* Posts by The Indomitable Gall

1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Sony hits stop on Walkman tape players

The Indomitable Gall
Terminator

Err... what?!?

"@"a tradition that has lasted longer than any of the intervening recording formats"

Accelerating technological change means we will see shorter life spans for products."

That's entirely beside the point. The text you quote refers to the tradition of dire warnings on loss of hearing and wandering into moving traffic. Your response makes no sense.

Does... not... com... pute....

Nigerian airline ticket fraudster gets 8 years

The Indomitable Gall

Hmmm....

"Ademola Ismaila Adegoke, 43, a Nigerian-born resident of Accra, Ghana, was jailed for 102 months on Friday after he was convicted of using stolen credit card numbers to steal more than $400,000 from US citizens. Adegoke, who agreed to pay $696,026 in restitution, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in July."

Surely agreeing to pay that much restitution lines him up to be done for further fraud? I seriously doubt he got the extra 300K by any more legitimate means than the 400K involved in the case....

Vulture 1 rolls out of fab bunker

The Indomitable Gall

We'd better hope...

We'd better hope it falls apart shortly after release so that we actually get to see it. That thing reaching Earth intact would be a real culinary millinary moment, and what's the point of it when (to use the popular vernacular) "pictures, or it didn't happen"...?

Facebook comes down hard on Faceporn

The Indomitable Gall

To be fair....

To be fair, the porn industry is well-known for playing off other people's trademarks. The fact that Hollywood generally leaves them alone is no real excuse.

And considering the minor role face plays in porn, it's not hard to twig what they're up to.

Wikileaks outs 400,000 classified Iraq War docs

The Indomitable Gall

According to the internet...

According to the internet, the Americans think this is an "Arabian proverb". Personally I think they fell for it, hook line and sinker.

Mobe operators foresee SIM-based contactless payment

The Indomitable Gall

Fork!

It's a classic fork (in the chess sense, not the source code sense). Use a pocket protector to prevent fraudulent contactless payment snooping and you don't receive incoming calls. Be open to receive incoming calls and have your data exposed.

If we need contactless tech, it should be possible to shield it when not required.

Vulture 1 sprouts wings and a tail

The Indomitable Gall

Judging by the colour....

Judging by the colour, Stelios is getting as stingy as O'Leary....

Cameron cocks up UK's defences - and betrays Afghan troops

The Indomitable Gall

As a Scot...

As a Scot, I can sympathise. We have our own parliament with its own budget that keeps getting the rug pulled out from under it by another bigger parliament that changes its budget all the time.

The Indomitable Gall
Coat

No cuts in Afghanistan.

To be fair, nobody asked Cameron *how* he'd avoid cuts in Afghanistan. His strategy is quite simple: he's reducing the number of blades!!!

Futuristic Judge Dredd smartguns issued to 101st Airborne

The Indomitable Gall

Trademarks...?

I don't think Elmer's Products Inc, owners of the X-Acto precise craft-knife trademark will be best pleased. But of course the Pentagon is above petty laws, isn't it?

Provincial outrage over BT's broadband upgrade race

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Sigh - let the flaming begin

I'm going to try to avoid this being a flame, and try to stay rational.

The internet has in the last 10 years turned from something cool to part of the fabric of consumer and business life.

The internet was supposed to free us rural folk from the need to all migrate to cities when we grew up. I grew up, I migrated to a city. I would love to go back home, but the infrastructure just ain't there.

Leaving rural areas on dial-up is like giving them cycle paths instead of roads and saying the cost of their choice to live in the countryside is that they can't get access to fast transport. It's the country dwellers who need cars most, and it's the country dwellers, without access to the bright lights of the west-end party scene and close access to offices etc that need the internet.

The Western Isles were so badly served by BT that they had to develop their own too-clever-by-half wireless system that 8 years in is badly outdated, underspecced and riddled with faults. And not yet finished.

BT are a business, but they are also a monopoly, particularly in the sort of places we're talking about now. Capitalism abhors commercial monopoly. Socialism abhors commercial monopoly. It's time to nationalise the internet.

Microsoft's fear of an OpenOffice

The Indomitable Gall

Interesting video.

The whole argument in favour of MS Office appears to be:

It's easier for new users... because they've used it elsewhere.

It's easier if you're sending out documents... because the other guy probably uses it.

It's easier if you're receiving documents... because the other guy probably uses it.

It's easier if you used to use MS Office... because your files were written in MS Office.

In summary:

Use Microsoft Office: it's not open or compatible with other products, so you've got no choice! Bend over, assume the position and prepare to receive 6 inches of pure monopoly.

Spanish fascist decries Franco Eurovision slur

The Indomitable Gall

True, but...

...there wouldn't have been an "other side" if the Falange hadn't outsted the democratically elected government, in order to defend "traditional Spanish values" from the Spanish people, who didn't actually hold them to start off with.

If it wasn't for the war, the craziest nutters in some of the fringe anarchist groups would never have gained prominence, but when it comes to shooting you neighbours, being an amoral self-serving b*st*rd is a useful qualification.

PARIS radio chap slips into safe sex outfit

The Indomitable Gall

Ah boo...

And here I thought it was going to be a post-watershed A-team-esque condom-as-waterproofing jury rig.

Great white sharks menace Blighty

The Indomitable Gall

Meanwhile, in the Truro WeightWatchers committee room...

"They don't like human flesh as we are not fatty enough"

Hey guys, I think I've got our next poster campaign -- "shed that sharkbait".

Microsoft confirms Russian pill-pusher attack on its network

The Indomitable Gall

Reason? Reason?!?

There is nothing unreasonable about ill-informed internet ranting -- it is our human right to make broad sweeping judgements without full knowledge of the facts.

We thank the great demigod Berners-Lee for allowing our opinionated pub politics to be spread with the whole wide world. I will now sacrifice a mouse in his honour.

(Oh wait, someone's already nicked my mouse and reception have no spares...)

Jobsian fondle-slab in SEXY FILTHGRAM CRACKDOWN

The Indomitable Gall

Would that be...?

Would that perchance be a "veil of tiers" then?

Amazon shrinks books with Kindle Singles

The Indomitable Gall

Language change.

This is a demonstration of linguistic evolution in action.

Remember that what you call correct, the generation before would call an error.

Wouldst thou prefer that nothing change?

The Indomitable Gall

Not a new idea, though...

Some of the independent e-publishers already have a good line in short stories for sale individually rather than in collections.

It's a natural evolution in the market as (as Amazon said) the industry's previous love of novels and collections was mostly led by printing formats and pricing, and producing an efficient and profitable format, much the same as music albums vs singles.

Just as music downloads have meant the unbundling of the album into singles, the ebook was always going to lead to the unbundling of anthologies into individual stories.

Spycam school to pay damages for kiddie snaps

The Indomitable Gall

Agreed^2

Quite right. Suing the public purse is pointless -- prosecute, or at the very least sack and ban from ever working with children again.

Facebook introduces one-time passwords

The Indomitable Gall

Johnny 5 need input...

...like in what country?

I doubt the number will be same worldwide....

Cambridge chap's todger topiary gets the chop

The Indomitable Gall

Could have just...

He could have just trimmed the b*ll*cks back a bit and claimed it was a New York fire hydrant.

Germans radio tag ID cards and phones

The Indomitable Gall

Rock and a hard place...

Clever evil plot by some shadowy cabal, or badly thought through incompetence...?

If you have an RFID tag on your ID card, you but it in a wallet that blocks radio waves when you don't want it read. If you put your mobile in a wallet that blocks radio waves... well, I think you see the problem.

Legendary steampunk computer 'should be built' - programmer

The Indomitable Gall

Absolute opposite of OO....

The point of OO is that the operations are intrinsically linked to the objects operated upon and the results of the operation. Lovelace was pretty much declarative, borderlining on functional, in her approach to programming.

Canada prostitution laws pulverised: politicians apoplectic

The Indomitable Gall

Out of where...?

Given the record of public figures, I have to ask who put them there, and whether they were paid for this service or not....

Ireland gives Google traditional pogue mahone greeting

The Indomitable Gall

Busoms?

Why are you showing us pictures of blokes backsides if you have pictures of hibernian bulgarian airbags? Hand them over!

Artist crafts Kevin Bacon bacon bust

The Indomitable Gall

Is it just me...

Is it just me, or does that look more like Patrick Swayze? What's his 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon?

Virgin Media introduces P2P throttling

The Indomitable Gall

The point of net non-neutrality...

The academic justification behind a non-neutral net is that certain applications require extremely low lag (eg streaming media, VoIP) and certain applications don't (eg bulk file downloads). The ISPs are only doing what the universities have been proposing since the 90s.

Net TV to consign Net Neutrality debate to dustbin of history. Why?

The Indomitable Gall

Who pays...?

Well, in the end, the consumer pays.

If content providers have to pay extra for end-user delivery, they add it to the bill and it comes out of the public's pockets.

If you doubt this, consider mail order. The suppliers pay the cost of delivery, but there's that little entry "P&P" on your bill -- they pass the cost on to you.

But unlike Sky, the Beeb can't just arbitrarily up it's income to compensate for increased outgoings. In the old days if I wanted info from the BBC I was invited to send them a stamped-addressed-envelope, which in the old days we abbreviated to SAE. That way they were able to send me their content without receiving money (not allowed) and without incurring unacceptable costs.

Let's call my ISP fees my new "SAE".

Star Wars set for 3D rehash

The Indomitable Gall

Because...

Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill are too old now.

And because Lucas cashed those chips in when he allowed a bunch of cheap hack paperback writers to create a series of follow-on novels. And a bunch of cheap hack comic writers to create an independent series of follow-on comics. And then allowed the cheap hack comic writers to rewrite the cheap hack paperbacks into one single continuous comic-book "canon", involving characters from the films who weren't even in the films.

With this deft move, he made it impossible to write new films that wouldn't p!ss off the fanboys who'd bought into the cheap hack sci-fis, and writing films based on the cheap hack fiction would result in something even less appealing than the prequel trilogy.

No cassette required: ZX Spectrum games on the iPhone

The Indomitable Gall

Hang on....

Isn't everyone always complaining about how the price of games never drops? Well when I was buying games for the C64, the budget titles went for 3.99, and full price titles 12.99, so yes, prices have dropped. £1 is, was and always will be, practically nothing.

ACS:Law's mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k

The Indomitable Gall

Hmmm....

I'm reminded of a certain XKCD strip:

http://xkcd.com/591/

Copper prices push cable thefts to new high

The Indomitable Gall

Do we need any more justification...

Do we need any more justification for a national fibre network? Let's free ourselves from reliance on overpriced nickable copper and replace it with cheap glass.

Microsoft adopts invisible mobile pitch

The Indomitable Gall

Lots of info on the home screen?

Nope. There's still curvy edge blue boxes with a lot of padding inside and out. Reduce the chrome, increase the content.

Nutter repairmen scale 1,768ft TV mast

The Indomitable Gall

You know...

The copyright owner has withdrawn that video from circulation. You may not be hosting it, but still....

UN appoints alien liaison boffin

The Indomitable Gall

Operation global barricade

A series of strategical shrapnel explosions in the upper atmosphere should produce a layer of high-velocity space junk that would slow them down while we prepare our response. Which would probably be a genetically engineer supermosquito with genetically re-engineered malaria.

Mozilla Labs dreams of projected keyboard phone

The Indomitable Gall

Concept phone?

It looks like concept *artwork* to me. A concept phone would be something I could hold in my hand.

Give me 25 minutes with a pack of Crayola and a ream of A4 and I'll deliver you loads of "concept phones"....

Keene USB FM Transmitter

The Indomitable Gall

mini-CD

"The Keene USB FM Transmitter comes with one of those godawful mini CDs to run the Windows installer from, but thankfully, you can download the software from the product web page"

Well you must be a slot-loader man then.

Seriously, what is wrong with a mini-CD? So many hardware items have a smaller footprint than a full-sized CD, so including a full sized one means more wasted packaging, and fewer in the same space in the warehouse, delivery van and shop.

Besides, if nothing else, the mini-CD is the perfect "hi-tech" prop for cheap sci-fi. You get something that looks advanced (because it's smaller) but you get it from a normal shop at normal prices. Everyone's a winner.

Google cools data center with bottom of Baltic Sea

The Indomitable Gall

Mummy's gone to Iceland...

Why isn't this happening in Iceland? They got massive big hydro dams generating enough electricity to make them one of the most important aluminium smelting nations on the planet, even though electricity is a rubbish power source for aluminium smelting.

Those dams don't just supply power, they've also got some incredibly massive heatsinks behind them that stay at extremely low temperatures for fresh water all year round thanks to a combination of altitude and latitude.

Iceland's in the EEA, but not the EU, which is probably quite useful in terms of regulatory approval vs regulatory interference.

It might seem a bit remote, but it's pretty well cabled up, connecting with Canada, Greenland, the Faroes, the UK, Denmark and Germany. That gives it reasonable access time to both North America and Western and Northern Europe.

There's a lot of potential there for back-ends and backups, as well as dedicated services.

School caretaker jailed for fitting up colleague

The Indomitable Gall

Hmmm....

Now this Weiner guy definitely needs banged up -- his actions were dispicable and criminal -- but I'm a bit wary of the posession of images charges here. Isn't that legislation aimed at paedos? But no-one's suggesting for a minute that this man is a paedo.

Also, the clearest sign of a witch-hunt mentality is when people accuse others of being witches just because they don't like them.

Facebook on the blink for second time in two days

The Indomitable Gall

Network probs...?

When I tried to connect it reported a DNS error, so I'm not sure the scepticism is really justified.

Universities warn Willetts on science cuts

The Indomitable Gall

Austerity....

I'm always fearful when that term gets bandied about. It has the feel of "mourning" in a puritanical society. Don't smile -- mourning/austerity. Don't run -- mourning/austerity.

Austerity is an excuse for life to stop, but life cannot stop. If we stop thinking about the future, we make no progression towards it. Education and research is our future, so the usual murmur of "austerity" is no good excuse. Invest in the future or we shall be forever whispering austerity.

Moses' parting of the Red Sea: New sim explains whole thing

The Indomitable Gall

Two things....

Most myth has a grain of truth in it somewhere.

The epic of Gilgamesh may not be true, but the flood story was inspired by massive flooding on a scale that is extremely rare, but that has been shown to have happened from geographical and archeological evidence. There are even those who suggest that the Noah story was founded on the same floods, perhaps even as a corruption of the same story as Gilgamesh.

Therefore finding the mechanism described in the Bible -- a wind that parts the waters across a hidden land-bridge -- does not say that Moses crossed the landbridge. It merely says that someone may have at one time witnessed the phenomenon, and it may have later become incorporated into myth (a theory which could be corroborated by finding Egyptian, Palestinian or Jordanian folk tales incorporating a similar parting-of-the-waters scenario).

Finding a natural mechanism in the physical world that can do what the Bible does not prove that the Exodus (which is a recognised historical event) happened as described in the Bible. And neither does it prove that if it did happen, [g|G]od was not involved. Because as others have said, to be that lucky would be downright miraculous.

But even though it proves nothing, it's still a valid piece of research.

Thieves jam key-fob lock signals in mystery car thefts

The Indomitable Gall

Well that was predictable....

It was bound to happen, wasn't it?

So what's the solution? Maybe sticking a piece of metal into the car that contains a physical code that can be used to activate or deactive the locking mechanism. I call this revolutionary device a "car key", and have lodged my patent application with the USPTO.

Police issue lettuce e-fit

The Indomitable Gall

Actually...

I think the crazy hair actually manages to distract from the imperfections in the face, making it seem (bizarrely) *more* human than it would with normal efit hair....

Surprise Automotive X Prize winners announced

The Indomitable Gall
FAIL

Re: Shortsighted. Try this on.

@AC:

"If you sell one tech and give your money to another, it uses your cash to grow and improve to a stage where demand for the new tech can outstrip the existing."

You don't seem to understand stocks and shares. When you buy shares, you buy them from a shareholder, not the company. Similarly, if a shareholder wants to sell shares, he has to find someone who's willing to buy, which is most likely not the company the shares are in.

A high volume of sales will have a negative effect on the value of shares, but this has no direct effect on the company's own business. Selling shares in Esso won't affect the price of petrol, for instance.

Facebook fone? Feh, says Facebook

The Indomitable Gall

Surely

Surely the point of a Facebook phone would be to have a native client with direct support for adverts?

The need for a native client would be justified by allowing you to align your phonebook with your Facebook friends, even if they didn't have their phone number in their profile, so that you could phone direct from Facebook, without having to go back to the address book.

BT feathers ruffled over pigeon-based file transfer caper

The Indomitable Gall

Speaking as a confirmed city dweller...

"Societies and economies exist in balance and that includes people living in rural, industrial, urban areas etc. If everyone moves to the city the economy would be even more unstable and dependence on externally sourced products and services would significantly decrease national wealth and living standards."

That's exactly his point.

So who was the stupid one again?

Devil manifests in Hungarian bathroom

The Indomitable Gall

My curtains.

There's an old sailor in my curtains dancing to Saturday Night Fever.

Slightly less newsworthy than Satan or Jesus, but no less real....

Tinfoil 'radiation shield' maternity wear hits 'Frisco

The Indomitable Gall

What did they hire them to do, though...?

I would say the company was independent.

I suspect they were given the fabric and asked "does it block radiation?"

I suspect the answer was "It has an attenuating effect in the range 10MHz-8GHz, but this only accounts for (whatever)% of non-ionising radiation at ground level."

It's quite easy for the company to get rid of everything after the "but" and still be reporting the findings without lying.