Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Top Spanish minister shows citizens are thick as tortillas de ballenas

Re: Einstein told us "everything is relative"

Einstein also say "God doesn't play dice". He was wrong about quantum mechanics, so he wasn't infallible....

Franco died in 1975. The first elections were then held in 1977 and a new constitution was formalised in 1978. The new constitution was unequivocal in separating church and state, so it's hardly surprising that the law was dropped.

Building a better society from the Czechs' version of Meccano

@Steve Davies 3

" an 8.8mm Canon "

I prefer 35mm Canons, but I'll settle for a micro-four-thirds digital model.

Scientists splice mammoth genes into unsuspecting elephant

Re: Well I feel sorry for Mrs Elephant.

You realise that mammoths were the same size as Asian elephants, right? Don't let the name fool you.

Re: Animal made from ancient degraded DNA released into the wild

I think mammoths are kind of safe -- compared to (for example) cane toads, it would be trivially easy to hunt them down and cull them if required. Much like the sequoias imported and planted in the UK -- if they did prove to be dangerous weeds, we could find them all (they can't hide) and cut them down, and within one sequoia generation, there would be no more sequioas in the UK.

BLOOD STAR of the NEANDERTHALS passed close to our Sun

Re: But everyone knows you can't take panto comets seriously

Oh no you can't.

@Wilseus

Are you telling me that Superman was colourblind? So how does he know what kryptonite looks like?

Analyst dons Tim Cook mask, thinks: Glass went well for Google. Let's do that, too

" 1) The video camera (if any) has a hard cover that has to be slid aside/opened before filming. Will protect the lens and also make it very obvious to bystanders whether you're recording or not "

No it won't -- there are plenty of AR apps that will could make use of the camera without recording being on -- real-time text translation, for example.

@Jubtastic1

" another 5 years or so of miniturisation before anyone can make a pair of AR sunglasses indistinguishable from ordinary sunglasses, that's when Apple will release a product* "

Except that sunglasses are currently getting larger, specifically because designers need them to be big enough to carry a brand and be recognisable. Apple want to be visible and recognisable, so getting right down to sunglasses size isn't strictly necessary....

Vince Cable opens hipster-friendly London tech creche

Re: a uniquely British solution

The "uniquely British solution" for any problem is to make lots of disparaging jokes about the French, then realise that they own half your infrastructure.

Thus I conclude that Cable is suggesting privatising city councils, and selling them off to French-led consortiums.

Watchdog slaps American Apparel's youthful naked arse

What is more concerning...

I can't help feeling that this is a very odd bit of clothing. It looks like a swimsuit for when you're not... well.. swimming, but it fact it's really a T-shirt that goes between your legs in order to avoid wrinkling or rising. Why would anyone put up with a constant wedgie from a T-shirt, just to avoid a wee bit of wrinkling?

Atomic keyrings: Just how bright are they?

Re: Decommissioned nukes

Oh no, we have had the global thermonuclear war. However, the machines made us forget when they plugged us into their VR system. They have also evolved a warped sense of humour, hence the Occulus Rift making people puke.

Gamers! Ransomware will scramble your save files unless you cough up $1,000

@AC

" I'd be more worried about it being a MAC! "

As this is a Flash-based attack, your network hardware is not relevant, thus spoofing an alternate MAC for your NIC isn't going to have any effect.

FCC says cities should be free to run decent ISPs. And Republicans can't stand it

Food greatly simplifies intertate commerce, in that people who don't eat die. (Reductio ad absurdum.)

Other people are scared...

It's not just the ISPs proper that are scared -- it's a fairly big issue for MacDonald's and Starbucks too. If you do any amount of travelling, a recognisable chain which advertises free wifi in all its outlets can be very appealing. It's certainly easier than going into an unknown local café and asking about wifi, particularly if you don't know the local language.

A knock-on effect of keeping municipal internet services fee-paying, is there can be no free municipal wifi. Municipal wifi is a great leveller, because with it, we know we can get online literally anywhere, so we don't head to the multinational chains....

Apple LIGHTSABERS to feature in The Force Awakens

Re: Reboot?

Annakin, both the "I see dead people" version, and the "I see nothing but red" version, deserves to be booted out the airlock...

Re: It's just a movie....

" The Star Wars prequels are similar to Starship Troopers (the movie) in the sense that most people criticising them do entirely miss the plot. Don't see the wood for the trees, so to say. "

Not the right cliché. The plot was tiny, and hidden behind all the distracting fluff tacked on (which is not what vignettes are, incidentally. I'd say the plot was a clearing, which you couldn't see because the viewer was outside an Endor-sized forest with a whole moon's worth of trees between the viewer and the clearing.

The theme held promise -- the corruption of power -- but the overall plot was ridiculous. Episode I in particular had a lot of people moving about for no clear reason. Episode II had two people who appeared more robotic than R2D2 deciding not only that they understood the concept of "love", but that they were in it. Episode II gave the opportunity for a good tragic twist when the Trade Federation told Kenobi that they were building the Death Star to fight against Darth Sidious, but then Lucas chickened out and made that a lie. The Greek-level tragedy of Obi-Wan destroying the galaxy's last hope against the founding of the Empire and personally delivering the plans for the Death Star to the future Emperor would have been a fantastic plot twist.

And in the end, even the political intrigue needed a figure of ridicule to pull it off. It should have been someone we liked who messed up.

Re: Warranty void if seal is broken

"They'll probably have a standby mode, and an irreplacable fuel source that needs recharging every 24 hours."

I'd be more worried about the fact that you can't plug it into a charger without it turning itself on. Kind of risky.

Re: Retrogression of the "Force".

@Vlad,

" You are angry, AC. Anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. "

Suffering leads to ???, and ??? leads to profit.

Re: Retrogression of the "Force".

" As for why the lightsabres might get more spitty. Well, let me think... hmm three seconds later I came up with the idea that possibly it's because all the other Jedi/Sith are dead and the couple who are left lost the previously refined art of constructing lightsabres and are trying to work it out from the beginning again, hence the technology is messier. Obviously three seconds thinking is too difficult for you. "

If you'd thought three seconds more, you'd have remembered that Luke Skywalker's Return of the Jedi light saber was built by Luke himself, seemingly after the death of Yoda, so with no ancient Jedi blacksmiths left to pass on the knowledge. Luke's entire Jedi training appears to have consisted of a week with Kenobi and a few months with Yoda, so it can't have been that hard.

Kanye West: Yo, DNS... Imma let you finish, but this gTLD is one of the best of all time

Re: Bah!

He is a gay fish.

LICKED: Behold my TOAD-PROOF ERECTION, boasts Aussie boffin

Re: That fence will exclude everything not just the toad

Yes, but the reservoirs aren't part of the natural ecosystem, so blocking them off completely would rebalance things quite nicely.

Silicene takes on graphene as next transistor wonder-stuff

@Andre Carniero

"Still waiting to see real-world applications of graphene, though..."

It's nanotech -- why would you expect to see it?

Turbocharged quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed, global geekgasm likely

Re: Competitors dead in the water?

Still 100 MBIt and no SATA.

<p>And still no sign of audio in. I mean, seriously -- the Broadcom SoC was designed for camcorders and embedded multimedia, but there's no ADC anywhere on the Pi board. It's an unbelievably odd design decision.

NY premiere of The Interview cancelled after hackers' terrorist threats

Actually...

I think the studio that made the film win this one -- how much free press is this generating? And there'll be plenty of people who go to see it to "stand up for freedom". Pass the popcorn....

Unlock your mobe by STROKING it with your PEARL

"It's not a pearl, it's a bean."

Well, that's how I heard it anyway.

Finland ditches copyright levy on digital kit, pays artists directly

Budgets declining.

"if the state budget declines, so too may artists’ remuneration. "

This is not a problem. Consider:

The state remuneration is to compensate for lost sales in implementing a right to "space-shift" recorded media. This is important because increasing consumers' rights over recordings retroactively changes the value of the product. The industry can say "but we could have charged more if we'd known," which is true. So they are compensated.

However, look at where we are now. We now know that people will copy files across devices. It is expected. Therefore, the labels should be accounting for it in the price of first sale.

It follows that the revenue in artists' compensation schemes should drop year on year as the industry adapts.

Everyone's happy, no?

UK.gov STILL won't pop a cap on stolen mobile bills

Profits...

Note also the fact that mobile operators are "unable" to block premium rate numbers. I appreciate that call charges are different on landlines and mobiles, but... WTF?!?!? I mean, how is it technically feasible to block premium calls on landline exchanges, but not mobile ones? It's the same bloody thing! The only difference is that the operators have CHOSEN not to implement such call barring. Their choice, their negligence, their responsibility... surely?

Pervert's Guide man's new book, an urban myths tome and Youth, an underrated gem

Re: Some BS

Indeed. No historical society has institutionalised individualism and thrived in the long term. Modern society is a corruption of earlier family-like tribal structures. Individuals have used positions of trust (head of the household) and slowly mutated them into positions of "authority". Domination etymologically meant little more than running a household, patriarchy was just doing as your father said. But now these words have been corrupted by office-bearers to mean something more controlling and sinister.

This sort if self-interested individualism killed Rome. It was the increasing servitude of feudalism that triggered the French Revolution and the birth of modern democracy. Industrial capitalists' lack of altruism led to trade unionism and communism, but they only stalled the march of the current individualist wave which is set to bring our society tumbling down.

Re: It doesn't require much genius to know it is far easier to provide criticism when

Spoken like a politician. Politicians love criticism to be accompanied by a counter-proposal, because then they can attack the counter-proposal rather than having to defend the flaws in the current system (and no system is wihout flaws). This leaves us with a "disposable politic society" where we throw away all our policies and start from scratch on new policies, instead of mending only the broken parts. Nowhere is this clearer than in education, where every 30-ish years we swing between strict grammar-spelling-and-times-tables "basic skills" teaching, and let-them-be-free-to-create "holistic" teaching, instead of integrating the two (NB lots of individual teachers do go work resolving the two ideologies into a coherent whole,but it's never institutionally codified).

So it's good to go into some depth about the problems without confusing the debate by introducing one of an infintite variety of possible solutions.

The IT Crowd's internet in a box gets $240k of crowdcash for a cause

Re: Eh?

@Peshman

" but if a signal is broadcast on a particular frequency then how do you stop that particular frequency from being hijacked? Or there is nobody capable of spoofing a satellite transmission signal to bork your bit of hardware? "

If that's really a concern, then the best trick would be to use a parabolic receiver, which is traditionally used to isolate a particular signal from a particular point in line-of-sight -- in common parlance, a "satellite dish".

Obviously not all satellite receivers bother with the parabolic dish now (GPS, most satellite phones) but if interference is a genuine concern (and it will be if you're operating on a band that isn't specifically reserved by the ITU) then you'll be wanting that dish....

Human DNA 'will be found on moon' – Brian Cox

Re: WILL THIS BE BRIANS LEGACY?

"has this fuck actually contributed to science or has he just passed a load of exams?"

The former. Exams finish at MSc level, and you get a chair (professorship) based on your academic weight. You can look up some of his papers, if you like. I don't know what the ATLAS project is, but I'm pretty certain he's using the LHC at CERN for more than just high-energy Scalectrix...

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/23398545

Re: Helium-3

Yeah, but then some 21st century human hair gets in the reactor and mutates. Future man will be wiped out by the resulting monster!

'Open source just means big companies can steal your code.' O RLY?

Re: It's the crystals!

I'd be careful -- if you focus too much on the crystal, you may well end up locked in, and waiting for Mumsy to come round with a bowl of soup.

Re: Awards to ACs

@Khaptain:

"the fact that PC crowd can become exceptionally distastefull"

You must be some kind of Apple fanboi.

/me ducks, and scuttles off into the bushes chuckling to himself.

Sarong it's right: Coining it in Thailand without a visa

Funny how pedants are so quick to show their superior knowledge that they don't even stop to check the Oxford English Dictionary. No mention of purchasing in their definition of the word.

Clara goes to the dark side, with dark secrets revealed in Dark Water

On the subject of spoilers...

Why does El Reg have the Cybermen spoiler on the subhead on the main page? Surely that's no place for spoilers....

Re: Fav moment

They also showed the cybermen in the thumbnail pic on iPlayer. Way to kill the tension, BBC.

Sway: Microsoft's new Office app doesn't have an Undo function

Re: it's an beta release

Maybe you've never done any software dev, so here's a little lesson about undo features: if you don't code them in from the ground up, they're unlikely to work. I find Microsoft's lack of an undo feature disturbing.

Facebook's Zuckerberg in EBOLA VIRUS FIGHT: Billionaire battles bug

Re: Good on him

"Zuckerberg is giving a mountain of money for a worthy cause"

And that worthy cause is Zuckerberg trying to minimise his chances of getting the disease.

Re: Great, but...

There has only ever been one Doctor! (Well, at any given time, that is....)

A drone of one's own: Reg buyers' guide for UAV fanciers

Re: Ignore the licence requirements

@Phil W

" it would be worth pointing out that the article author didn't say to ignore the rules or the insurance, only not to bother getting a licence. "

Right. Now you find me an insurance company that will pay out on an unlicensed individual.

Remember Palm's WebOS? LG does – check out its smart TVs

@Steven Raith Re: Wrong priorities

I gave up trying to connect tellies to hifis a few years ago, as all this digital processing seems to mess up the sync.

Plan 9 moves out from Lucent licence space

Re: how would this go on phablets ?

@DougS,

" If you add everything it needs to be used on a modern mobile device, it will no longer be minimal and lightweight when compared to Unix. "

Not necessarily. A lot of the cruft and bloat in modern operating systems is legacy material that can't be removed due to backward compatibility issues, or simply for fear of unintended consequences. Building direct from "back then" to "now" while skipping all the in-between stuff should result in a lighter, quicker OS that modern *n*x variants.

That said, it still wouldn't be worth the bother. Some people might find it useful for embedded work, but it's not going to set the world alight....

Trials of 'Iron Man' military exoskeleton due in June

First practical market:

Mike Brown:

"Without a very effecient, and small battery these suits are going to very limited in range: the length of the power cord."

This is why the only market I can think of for the initial units is for steadicam operators. A full steadicam rig typically weighs around 50kg, and I've seen steadicam operators who don't weigh much more than that to start with. A lot of the time the cameras will be on an umbilical anyway rather than battery power, so the power lead won't be an extra burden if it's bound into the same "snake" as the camera power and signal cables.

By increasing the weight capacity of the operator, they'll be able to use heavier cameras still, and I'm sure you all know what that means.... Yep, that's right: seasickness-inducing stereoscopic steadicam 3D!!!!

Minecraft developer kills Kickstarted Minecraft movie

Re: IP, you say...?

So making a full-length Star Trek fan movie is, well, fans dicking around not-for-profit, but a machinima/live-action hybrid set in a universe that has no story of its own is piracy on the high seas?

There are Star Trek fan movies out there with the blessing of the copyright holders, and these are alright, because they have the permission. There are parodies that exist under the US provisions that protect parody, so these are alright. If they weren't alright, they wouldn't be there, because those guys have lawyers like you wouldn't believe.

Gamers in a flap as Vietnamese dev pulls Flappy Bird

Yaks?

Last I heard he kept sheep and llamas on his plot of land in Wales, but no yaks.

(Actually, I recall being told that yaks can't survive at low altitudes because the air pressure would kill them... I wonder if this is an urban myth...

...google...

Wikipedia says they "do not thrive at lower altitudes", so it's not instantly fatal, but also that they begin to suffer heat exhaustion at 15 degrees Celsius.)

(Goddammit... I need to get a job.)

Re: Flappy bird in Blender

"Nobody will begrudge a small developer hitting it big."

Welcome to the internet -- you're new round here aren't you...?

Heck, welcome, intergalactic traveller, to the Planet Earth. May I introduce you to the dominant species on this planet, "humanity"?

HARD ONES: Three new PC games that are BLOODY DIFFICULT

Re: It's not the 80s, and things have moved on.

Horses for courses, pal.

Restrictions on game mechanics have knock-on effects in level design, and as long as the two are considered in parallel and feed into each other, there's no problem.

The most valid way to complete a game is by learning and mastering the game mechanics. If you have no save points, à la 80s and 90s gaming, that means there will be a lot of replaying to be done. If you replay, you will be constantly improving your base skill level before hitting the new stuff, so the game difficulty can ramp up pretty quickly.

If, however, you never need to replay a completed section, the next section can't really assume you've mastered the mechanic, and you're forced to make the next level only very slightly harder. This means you've got to write more content to get the same overall learning curve and final mastery level for the game. However, it also risks the designers slipping into "very obvious" mode for a lot of the levels, where the solution to the next difficult bit relies directly on the new trick that you've just picked up.

If you add a save option into a well designed game that had no saves, the game will become boring. If you take the save games out of a well designed game with savegames, the game will become boring.

The two things are different.

Look out, Earth! Here comes China Operating System (aka Linux)

Re: What a bunch of wimps.

Maybe they just forked an alpha version of the Ubuntu Touch codebase? Legally, there's nothing stopping them (GPL and all that).