AKA Meatfucker
Not only do I get the reference, i know which book it's from and approximately where :)
82 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007
Everyone seems to think the is just a badly designed crosspiece. Personally this makes no sense as we've not seen one up to now at lightsabres don't seem to slide up and down when they are clashed.
If you look at the actual blade of the sabre, it looks really quite unstable - it looks thinner than every other blade we've seen and there's red ligtning coursing up and down. Perhaps this is a cobbled together lightsabre from old salvaged bits or a young sith's first build attempt without guidance that needs exhaust ports to prevent the thing from blowing up in the wielder's hand. If it was never designed as a handguard then the bits that stick out make more sense.
I bloody well knew it! The "My EE" app has been displaying usage which is double that of the 2 separate mobile data tracking apps i have intatalled as well as my phones own internal measurements, but the call centre droid on the end of the phone relentlessly insisted that the usage was correct so i've been serverely rationing my mobile data just to make it to the end of the month! Gah bloody useless network!
As much as it pains me to see how comparatively small NASA's budget is compared to the rest of the US federal budget, I'm still awed but what they strive for and can achieve. Think how crap our understanding of the universe would be if NASA didn't exist! Give them a bit more money so we can land a nuclear-powered laser-armed battle-bot on every planet in our solar system! :)
"No, as Elon Musk is proving, its the leaches who see the NASA budget as a gravy train."
Interesting point you make, I assume you have some citations you can link to to show how these "leeches" are using the NASA budget?
Also what Elon Musk is proving is that it is commercially viable to haul cargo into orbit. Do you think commercial viability has anything to do with going to Mars? There is not a company on earth that would bankroll such a massively expensive propostion without a CAST IRON guarantee of substantial profit in the medium term at most.
"Much as I confess I am fascinated by spaceflight, the technology, the moon landings, and would be thoroughly excited to see people land on Mars, it's going to cost a shitload of money and there really are better things to spend it on."
Here's a few choice items from the US Federal Budget for 2013 (in billions of dollars)
Department of Defense including Overseas Contingency Operations: 672.9
Department of Homeland Security: 55.4
National Intelligence Program: 52.6
NASA: 17.8
As you say, better things to spend it on.
Iain M. Banks is/was my favourite author, RIP. (although i could never get into Feersum Endjinn truth be told)
Personally i would be very happy to live in a society run by benevolent AIs where, for all intents and purposes, everything you could ever want is free and there is a drone for everything. A couple of isses with that right now - we live in a scarcity-based economy which i cannot see changing in my lifetime and humans are far too arrogant, opinionated, self-absorbed, tribalistic, power-hungry, cruel and greedy to ever truly accept and embrace a Culture or Star Trek style post-scarcity society. IMHO of course :)
@AC
My apologies if I offended you, my comment was aimed at obnoxiousGit, not you! I should have worded it much cleaerer, i thought the implication was clear. I could tell immediately that you knew what you were talking about and was agreeing with you entirely. Please accept my apologies.
@AC 13:02
I agreee that MK's remit was violence against the State after the failure of the political process to make headway with the regime. And i also agree that in the 80's MK bombed soft targets which is terrorism, by which point Mandela had been in jail for almost 20 years. However obnoxiousGit stated that Mandela is a terrorist by his definition "Those who plan, and implement acts of violence deliberately designed to maim and kill civilians are terrorists." I have seen no evidence to support that Mandela planned acts of violence to deliberately maim and kill civilians.
I did use Wikipedia for my quote, but i have a far better source for Mandela's actions - my mum who was born in South Africa in 1948 and lived through the horrors of the apartheid regime up until the late 60s when she managed to escape to the UK. Her assertion is that Mandela targetted the government and infrastructure in his bombing campaign, not random civilians. And i'm far far more inclined to believe my mother who lived through that period in history than a random internet nobody shouting from his soapbox.
@obnoxiousGit
Your name is quite fitting it seems. If you bothered to find out about Mandela's history rather than tar him with your ridiculous accusations, you'd know the Mandela's campaign was against the infrastructure of the apartheid regime - military installations, power plants, telephone lines and transport links. These bombings were carried out at night to minimise civilian casualties, if fact Mandela himself stated that they chose sabotage not only because it was the least harmful action, but also "because it did not involve loss of life [and] it offered the best hope for reconciliation among the races afterward."
But hey, let's not have the fact he was fighting to free his (and my) people from a brutally oppressive regime disrupt your drooling slack-jawed dim-witted view of the world, just do us all a favour and don't breed.
Hi peeps,
In September i'm going for my holiday of a lifetime to Japan(!) which will basically be 3 weeks of touring the courtry photographing (and possibly filming) as much as humanly possible. I'm in need of a device with which to keep in contact with the outside world, upload pictures and video to Facebook etc and keep me entertained during the various journeys to, from and around the country.
My requirements are: must be fairly light as i'll be doing a fair bit of walking around, must have good connectivity (wifi, possibly bluetooth but most importantly either full-sized usb slots or full sized sd card compatibility for data transfer), a keyboard is a nice bonus but not a deal breaker, a good battery life, movie and game-playing capabilities and good storage (either internal or external).
The way i see it i have 3 options - a tablet, a netbook/ultrabook or a proper laptop. A tablet will be nice and light, cheapish, should have good battery life and decent entertainment but will struggle with connectivity and storage. A netbook will be light, cheap, decent battery, decent connectivity but crappy entertainment. An ultrabook will be light, ok battery, good connectivity, decent storage, decent entertainment but stupidly expensive. And finally a laptop will have questionable battery life, be fairly heavy but have good storage, connectivity and full-on entertainment.
I think i've rambled on long enough, does anyone have any suggestions? Hmm and while writing this piece i found this today: http://www.simplyacer.com/Acer_Aspire_S5-391_Ultrabook_1203454.html, whatdo you guys think? :)
To anyone thinking this is a good idea (i'm looking at you bolccg), that' we'll all end up with AR implants or other such in-body tech, i HIGHLY advise you to watch one the Black Mirror series of dramas written by Charlie Brooker, particularly the one called The Entire History of You. If you still feel that same way after watching that then... well i guess there's no hope.
Oh and by the way, if any of you like watching X-Factor, Britain's Got Talent etc, i recommend watching the episode called 15 Million Merits. You'll never look at reality talent shows the same again!
Seriously, if you don't vote for this film you literally have not seen it! :) A few highlights:
It stars Debbie Gibson!
The megashark jumps out of the water and catches a jumbo jet!
The giant squid eats a bridge!
A scientist mixes coloured liquids for absolutely no reason!
This film is stuffed to the gills with so much incomprehensible ridiculousness as to render all other films ever made into potential oscar winners! Seriously you have to see it and even then you won't believe what you are watching :)
For a minute there i thought australia's law makers maybe going a bit soft in their old age and turning into some kinda of left-wing tree-hugging liberal elite whose sole job is to corrupt the youth by feeding them japanese rape simulators and terrorist training games. But no! Rest safe people of Australia, your government has once again shown itself to be the world's only true bastion of incorruptibility, protecting your innocence with a vigour and zeal not seen since the Spanish Inquisition. Remember, they are doing this for your own good because, lets face it, you're all still children at heart and need to be told what to enjoy. Go enjoy Bondi Beach, leave the decisions to the adults aka the politicians.
I wish the UK was just like Australia! Please Mr Cameron, I'm too stupid and susceptable to know what's good for me! If i tell you what i'm thinking will you tell me if it break's the law? In fact wouldn't it be better if we all told you what we were thinking so you could reprogram us when necessary??
But in reality it's never gonna work. "Here Fackbookers, pay $29 or however much to continue chatting and sharing photos etc with your friends... obviously only if they've paid their $29 too." And he says that Google, Fackbook et al are at the behest of governements etc, whats to stop the US governement or any soverign state demanding the master keys to whatever encryption software is on these things in the interest of national security or they'll be banned from sale?
You're absolutely right! The problem is, it's far easier for the parents to stick their head in the sand for a bit of peace and quiet rather than control their kids entertainment. So they'll give kids a pc for their room "cos my mate steve's dad got 'im one and i want one innit!", then they'll go buy them GTA 4 "cos keith down da road said it was well sick innit! straight merk dem fools innit blud!"
Then when their precious little mouth-breather goes off the rails it's everyone elses fault - the government, the schools, the video games, the internet, keith down the road and steve's dad. Cue Mrs frothing spittle-flecked outrage from Litttle Hatington writing to the Daily Fail, "Why won't they think of the children!!!" Knee-jerk from the Minister for Soundbites, "This is outrageous, we need legislation!" and the next thing we know there's some ridiculous attempt to randomly curtail a wide variety of liberties in the pursuit of a glowing redtop headline and some Sky News facetime.
And anyone with half a brain is standing there thinking, what... the... fuck?!?
When i was a youngster I went through Lagos airport with my father so i'm well aware of how seriously they take following the rules to the letter :P That particular time my father spent about 10 mins jovially chatting with the immigration official before handing him a saville row tailored shirt. We were swiftly ushered through with no regards to paperwork or anything silly like that. And on the way back he managed to "convince" them to allow him to carry the best part of a gallon of highly flammable palm oil as hand luggage for the flight home :P
So when the "outraged" offical says he'll go and deal with it what he actually means is he's pissed he didn't think of the idea first, now he's got to go and blackmail the security guards to both extort money and get preferential access to the nudie scans.
Paris, because you don't need a $100k perv scanner.
Gotta love the death-tech boffinry's attempts to make killing american soliders even eaiser. Well, unless you're the poor sap in the back of that thing when it gets shot at. They just don't get it - flying cars will never work if you just tape a mini to a cessna and camo paint it. Ducted fans are getting there but still not right. A flying car should look like a car, not a frankenstein monster, and that will only happen when some genius cracks true anti-grav tech.
So never then. Damn :(
Err i'll think you'll find in this borderline OCD age of flight security the LAST thing anyone would do is to joke about any aspect of airline security or police or anything. Judging by the fact he was immediately booked on the next flight rather than taken to some windowless office which happened to be "down a number of flights of steps" says this was just a misunderstanding imho.
@Lewis Burgess
Lewis you are so wrong its frightening.
I think this is utterly ridiculous that such an obvious design flaw was missed in testing. And then the stunning arrogance of his holiness to tell me that i need to hold it differently or buy some stupidly overpriced rubber band to make it work properly is truly astonishing. And the fact that you are sitting here apologising for and making excuses for a mutli-billion dollar global company is frankly even worse.
I don't use phone cases, never needed one as i'm not a club-handed simpleton and i don't see why i should be required to buy one to use an iPhone 4. But hell if your happy holding the phone in the Apple proscribed fashion and buying a large variety of overpriced Apple endorsed peripherals to enable the product to work then you go right ahead. A fool and their money will always be parted.
So to all you people crying tokenism, political motivation and all the other pointless FUD arguments i ask you this:
Would you have preferred if some anonymous chubby white male with glasses was the new "Face of Engineering"? Does it somehow make it all less of an honour, less of a recognition of her abilities and more of a political statement because she has an african heritage and her sexual organs are on the inside? Or are you just thick?
No doubt she must have sucked her way to the top or used her drug-dealing, hood-rat, fried chicken-eating bro's to threaten the IEEE board into giving her this recognition. Because obviously anything else would just be preposterous...
Let me ask you a question and i would actually really like an answer to this: Exactly when will a black woman's success in a traditionally white male dominated field be seen as some thing other than politically movitated tokenism?
Standard MacroBloat vitriol aside, by all the accounts i've read W7 is actually shaping up to be decent and XP is starting to feel a bit creaky. I have absolutely no intention of ever buying a Mac and i'll probably only ever use Linux on a netbook or as a server so for my standard box Windows, for better or worse, is where i'm at.
I'm sure i'll garner some hate for daring to appear supportive of M$, but i counter that by saying opinions are like arseholes, everybody's got one :)
The signal to noise ratio is pretty high in this comments section.
@Sarah Davis
"Think about it, this kind of crap is one step away from the real thing, so ask yourself if you 'really' want to see this, and if the answer is yes then you are wrong in the head and need help (or secure isolation)."
I'm sorry but you are utterly incorrect with this statement. Saying that watching something is "one step away from the real thing" neatly avoids the fact that its a massive life-changing step and requires a person to actively decided to commit the act in question. And using your same logic on anything else of a disturbing nature shows just how flawed it is, e.g. i watched plenty of news and footage of the suicide bombings in Iraq - do i want to be a suicide bomber because of that? I actively sought out the footage of that iranian woman randomly executed during the recent unrest, which is quite possible the most saddening and disturbing thing i've ever seen - do i want to start shooting iranian women because of that? I've watched documentary footage of whales being harpooned - do i want to join some japanese whaling fleet because of that? I recently played a game on the PC where i used very realistically modelled weapons to shoot all manner of people - do i want to join the army and shoot foriegners because of that?
The answer to all those questions is a very obvious NO. Equating wanting to watch something disturbing or distasteful with wanting to mirror those same acts myself in real life is quite possibly the single most dangerous threat to freedom of speech and freedom of expression you can come up with. You may as well accuse anyone who watches a documentary about Hitler with wanting to become him. Patently ridiculous.
Oh and you completely missed the minor issue that, according to your logic the censors themselves should be locked up for wanting to do their job.
I doubt the standard grunt will use this but i can see speical forces like the SAS using this. Get a six man team, give them half a ton of explosives and enough ammo to lay waste to an army, use the HULC's to get their payloads "in theater" or whatever the vernacular is, and watch them flatten a city :)
Or give them a million copies of "Random Bloke does Paris 4" and win hearts and minds by some good old imperialist propaganda :)
Whilst i will admit that the old Reg site was a bit of a 3-legged pony and quite rightly has be led to the glue factory, i think the fixed width of the new site is unnecessarily restrictive and the 2 huge grey bars on my widescreen monitor are just plain ugly. Next the icons for the comments section are FUGLY in the extreme. They look like they were designed by a 10 year old with a drinking problem. Seriously, bring back the old and all will be forgiven! Oh and the new site banner is pretty meh too, the font's a bit too Daily Mail for my liking (thick and ugly if you were wondering).
All that aside i think the body of the site looks nice and readable, less a shotgun blast (or vomit splash) of stories everywhere, now much more newspapery :) The "Don't Miss" boxes could use a touch of colour too, grey is just so miserable a colour. And a better font.
Overall a 9/10 for effort but a 5/10 for results.
Hmm EA (or your corner of EA at least) are considering dropping PS3 development? I'd be surprised if that happened as i've read a number of analyst analyses of the console market and they all say the PS3 will be outstripping sales of the 360 sooner rather than later. But then again analyst analyses is like saying military intelligence so who know what to believe :P And besides the really winner this time around is the Wii by a country mile but both MS and Sony pretend it doesn't exist :)
Anyway thanks for the word from the inside and as for have one of each on your desk... its a tough life :P
IMHO neither console is good enough for 1080p 60fps (True HD as Kaz likes to call it), the only thing which can do it is the PC :)
Ok i got a question for you, as an insider to the whole development game, can you give a no-bullshit. unbiased assessment of the potential of each platform? From my limited vantage point it seems that the Xbox is orders of magnitude easier to code for but the PS3 has more theoretical power but is much harder to unlock. Is that close to the truth?
Oh and when is the next SSX coming out??? :D
Well done! "PS3 fanboys = pwnt" Wow that's hilarious, you sir, truly have a towering wit and an unsurpassed command of the english language! However there are a few minor, nay trivial points that i'd like to make.
Xbox 360 RRoD we're due entirely to shonky manufacturing by MS, the console HAD to be sent back to MS to be fixed and it cost them $1 billion plus an awful lot of negative mainstream media coverage, hell it was on the BBC news a few times.
The PS3 "bricking" is not a bricking at all but a code conflict issue between the new firmware and a particular file or set of files stored on the HDD. It sure as hell aint gonna need a mass recall of consoles at the cost of vast sums of money, nor is it gonna be reported on anything other than tech sites.
The PS3 has exclusives which will generally stay exclusive to the console for it's entire life. Most Xbox 360 exclusives end up on the PC (where they are generally better with the excepion of Halo 1 & 2, both of which we're appalling conversions, and comparatively average compared to the vast array of FPS's on the PC.)
Now before you explode into a frothing ball of bile-filled hate and start flinging your poo around like a deranged monkey let me just say that the PS3 is FAR from perfect. The stupid SKU changes, the ridiculous "Oh we can do dual 1080p 60fps outputs" bullshit, the "we cant put motion-sensing and rumble together cos it's like hard and stuff" scandal, "that" Killzone 2 video and giant enemy crabs. Historically accurate giant enemy crabs :P
Bottom line is both consoles have their good points and their bad points, wibbling on like a slacked-jawed drooling yokel about how your e-peen is so much better than theirs makes you look like a gormless fuckwit.
I never said anything of the sort. What i asked was for the games AC had that we're exclusive to the Xbox, not the full list as i'm well aware of the 360's back catalogue. My point being, half the "exclusives" on the 360 will end up on another platform sooner or later, whereas that's rarely the case with PS3 or PC exclusives.
And WRT downloads vs bluray, you don't need to buffer bluray, if your HDD dies you don't lose anything and you actually own the media rather than renting from the download service :)
I'm interested AC, you must have a huge library of exclusive AAA games for your 360 and i'm sure you'd love to share that list with us... And while you're at it i'd be interested to hear about all the HD films you're streaming off the net, or are you downloading them then watching?
No doubt Bab5 was an excellent sci-fi show but BSG is the best show of any kind on TV in the last 20 years. I'm a huge Star Trek fan (no i don't have any paraphenalia, but i do have a purple lightsabre, go figure!) have seen all of NG, DS9, Voyager and the abomination that was Enterprise and i can name precisely 4 episodes of all that Trek (Best of Both Worlds, Way of the Warrior, All Good Things, Sacrifice of Angels) that comes anywhere near the quality oozing from every BSG episode to date.
Mine's the frakking jumpsuit with bits of frakking toaster stuck to it.
I don't understand this, why are so many people so vitriolic in their dislike of Hamilton? It's not his fault the media have made a huge circus of the fact he's the first black man to drive in F1, and like it or not he is a very very good driver, if still a little green around the gills. Schumacher was no different when he started, the raw talent was obviously there but just needed a couple of years to properly bed into F1.
Don't hate the man, hate the media for the ridiculously disproportionate hype they have built up..
Microsoft buys the Houses of Parliament - "We'll knock down that dusty old relic and build a gleaming new edifice of corporate greed! With riverfront views too!" gushes a senior MS source.
Nobel Council stuns world by announcing Robert Mugabe as prime candidate for Nobel Peace Prize - "Well he's the obvious choice, but personally i would have chosen George W Bush" an unnamed source wittered.
And so on and so forth...
Mines the one made from unicorn skin and fairy wings