Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Subscribers get $3 each in Classmates suit. How much did the lawyers make?

As I was saying the other week....

People keep talking about how the threat of law suits keeps companies in line. Like hell it does. These settlements are always insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and the perpetrator always comes off lightly because they've saved enough money through whatever shady or careless practice they're hauled up for that they're still in the black.

There's no out-of-court settlement against a statutory fine, and it doesn't stop individuals suing for damages. "Small government" fails its electorate -- any civilised country should be protecting its citizens better than that.

Apple adds 'make the web go away' button to Safari 5

Clean and readable...

...yet unsustainably unprofitable...

Stephen Fry's truly terrible mistake

Killer quote!

"Willie Donaldson's 'Dictionary of National Celebrity' famously defined him as "A stupid person's idea of a clever person""

This I shall remember. It is good.

But is Fry really an actor?

He's certainly getting a lot of acting work these days, but I don't really think of him as "an actor" any more. He's a personality, a commentator, and perhaps the closest thing the average TV viewer will see to a philosopher.

When he sells tea, I still see the actor. But what I see in this campaign is different -- I see a trusted media figure, a man of unquestionable intellect, giving me advice. (Fortunately, I already know his advice is wrong.)

You can say that this is my fault, but it's pretty damned normal really, and is, after all, the reason they're using him for the campaign in the first place.

6music, eh?

You do realise that 6music is on the chopping block, don't you? Hardly worth going DAB for that....

New cycle helmets emit stench if they need replacement

Well, for my part...

I had a pretty spectacular fall and the helmet absorbed the impact well enough that I didn't even realise my head had contacted the ground. It also ensured that neither my face nor my glasses connected with the nasty rough bitumen --either would have been messy.

Gadget tax needed 'to save US newspapers'

How dare you!!!

"There will come a time soon when MPs will easily be able to ignore whatever crap papers decide to use as a dog whistle for easily enraged idiots (immigration anyone?)"

Immigration is a serious problem and not just an issue for "easily enraged idiots". These people aren't coming over here and doing unpleasant jobs like toilet cleaning and sewer maintenance at thoroughly pitiful wages.

Nonononono.

They're squatting in our sheds and eating our swans while living in posh flats paid for by the taxpayer and dining in swanky restaurants at our expense!!!!!

Pacific islands growing not shrinking, says old study

Escrow...?

Surely if there's doubt over the legitimacy of compensation claims, the courts shouldn't be ordering one way or the other, but making a provisional judgement that places the compensation in escrow pending final evidence of the damage (ie islands going under), with a time limit? The funds would then either be used to relocate the displaced population (surely the point) or returned to the other party.

That way no-one loses.

US Navy develops toss-proof robot crane

Hmm....

Combine with this related story...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/24/self_assembly_floating_fortresses/

...and it looks like there's a genuine plan coming together.

Steve Jobs beheads iPad apps for acting like desktops

Irony...

"I have been a regular customer of Apple since the summer of 1984."

You couldn't have picked a more ironic year, given the circumstances.

Skype to start charging for iPhone VoIP

No, this is why...

This is actually why we need the traffic shaping.

There are multiple use cases for the internet.

Some of these need near-instant response speeds -- eg VoIP.

Some of these require large transfers over a more flexible timeframe -- eg downloading Linux ISOs.

Some are less fussy -- eg surfing (your download time is now very often shorter than the browser rendering time).

Traffic shaping allows us to dedicate the resources that each needs. We dedicate the voice bandwidth to voice users at the cost of longer download times for other uses -- shouldn't voice users pay for that?

Top 500 supers – The Dawning of the GPUs

The USA...

...maybe the government should be asking its agencies to time-share? I mean, do they really need all that power all the time?

Woman sues Google after highway knockdown

You know what?

There's probably already been lots of people who *have* been killed because of this. We only haven't heard about it because they're dead and their iPhones got trashed in the accident.

This is actually dangerous, you know.

A possible explanation

"It is of course puzzling why Rosenberg did not use the evidence of her own eyes to decide Google Maps' instructions were best ignored.

Almost as puzzling as why she has set the lower bar for suing the world's biggest ad broker at a mere $100,000."

Her lawyer probably figures that given that she ignored the law and (presumably) at least one "no pedestrians" sign, she has a better chance of winning a claim centred on direct costs than punitive damages.

Quit Facebook Day flops

Erm... first I've heard of it.

Didn't even know it was happening.

BBC One HD to launch this autumn

HD Mux? Inefficiencies!!!

The idea of a HD mux is flawed if there's going to be simulcast HD/SD channels. Popping BBC1 HD on the same mux as BBC1 SD would allow them to broadcast shared audio and red-button data streams.

The promise of digital TV was greater flexibility and interactivity, and clever use of bandwidth. This fails to fulfill that.

There should be one BBC1 "channel" on a single mux, broadcasting "in HD (where available)" with non-HD sets receiving an SD stream.

The current state of affairs is a weak hack, nothing more.

Want nips like church coat pegs? Click here

So are these designed...

Are these aimed at people going au natural but without natural pointiness, or are they designed to go on top of bras and reinstate lost nipplage while allowing for extra support and shaping?

I know, I've thought about this too much, but it's Friday and my most trusted source of news is talking about lady-bumps.

Copernicus reburied with full Catholic honours

As others point out...

Copernicus was never considered a heretic, and Copernicus was buried (as the article says) in a Christian grave like any other person of his standing.

The stuff that happened later with Galileo Galilei was a battle of scientific egos and bad judgement on GG's part -- the then-pope was a then-well-reknowned-but-long-since-forgotten scientist (most of the popes of that era had come through the university system, which at that time was still part of the monastic tradition) and Galileo basically picked a fight with him.

The scientific establishment has a history of dismissing ideas because some influential bigwig disagrees with the theory. The only difference here was that the pope had a great deal more power than the chairman of the Royal Society, and anyone who effectively accuses the most powerful man in the world of being thick is really heading for trouble.

Of course, the fact that the pope was more than a little vindictive about it doesn't say a great deal of good about the Catholic church, but that's a different matter.

'World's largest' airship inflated in colossal Alabama cowshed

The answer to the bouyancy problem is simple:

OK, so you need to lose lift as you lose weight in fuel. So what if your fuel was your lifting agent? This takes care of itself.

That means one thing and one thing only: hydrogen. Unsafe, you cry? Well they keep trying to put it in our cars, so it can't be that bad.

Anyway, a hybrid helium/hydrogen airship could be very safe, with an envelope-in-envelope design.

Have an outer inflation chamber (or series of chambers) filled with helium, and an internal chamber filled with hydrogen. In that way, if the hydrogen cell ruptures, it leaks into a 100% inert atmosphere and cannot explode. For hydrogen gas to escape, there would need to be a total failure of the entire balloon system, which would probably mean a fatal plummet anyway, so the added risk from the hydrogen is negligible.

Besides, the Hindenberg exploded because of a fault in its skin and problems with sparking from static electricity -- modern materials aren't as succeptible to such problems, so a leak would simply be a leak. Explosions are unlikely.

The commercial cuckoo hiding in the BBC's global mission

Grrr....

"As far as I can tell it spunks its money up the wall on football rights and overpaying for TV programmes that have built a faithful audience on terrestrial."

Grrrr.... yes.

That is so effing irritating. It's like a weird messed up sort of bait-and-switch where Channel 4 becomes the bait, the viewer is the fish and Sky is a big hairy fisherman who snatches you out on a Lost-shaped hook.

They also screw you over with the bundles -- it's impossible to buy the channels you want without paying for half-a-dozen Murdoch channels you *don't* want.

This is where all the money comes from. ITV makes its money from rubbish people watch, Sky makes its money from rubbish no-one watches and funnels it all into a handful of flagship programs everyone wants to watch.

Was Microsoft's Office 2010 worth killing Clippy?

Re: Heaven's above

Well, I can see nothing wrong with the OP's English, but you, on the other hand, may want to reread your title....

(The Indomitable Gall is an English-language grad and an internal comms professional.)

Bill Gates backs ball-busting ultrasound

OOOOOOOOOOOOOW!

I really don't like the sound of that.

In fact, it gives me the willies!

LimeWire induces infringement, Judge rules

YouTube next...?

They may not actively encourage people to infringe, but they're certainly not doing a hell of a lot about it, and they're doing it for the good of their own wallets....

Vote Lib Dem, doom humanity to extinction

There's more to it than that, Page.

" there's nothing to say that the same exaggerated terror of weapons application wouldn't stifle fusion the way it is stifling fission. "

While the whole weapons-grade fuel thing is worrying, many reasonable people will do a quick risk-cost analysis on potential problems at the power stations, and work out that the potential damage done by purely accidental failure (and the damage already done by previous accidental failure) really is too high to accept even if the risk of failure was lower than it is.

And before you say it, all the "lessons learned" at Douneray, Windscale/Sellafield, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are valueless, because the lessons we have allegedly learned are all in the realms of "avoiding the same mistakes", not in the realm of "avoiding making any mistakes". All of these were at root the result of sloppy management, so even if you address the actual physics/mechanics/engineering of the fault, there's still the whole culture of corner cutting that has to be addressed.

And I know that we don't officially "cut corners" anywhere in UK business, we officially "trim the fat", but that only leads to us hiding the corners we want to cut behind a chunk of fat...

Apple rejects crazy canuck's seal bludgeon game

If you want to know what iThink...

iThink it was just the name they didn't like -- all your I is belong to Apple!!!

Pirate Bay co-founder hopes it will die

Hmm....

Facilitated free copying then turned up and said: let's do something that makes money.

I walks like blackmail and it quacks like blackmail....

'Phantasmal' bioweapon drug-sweat microfrogs bred in UK

New venture....

OpenPressRelease.org has completed its alpha pilot phase with amphibian specialists and will go into public beta on the 1st of May.

Asteroids the source of Earth's water, NASA suggests

Re: orbits?

But everyone knows the world revolves around the Square Mile -- that's why the M25 is known as the London Orbital.

Quoth NASA

"water ice left over from the solar system's origin 4.6 billion years ago"

So it would seem that water formed in the birth of the solar system. The sun is, after all, made of hydrogen and the birth of the solar system created oxygen, so it had to happen.

The water came from the sun, at the dawn of the solar system.

Apple, the iPhone 4G, the cops and the click-tart

Filthy lucre

" We don't criticise him [Denton] for paying for stories - we don't do that ourselves,"

Oh well, I guess someone else'll get my exclusive Nexus 2 handset, as found in the sofa at a Mountain View lap dancing club....

Hawking: Aliens are out there, likely to be Bad News

Percentage point?

"*NASA, the best funded space agency of the human race, boasts a budget of less than $20bn - a small fraction of a single percentage point of US government spending"

Surely "a small fraction of a percent". Percentage point is meaningless in this sentence....

Reverse-engineering artist busts face detection tech

@Ru

"Small, bright point sources of light do a lousy job of 'jamming' CCTVs and the like. It'll work if you strap a car headlight to your hat, perhaps... nothing else is going to be really powerful enough to dazzle the camera."

I don't think he's talking about dazzling the camera -- rather he's suggesting that the pattern matching may rely on patches of light and dark not in the visible spectrum, so use of IR masking and/or emission would change the image that the computer sees into "not a face" without affecting the image a man looking you in the eye would see.

Facebook sinks Lite

I would have used it...

I have a MIPS netbook that just can't handle full-fat Facebook. As a travel gadget it's dead handy, though -- reasonable battery, optional wifi etc. Facebook always refused to let it use the mobile interface and redirected me to www. -- I couldn't be bothered faking the browser string so I gave up.

Given the "getting stuck in lite" thing, I didn't attempt it.

So I just don't use Facebook on the road.

Broadband boss: 'The end of freeloading is nigh'

I don't think he's joking per se...

I think what he's trying to point out is that with unmetered access, unicast IPTV is as "cheap" as broadcast TV to the punter on the street, or even cheaper, if you don't currently have a Freeview box or sattelite receiver. The benefit of IPTV is the availability of on-demand viewing. It is therefore a "better product" at the same price point, so the way things are at the moment, the bedroom PC will start to be used as a replacement for the bedroom TV. I don't have a Freeview dongle for my laptop, for example -- I just use iPlayer and 4OD. I even use iPlayer sometimes when I'm watching live.

So by having unmetered access we discourage people from using the efficient, robust and well-developed broadcast infrastructure and instead consume the internet's finite resources. Not only do most people not realise that there is no "broadcast" on the internet, but even those who do (eg. me) don't really care enough to conserve.

So we wouldn't expect the metered family to run up £600 a month -- we wouldn't expect the capacity requirements of a metered internet to be anywhere near as high as that of an unmetered one.

Ask yourself this. Many phone companies offer unlimited free calls. Would they continue to do so if people started listening to radio over the phone? Would they have the capacity?

Same idea.

In fact...

I've just realised that I don't own a digital PVR. I've never really thought about it, because I've never needed it, because I've got iPlayer. But 10 years ago I was quite happy to set the video for things that were on while I was out.

If the internet was metered, I would have bought a PVR a long time ago, and I would be sitting with a TV guide in front of me (an online one, naturally) once a week and "harvesting" everything I wanted to watch for later viewing. But it's cheaper for me to consume finite "commons" resources than tap into the broadcast network.

Microsoft wants pacemaker password tattoos

Did you even read the article?

Cos if you did, the whole point is that RFID is hackable and/or snoopable, therefore not suitable for truly private information, particularly if it can be used as an off-button for your heart.

For pity's sake.....

PARIS hacked Canon test (almost) runs on rails

Houston, we have a problem.

I don't know if it's the camera or your script, but the road appears in mirror image, with the command vehicle appearing to be driving on the wrong side of the road....

Newsnight tries banalysis 2.0 for Prime Ministerial debates

Thumbs up Mr Brown

...Tim Brown, that is.

Yes, the tag cloud is designed to help you find the salient points in a textual data set -- they are metadata only, and any serious analysis has to be done on the data, not the metadata.

If they're not going to follow the tags as "links" to the data, well they may as well simply count up the letters and say "like most of the country, Gordon Brown favours E over every other vowel, so must be a man of the people". Then follow up with "like most of the country, Nick Clegg favours E over every other vowel, so must be a man of the people" and "like most of the country, David Cameron favours E over every other vowel, so must be a man of the people"....

Icelandic ash cloud to keep UK skies closed 'til Saturday

VAACs

According to the Met Office, there are only 7 VAACs worldwide. London VAAC is operated by the Met Office, naturally, as they are the guys with the wind modelling tech. It is the control centre for the zone including Iceland, and it is in charge of some of the busiest airspace in the world (most transatlantic travel whether by sea or air tracks away from the equator to take advantage of the reduced circumference of the Earth). It may not be needed every day, but it's a massively important role.

http://metoffice.com/aviation/vaac/index.html

Have none of you commentards ever heard of Google?

Volcanic ash grounds dozens of UK flights

Hey...

Last time you poms got the ashes, you were over the moon. There's no pleasing some people....

It's very important news...

...if you're a travelling IT consultant.

Well, you won't be today.

Death row inmate claims allergy to lethal injection

To paraphrase:

"They're locked up, they're constantly guarded, they're beaten up and b**f***ed regularly, they only get to see their loved ones in short pre-programmed slots, but hey -- they get free TV, a free bed and free food!!!! So what if the food's rubbish and the bed is slightly too hard and they share a cell with a chronic snored, it's free!!!! They've got it easy, not like us that have to walk through the park to get to the office in the morning, and have to pay for our juicy fresh steak sandwiches or have the choice to go to the cinema when there's F all on TV. They don't have to pay for their bedding, and they don't have to go to the shop to buy it. Yeah, they don't get a choice, but hey -- it's free! They've got it easy, sure 'nough."

Re: Justice/Revenge of the Disco Biscuit

One of my brothers' pals turned up with luminous fishing lures in his hair. They were just tiny little glow-sticks so I said "there's a guy here selling teensie-weensie disco biscuits". He didn't know what I meant. I felt old.

Re: Oh and by the way...

"Here in the Cleveland, Ohio area, we had some guy trying to park downtown last week for a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game who tried to park in a handicapped space, and when confronted by the lot attendant he pulled a gun out of his car trunk and murdered the attendant.

"A friggin' parking space is worth someone's life?"

And this is your evidence that the death penalty is an effective deterrent?!? It didn't even stop a man who was just in a hurry to get a seat!!!!

All it suggests to me is that allowing people to buy and carry guns is a Very Bad Idea.

Rutland Telecom offers local internet for local people

Hotels?

Any word if the local hotels are switching? I'd love to see a local supplier nick the big business!!!

DARPA, US Marines team on proper flying car project

IGRPA press release

The Indomitable Gall Research Projects Agency would like to announce our latest project to be put to tender.

IGRPA will give a prize of £10,000 and a 5 year contract to anyone who can produce an instantaneous matter transporter that can be manufactured for under £23.95 by the year 2020. The device will be capable of transporting a human 5 light-years in under a second, with the power draw of a Bayliss wind-up radio.

Argentinian jailbreakers dress in sheep's clothing

What language do they speak in Argentina now?

"According to the Sun and the Telegraph, one cop insisted the crims "can't pull the wool over our eyes forever","

Ah, you see I thought they spoke Spanish in Argentina, but clearly they actually speak English, because that's an English expression, that is!

One fifth of humans say aliens walk among us

Gender disparity....

If more men believe in aliens, and men are more intelligent than women, then there must be aliens walking among us.

So either there are advanced superbeings from beyond the stars on the planet, or women are more intelligent than men.

It's a Morton's fork between Catch 22, a Pyrrhic Victory and Hobson's Choice -- whatever choice I make, men are no longer the most intelligent creatures in the universe.

iPod implicated in US attack sub prang

Scuttling submarines...?

There's an app for that!

Bribery Act passed by Parliament

Plus ça change....

"Businesses have said that they are left in doubt about exactly when that liability applies and what is meant by 'adequate'."

Nothing new -- the same could be said for equality and H&S law...