Posts by Annihilator 3787 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Ah yes, because "popular" means "sheep". It couldn't be that it's a good game that a mere 10m people like, or think that it's great value for less than a quid... I suggest not telling anyone what you like, lest they agree with you, causing it to be popular and thus causing you to think it "uncool" in response.
Here endeth the post with the obligatory "if you don't care, why are you reading and subsequently posting?"...
Hello, and welcome to the Springfield Police Department Resc-u-Fone. If you know the name of the felony being committed, press one. To choose from a list of felonies, press two. If you are being murdered or calling from a rotary phone, please stay on the line.
You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press one...
"Everything from 'grain of dust' to quasar follows the same physical laws"
Except they don't, that's the problem. Galaxies (as the proposed definition describes them) only follow Newtonian physics if we assume there is some mass/energy in them that we can't detect - dark matter.
Either dark matter is real and we figure out what it is at some point, or dark matter is the equivalent of Vulcan to our latest theories - something that's covering for our lack of understanding at the moment.
TBBT usually do well with cameos (George Smoot and Woz spring to mind) so should be good.
“In fact, we’re not exactly sure how we got him. It’s the kind of mystery that could only be understood by, say, a Stephen Hawking.”
Indeed, I think Hawking would understand quite well how he ended up on the show...
Lest we be accused of resorting to imperialism again, maybe there should be a similar range safety system so you can remotely blow up any disastrous launches that may be interpreted by foreign nations as a pre-emptive strike :-)
"Now the software biz behemoth has put its hands up and admitted in a detailed dissection of the blunder how a calendar glitch trashed its server farm. It's also a handy guide to setting up your own wholesale-sized cloud platform."
Surely that should be "a handy guide on how not to set up your own wholesale-sized cloud platform?"
Downvote me all you like, but just because *you* didn't see them, doesn't mean they don't exist - if anything the ones you've seen are put in to keep you happy (particularly if you worked/lived in the ex-pat community). My point is that many cultures squat, and to imply they must be 3rd world countries to do so is just rude.
Not a hobby, just well travelled for business and pleasure.
http://news.sky.com/home/strange-news/article/1310066
Actually Tom I think your confusing "third world cesspits" for many countries around the globe, including France, Italy, Japan, India and even China.
Squat toilets are rather common and I'm told the squat position makes for an easier, erm, movement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squat_toilet for a brief indication of where they're the norm
"To be fair, I don't think I was the first to say that."
Cough, not even the first on the reg forums..
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/1296148
Not that I begrudge you ;-) I was loathed to credit it to Chris Evans, and think it might even have been a listener who texted it in.
"However, I could have bought a brand new paper road atlas every year for the past 6 years, and still have change from one single Garmin map update."
In their defence, the road atlases you bought probably wouldn't give you the detailed change that the Garmin map update did. The equivalent analogy would be to buy every town's A-Z every year for the past 6 years. If they start spinning it like that, it might seem more of a bearable pill to swallow.
None of this is relevant though, as a) I agree its too expensive and b) the idea that "satnavs had caused more than £203m worth of damage to drivers on UK roads in the last year" is utter bollox - bad drivers caused it.
I think the downvotes for a sensible question seems harsh, but yes it's a counterintuitively more efficient means of harnessing an internal combustion engine's power. I believe an ICE is limited to about 40% efficiency as a theoretical maximum. In a standard car, it's real world efficiency is around 20%, less in many occasions.
As Danny points out above, you can keep the engine set to its most efficient speed regardless of where the drivetrain is. Think of it as an infinite ratio gearbox. In this case, with a diesel, it would be a particular improvement given a diesel delivers all its power at the top end of each gear.
A similar setup (forget which, but was a series hybrid) was reviewed on Top Gear a couple of weeks ago. James May tried to explain it to that blithering idiot Clarkson who as expected cut him off stating it was boring nonsense..
"What they haven't said is how they've done it."
No, but I did further up this page. They haven't explicitly enabled mobile signals, but the Metro is primarily cut and shut - there are very few "tunnels" as such - so the mobile signals generally make it into the train.
It's also why a good portion of the Circle line (or the lines that make it up anyway) can get a mobile signal.
I beg to differ. Only about 40% of the network is without mobile signal, the rest is overground, and a fair proportion of the "underground" section is cut/cover which tends to get a signal just fine.
The Metro doesn't have mobile coverage by design, just a happy coincidence due to most of it being largely at surface-level.
I suspect the rationale behind the down votes is:
a) WTF has any of that got to do with a new iPad being launched
b) you appear to want to be posting on another story, can't, and have just grabbed the first vaguely on-topic article you can
c) you've copied and pasted a huuuuuge (and irrelevant) bunch of text instead of a link and your point and finally, crucially
d) TL;DR.
Potentially missed an attempt at sarcasm there, but the shuttle, ISS etc were all ~14.7psi, same as here on earth - it's 5psi in a space suit.
As for the shuttle or ISS smelling bad, the air might not be "changed", but it's sure as hell scrubbed. Hygiene is as important in space as it is here - if anything its more so.
While in principle I agree with you, at least they've seen a bit of sense and stuck a Carl Zeiss on it - they score more hits than misses in my experience. Although 41Mpx is overkill, 2 is considerably underkill. You'll get nice shots on account of the optics, for sure, but won't be able to print them very successfully at anything more than 4x5, tops. It would be enough for me to upgrade the body certainly, though at the moment I'm stuck on 6Mpx and not tempted to upgrade any time soon.
I'm sure I'm not alone in being bored of the price argument. It's broadly in line with the PSP, DS and 3DS at launch. In fact if you look back, it's probably cheaper than the Game Boy and Game Gear were in 1990 when you allow for inflation - I recall those games costing £20-£30 each.
I don't see this failing on price.
"However, stats from the first 10 thumbs (1 up and 9 down) plus myself imply that - based on a sample of 11 commentards - a massive 82% carry their birthdate around in their wallet. Somewhat short of the claimed 99+%."
You can't make that correlation I'm afraid. All we know of the upvoter is that they agree with you that the 99% figure appears bollox, they may still carry a drivers licence (or young person's railcard, or NUS card, or passport, or bus pass, or library card - I'm sure there are more) but just doubt everyone does.
Besides, they're not *claming* anything. They're simply stating what the responders put in a small sample of 1300 people - for all we know they sampled people at a service station on the M4.
@AC I'm assuming you're on Giff Gaff or similar which is switching away from the text cost model and you're helping kill the cash cow, congrats :-) But in terms of most monthly contracts and "free" texts, they're not free, you're just paying for them differently, you can be sure that they're recovering their "lost" revenue via the monthly cost..
@Destroyallmonsters:
"Forced to hand over money, are you?"
See the word voluntary that you even quoted?... It's there for a reason.
Once worked out the cost per MB on SMS. Given it's ~10p per 140bytes, it even makes dial-up seem value for money..
"I wonder how many iPad2 owners actually know the cameras are 1/4 of the resolution of my 5 year old Nokia 6300? Not too many I think...."
I wonder how many iPad2 owners actually use the camera for anything more than Facetime. I wouldn't use it as a camera if it were the best in the world.
Let's face it, the point of it was for Facetime which it does adequately.
"He is CORRECT, the new Sony Z Walkman proprietary DSP enhancements ONLY WORK WITH SONY-SOURCED MUSIC:"
Further BS, or at least just misunderstanding from the very text you quoted. The DSP enhancements are a function of the Sony music apps (the Sony supplied goods Engadget refers to), which you can play any WMA, MP3, PCM and AAC-LC files through. Any third party Android apps won't have access to the DSP though, which is more to do with Android than anything - to make it available everywhere it wouldn't be accessible from the music app itself and would have to be running as a background service the whole time. Given the DSP seems virtual, that's not a surprise.
I suspect the primary reason for people loving it (me included) was the small amount of uptake - guaranteed short queue. The actual time to manoeuvre through it was no quicker than the manual method, perhaps longer - the processing time on it was torturously slow.
My only objection to it closing being the lack of alternative for some - I'm not renewing my passport just to get a sodding chip in it. Just let it run it's course until all passports are ubiquitous again.
Although step backwards with e-passports - with IRIS I don't even need to take my passport out the bag. Same cant be said of e-passports...
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