the "ethical policies" that some companies publish as a PR trick, corporate entities will behave in an ethical way *only* if they see it as profitable.

China is a huge market, and Apple would no doubt lose a huge chunk of its cash if it withdrew from it. However, continuing to do business in China and respecting the local laws (and therefore being unethical) will likely lose them very little money. A handful of people might boycott Apple in the West because of it, but it's nothing compared to losing the 1.3 billion potential customers in China.

TL;DR: It's more profitable for Apple to stay in China and obey their laws than it is to be ethical and pull out.

Secret code protecting cellphone calls set loose

Cellular tapping?

There's an app for that...

Microsoft loses appeal on Word injunction

Title

"...(building a copy of screen layout in memory then moving the *whole* image to the screen is *patented* FFS..."

I'm sure we used to do that on the Spectrum.

Ferry giant refuses ID card

Title

Tracking the movements of UK citizens throughout the EU? There's a database for that!

HP probes 'racist' webcams

Sexist

What the video clearly shows is that HP's technology track's women's faces, but not men.

Google: Do no evil, pay no tax

Title

These "average salary" figures are usually the mean, and therefore largely meaningless.

LHC Xmas shutdown today - massive boffin roister planned

Title

So... the sword of Damocles has been sheathed. FOR NOW!

On a more serious note, is it just me or is there a temperature excursion in progress in sector 81?

http://hcc.web.cern.ch/HCC/cryo_main/cryo_main.php?region=Sector81&sector=81

OGC claims £196.7m ICT savings

Title

To be honest, I saw a car a while ago with a number plate ending in OGC. I laughed so hard I nearly crashed into the back of it!

I propose that OGC should be one of those combinations that never appear on reg marks, like BUM and COK.

Title

From the look of their logo, keeping it up isn't a problem!

Plug-in Prius production plan posted

Nice...

Fifteen miles at < 62 mph would get me to work and back without having to burn any petrol. Plus when the battery does run out, the ICE kicks in and you have a normal car - better than the grinding to a halt and catching the bus home you get with a fully electric car.

Seems to me that the plug-in hybrid is the only practical way for most people to own an electric car at the moment. The only issue I can see is that putting a lithium ion battery in a car effectively means you're sitting on a bomb.

Google's reCAPTCHA busted by new attack

Title

Call me a weirdo, but in filling in these reCAPTCHAs, I've discovered more than a few that would make excellent band names. Here are some of my favourites:

Mon Vodka

Pinhole Husband

Clack Zolonko

Starch Wife

Gapes Orion

$39 Nibblers

Double Debbie

Stoney Member

Houston Lewd

And my personal favourite:

Gordon Surtaxes

Any budding musicians stuck for a snappy band name would be better off trying reCAPTCHA rather than one of the other silly band name generators on the net!

Title

Practice your reCAPTCHA skills here:

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

Penguins

Actually, Australia and New Zealand are home to a major chunk of the World's penguin population!

http://www.siec.k12.in.us/west/proj/penguins/australia.html

</pedantry>

Chocolate Factory does url shortening

Nostalgia

Does anyone else remember back when these services first became popular? Before all this "face space" and "twatter" nonsense, it was just a way to stop a pasted link wrapping over multiple lines, causing Outlook Express to do a brain fart when the clueless recipients tried to click on it.

I seem to remember the first service to gain popularity was called makeashorterlink.com. Great idea, but in their naïvety they failed to realise that others would come along and make... Even Shorter Links!

Parcelforce to drop Windows 7 compatibility through letterbox in New Year

It's a Fripping website!

It should be tested across a range of browsers, but it shouldn't even be looking at the OS in the User-Agent string!

Their whole approach is wrong here.

Hubble probes deepest universe

Yes, it's good

It's a great comment, but my concern is that if it's not possible to exist outside of the Universe, there can be no objective observations of it. Science, therefore, is unable to prove the existence of the Universe.

The other possibility is that "space" is infinite, but there's a matter boundary, where crossing the boundary leads to an infinite expanse of empty space where no matter (or antimatter) exists. By crossing the boundary, you introduce matter into the space and therefore expand the Universe. Of course, if "space" is infinite, then it can't be shown to exist either.

Hubble's Ultra Deep Field image is undoubtedly beautiful, but it also seems to be mocking us. It's like we're trying to find our way in an infinitely complex hall of mirrors - the deeper we look, the deeper it goes.

luis sancho

Stop spoiling our moment.

LHC pulverises previous record: 2.36 TeV surprise collision!

Re: luis sancho

CERN originally stood for "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire" (European Council for Nuclear Research). The name later changed to "Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire" (after they got organised?), but the acronym stayed the same.

Of course, the research undertaken by the LHC can't really be described as "nuclear research", as they have gone beyond the atomic nucleus and are working with much smaller subatomic particles.