Posts by The First Dave

MPs prepare to beat off phantom Olympic hooker invasion

Location

So, if these girls are going to be turned away from London, where are they going to be sent to? Coventry, Manchester, maybe Glasgow?

Enquiring minds want to know (so we can avoid them, of course.)

Astronaut love-dustup mace space ace Nowak cops plea

Nappies

If I had left a used nappy in my car for eighteen months, I think I would rather say that I had used it myself, that day, than admit to having such a low standard of hygiene.

Legless woman falls onto Boston train tracks

how close?

So, she was lying _between_ the tracks, and the train stopped anyway, so it really wasn't all that close - she was probably in more danger on the platform itself.

UK.gov denies innocent will be hit by filesharing regime

Levels

So, does that mean that we should all _increase_ our file sharing activities for a while, just to get the baseline measurement up a bit?

Aspiring model pleasures Taoist master

Law

What do they mean by: "procuring unlawful sexual acts by false pretences"

Does that mean that unlawful acts are okay as long as they are consensual?

Does it mean that vanilla sex by false pretences is okay?

We do all need to be clear on exactly what is what.

Doctor sentenced for massive online Rx factory

Explanation?

Please? What does this all mean in plain (British) English ?

French cheer on €11.6m heist security guard

Timing

From reading this article it sounds like he emptied his bank accounts _before_ he took the money to a safer place than the bank it was intended for. Is that correct, and if so, what do his colleagues have to say about leaving the vehicle?

Eat my dust - it's time for Comment of the Week

Brock dust

What is so funny about brick dust?

US woman to drop sprog live on internet

Please

Don't.

Babies should not be seen until after they have had their first bath.

Google unleashes internal JavaScript tools

@Jon 66

I have no opposition to the library, if it is done properly (what's good for Google generally isn't so good for smaller players), but I do object to press-releases that claim to be the best thing since sliced bread AND first to market, when they are neither.

Second-gen TTxGP e-bike unveiled

untitled

So what's the recharge system? Running costs? You could at least make a guess at the latter.

115,000 nabbed for in-car calling

@Andrew Bush

If you had been paying attention, you would have heard Top Gear point out a year or so ago, that all Audi drivers are cocks, and that BMWs are therefore now safe again.

PayPal to embed X apps in self

untitled

"You can trust us"

I think the end of that quote went missing, I'm sure it was something more like:

"You can trust us to do this as cheaply as possible, therefore leaving some nasty security holes, and to charge over the odds for any participation on your part."

Scientists flee Home Office after adviser sacking

@Pete 2

The ironic thing, though, is that at the moment Goverment has to spend lots of money fighting drugs, and on the effects of illegal use, while making lots of money from the taxes on Alcohol and Tobacco....

Leaked Lotus doc hints at e-Evora

@John Latham

After 21 minutes of full-throttle, this thing will be approaching the sound-barrier, and can free-wheel the rest of the journey .

State attorney nabbed in car with stripper, Viagra and sex toys

Title

Sounds like the basis for quite a few law-suits, or at least it would if the USA cared about data-privacy.

PS Good luck to anyone who still feels randy at 66.

Apple to 'vigorously' fight Nokia patent pout

RE: AC

Personally, my money is on Nokia going bankrupt before they can get any adjudication either way.

As for the bit about 'unknowingly' or not, that is Apple's polite way of saying that it is possible to patent almost anything these days, even when it is completely obvious. The theory goes that if you re-create a patented item, you must have done so be reading the Patent, and are therefore effectively breaching copyright. What Apple are saying is that this did not happen.

<-- What's the IT angle of this story? It has nothing to do with technology, only about commercial law.

Student boffins take on iTunes' not-so-smart Genius

@iTunes

On what planet is it a bad, or even unexpected thing, that a music recommendation service does not recommend stuff that is is unable to supply?

How stupid would it be if it recommended tracks and then told you that it didn't have them?

Also really disappointed that the article did not even mention lyrics, or the fact that I for one, prefer cover versions that are different from the original - and usually can't be bothered with ones that sound really similar to the original - this system seems to be designed to recommend the former, and ignore those that have some originality.

Dallas cops fine drivers for 'not speaking English'

@Allan George Dyer

The trouble with that is that the USofA does insist on using different road signs and conventions from the whole of the rest of the world.

How much does desktop PC support actually cost?

Rubbish

So, first you ask people if their kit is past it or not, then ask them how much hassle it is to support it? And you are surprised to hear that people who think their kit is sh!t also think that it might take a lot of effort?

And all this from a vendor-sponsored survey that has a vested interest in selling more kit.

Actually, the reverse is probably closer to the truth - how much time is wasted learning how to support flashy new kit that will run the latest version of Word and Excel, with new bugs in them, when even the best typist in the world cannot type faster than 68000 processor can respond.

45th Mersenne prime revealed

@AC 09:40

a) Mersenne primes are a special case, and therefore there is no obvious reason to think that they are infinite.

Alternatively, note that the average gap between each prime increases exponentially over the smaller numbers. Extrapolating towards infinity, there must be an infinite gap between the last two primes, and therefore if the penultimate prime is finite, the last one must be greater than infinite, and therefore does not exist, making what I just described as the penultimate prime is actually the final one.

The Twitter storm that saved freedom of speech

@Allan George Dyer

Dead = 'no longer living'

Therefore "I'm not (no longer living)" is a double-negative, and easily provable.

Liquid electrocar batteries could be replaced at pumps

Stop

Enough pissing around with Battery Tech - and put a bit more effort into synthesizing real fuels, whether that be H2, Petrol, Ethanol or similar. there is a good reason why battery cars never took off a hundred years ago, despite being safer than internal combustion...

Mitsubishi preps 'versatile' plug-in hybrid e-car

Size

So, this will have two large electric motors, a medium-sized petrol engine, a medium-sized battery, a petrol tank, a large alternator, all of the direct-drive hardware including gearbox, and maybe room for a passenger or two...

How much is this going to weigh, and what is the REAL mpg figure going to be? (ie not the one where the manufacturer assumes that it will be charged overnight from a solar-cell and only driven two miles per day.)

Toyota Prius fourth-generation e-car

@Echo

"In B-mode, engine braking is engaged: the fuel is cut off, and the transmission is allowed to drive the engine to slow the car. It saves wear and tear on your brakes"

Tell me: which is cheaper and quicker to replace: your brake pads or your entire engine??

Coin-sized nuclear isotope battery minted

@John Sanders

What is a "candy dispenser",

and what are your coins doing _on_ your pocket?

Spammers jump on Gmail, Hotmail mass-hack gravy train

@Gary 38

From memory, the spec says that email addresses MUST NOT be case sensitive...

US Army doubles fleet of enormous floating eyes

Beacon

Also acts as a useful navigational beacon: not sure which way to point your rocket launcher? Just aim at the balloon, and the base will be right underneath!

'Stop NASA bombing the Moon!'

Bombing

"We are all created from Moon dust."

In that case a little more dust is surely a good thing - existing supplies must surely be running a little low?

PS I didn't think that the moon _had_ any magnetic field, so what was that bit all about?

Pirate Bay buyer admits doubts over deal

Humour

"The firm had planned to take Pirate Bay legit by negotiating licensing for the hundreds of thousands of illegally-shared files it tracks."

I'm thinking that you forgot to add a smiley to that bit, or something. Yes, that is what GGF had _sais_ they planned to do, but it was such a ludicrous idea that no one seriously believed it, including whichever El Reg reporter did the honours the first time this was mentioned.

US military gets a camouflaged cloud

WTF

So WTF do these computers actually do?

And why is demand for them so (apparently) variable?

Why the Advocate General got Google AdWords wrong

Opinion

In my opinion, the Court is correct. Google are not making money from selling anything related to the product that the mark applies to.

To use a tech analogy, a trade mark is a 'pointer' to the physical product.

What Google are selling is a pointer to the text of the trade marked words.

Tories will let voters 'rewrite' legislation online

Feedback

The trouble with things like this is there is no feedback loop: what is needed is direct budgetary control - then people can make their own decisions on how much money should go to education vs health, whether taxes should go up or services go down...

Anyway, sounds like a good starting point, somewhere better than the zero consultation that we currently get.

Police charge anarchist over G20 protest network

@Danny 2

Speeding is debatable, but exactly when is it sensible to drop litter?

NO2ID backs drive to inject voter power into next Election

Policies

It really is about time that we were able to vote directly on policies, instead of career politicians.

A good start would be a way to indicate preference for higher taxes versus higher spending, on a simple 1-5 scale - everyone ticks box 1, then taxes rocket; half vote for 2 and half vote for 4, then we get a dead heat and no change to the budget.

MoD pays quadruple in money + blood for Afghan helicopters

@Stuart Van Onselen

"Perhaps Lewis can word things a bit more clearly in future?"

Good one - that had me laughing for twenty minutes! Lewis has never been a fan of balanced reporting!

Seriously though, what is this obsession with looking only at the base cost of something?

If we buy american kit, then the cost is absolute.

If we buy British kit, then even if it appears slightly more expensive, what we get is: a big fat VAT check (most of the time, maybe not for military kit), 20% of the wage bill goes straight back to the government as income tax; 18% of the remainder comes back as VAT on the stuff that has been bought with those wages;

Knock-on sales are made to other countries, sometimes of new kit, and sometimes of our refurbished cast-offs.

Apple's move to kill Hackintosher suit denied

@Spencer

Of course _you_ have the right to install OSX on whatever you like, (probably).

What you don't have the right to do is re-sell another companies products in a way that they have expressly forbidden.

The car analogy initially made was too simple: this is like one of the kit-car companies insisting on being able to buy engines intended for the Pagani Zonda and fitting it to their own chassis. You could argue that Pagani have a monopoly on sports cars beginning with the letter Z, but it is not an abusive position.

Google Books opens French front in war with publishers

Article

This article would have been an awful lot more interesting if there were some hint as to what Google's defence was? Is it simply that while they are breaking copyright, the accuser does not hold that right themselves, and therefore they can only be sued by the original author?

Baroness Scotland fined for failing to follow own law

Double Fail

So many people are focussing on the failure to record the details, but surely it is just as much of a fail that someone in her position should be taken in by those details in the first place. (Assuming she actually bothered to look, as opposed to just ticking a check box to say that she had read them, which seems far more likely.)

Linus calls Linux 'bloated and huge'

@Ken Hagan

Correct me if I am wrong, but part of the advertising for Snow Leopard is that it is smaller and faster than the previous version, but I don't suppose that Linus really wants to get into a comparison with OSX?

Lancet: Hordes of patio-heater babies will doom planet

difficulty

Just because something is difficult doesn't mean we shouldn't try it. Let's at least aim at stabilising the population.

New SOCA chief battles Yes, Minister jibes from MPs

@Jelliphiish

Read the article again - he has had a 34 year career, not life.

Interesting question though, considering what (little) experience any of our politicians have before they become ministers of state...

Personally, I think that a post like this one needs an outsider every so often.

Street View stalks Swiss data protection bureau

Owner?

Please tell me that isn't _his_ car?

Human brain 'works like US presidential elections'

Summary

So, what they are saying is that the human brain doesn't work very well?

To mis-quote Churchill (I think) "Democracy is rubbish, but not quite as bad as everything else that we have tried."

Naked iPod touch dangles its FM radio

@Greg J Preece

If you really think that the cowon devices are superior, then you really need to ask yourself what the company is doing wrong when it can't sell a device that has (according to you) a better spec than an iPod. Maybe it is you that is wrong and the iPods are actually a better deal all-round?

As for the negative tone at the end of the article, and in some of the comments - MS builds things for backwards compatibility, and does it badly. Here we have evidence that Apple are building things with genuine forwards-compatibility and you are COMPLAINING about it? WTF?

What your database needs is a good thermometer

Power

What is the basis for that tiny power consumption figure for SSD's? I'm presuming that you aren't comparing like for like in terms of size, and even so, the load factor is important for both types of drive.

Sky News election petition defaced by prankster hackers

Waste of time

None of our major politicians can remeber what it is they actually believe in, which is radically different from what their respective parties tell them they should believe in, which in turn is radically different from what they will even _try_ to deliver, (if elected.)

<- Burn them all, and Murdoch too.

British troops get nifty techno-gunsights

@Ian Ferguson

Why did you have to drag Israel into this conversation?

If we are being fair, the big issue over there was caused by the British (and friends) telling one bunch of people it was perfectly okay for them to take control over a land that was already inhabited. Pointing the finger at the Israelis for throwing tear gas and rubber bullets at kids throwing petrol bombs, and sending tanks looking for rocket-launch sites is a ridiculous over-simplification of the situation.

New iPod nano torn to pieces

@mlo0352

Try reading the entire article - it seemed pretty clear to me that there isn't enough spare space in there to store much more than a couple of hydrogen nucleii, so how do you expect to fit a bigger/better camera in?

Boffins: Stop trying to monetise us, you don't know how

Translation

In other words, scientists with pretty large brains reckon that they are better at fitting random buzz-words into a grant application, than politicians with average size brains are at choosing the right buzz-words in the first place?