Posts by I ain't Spartacus

The Great British Curry: Put down the takeaway, you're cooking tonight

Re: You call that a cheat ?

Surely that rice thing is too much effort? And takes just as long as doing it on the hob with more to do.

1. Measure 1 cup of basmati rice per person (half a tea mug) and put in decent sized sieve. Wash under cold tap for a minute to get rid of some starch. You can skip this step if you don't care about the rice sticking together (which I mostly don't - especially when drunk). Different batches of rice are differently starchy. My current bag is really sticky and needs it - the last one didn't really.

2. Bung this rice in non stick saucepan with tight-fitting lid. It doesn't need to be non-stick, it's just zero effort to wash up afterwards.

3. Add a bit of salt to taste.

4. Add 2 cups (1 full tea mug) of cold water per person (i.e. double the volume of the rice you added).

5. Time saver - boil most of the water in the kettle first.

6. Bring to the boil on a decently high heat. Once it's starting to boil, bung on the lid, turn down the heat to a low simmer and set a timer for 15 minutes. It's pretty much unfailingly perfect at 15 - but batches of rice do vary by a minute - some need a tiny bit longer. All the water will have gone into the rice and you'll have dry, fluffy perfection ready to dish up.

If you've pre-boiled the water this is basically 1 minute of measuring and filling your saucepan, two minutes of waiting for it to boil and then 5 seconds to set the oven-timer for 15 minutes and turn down the gas to its lowest simmer.

You can do rice in less than half the time if you keep it topped up with boiling water and run it on really high heat - but you have to do a lot of stirring and watch it like a hawk so you don't burn it to the bottom of the pan.

Dutch boyband hopes to reverse Brexit through the power of music

I ate a vegan woman once. And now I'm on the front page of The Guardian.

Yup. You do need to make it clear if you're taking the piss when you call all the voters for one side old racist philistines. Because there's a certain kind of person who says that kind of thing as a badge of pride - to prove their committment to the cause and their contempt for people who disagree with them. See the Guardian below the line for details. Come to think of it, quite a few of their editorials are pretty close to being professional trolling nowadays. They're in serious danger of becoming The-Lefty-Mail.

It's horribly corrosive to democracy. And should be discouraged. It's as bad as the Corbyn supporters who call members of their own party "Blairite Scum", or the Brexiteers who call everyone else LibLabCon or sheeple or whatever.

Come to think of it, The Guardian like to claim the moral high ground but still sell t-shirts with "Tories are lower than vermin" slogans on them. How's that better than "Enemies of the People" headlines in the red-tops?

It's all terribly depressing. I demand enforced civility backed by the threat of punishment beatings!

Re: Spineless bunch

Isn't there a Jacques Brel song about London where the skies are grey and the rain falls like tea?

Re: Slightly wrong.

Helped by arch remainer Gina Miller, we now face a situation in which parliament will not approve anything the EU will agree to, leaving either reneging on the referendum or a no deal exit as the only viable ways forward.

Anon,

Why blame Gina Miller? I didn't really approve of her legal action, and I think the court got the result wrong. But it was perfectly arguable either way - and that's what we have courts for. Of course the ruling was undermined by the ECJ just ruling that we can reverse A50 - but the government told the court they didn't believe that to be true - and nor did the Commission (or Miller's legal team).

All that ruling did was say government couldn't activate Article 50 without a vote of Parliament. It probably also means that government can't cancel without a Parliamentary vote either, but to overturn a referendum result government would at least need Parliament - if not an actual referendum. To do it by Prime Ministerial (crown) perrogative alone would be ludicrous.

Re: Slightly wrong.

Charlie Clark,

Yes constitutionally referendums are only advisory. But we've never not implemented the result of one. And as our constitution works partly by precendent, I'd argue that the EU is now a referendums only issue. We didn't have one to join, but did to retrospectively justify that. We were promised one on Euro-entry, and one on the Constitution (reneged on by Labour when they changed the name to the Lisbon Treaty). And we just had one on leaving.

This is a new Parliament, and I don't think that's ever happened between holding a referendum and implementing it. So that would give a consitutional fig-leaf. Expect both major parties stood on manifestos of implementing the result, and both increased their vote.

One Parliament cannot bind the hands of the next, after all. But I really don't think it would fly as an idea. If you want to overturn a specific people's vote on something this important, you'll have to go back and ask again.

Do you mean they should have got Charles Aznavour to sing it?

Or is he dead? Sorry, too lazy to check - or to check who the most up-to-date (and alive) chanson singer would be.

I think we've totally buggered our chances of winning the Eurovision Song Contest...

Re: Brussels is evil I tell you!

As long as they don't have a station dedicated to David Hasselhoff, they're not complete monsters.

Are you sure

When you say Brexit can't be implemented without Parliament having a vote, haven't they already had it? The EU withdrawal bill already passed means that we're leaving on March 29th while putting all current EU regulations into force that aren't already in UK law. So Parliament can vote down May's deal, but that doesn't change the fact that we're leaving unless they vote to amend that act which is already passed. Plus Article 50 is in the EU treaties - so again, having notified that we're offski - it happens automatically in 2 years.

Not that MPs can't vote to change this. Would be very hard to force the government to enact new legislation and very easy to fillibuster a private member's bill. And international negotiation is a crown perogative, so Parliament would struggle to force a reluctant government to do what it wants. Even withdrawing Article 50, which we now know we can do unilaterally, requires the government to write a letter to the Council of Ministers withdrawing it. So MPs can vote to do it - and would need to by what I read of that ruling - but still couldn't force May if she didn't want to. They can vote no confidence in her government and force a general election - which might persuade the EU to hold up the deadline (can be agreed unanimously by Council of Ministers) but again doesn't that need the UK government to agree? And does the Brexit bill still have us leaving if not changed?

Lots of fun and games for experts on the Constitution to play with. But anyone who gives a simple solution to any Brexit problem is almost certainly either ignorant or a liar. Or both I suppose.

Brussels is evil I tell you!

I know this, because when I lived there I had to tune my radio - pre-DAB but had pre-set stations I'm not a caveman! So there were 2 flemish-speaking stations playing heavy rock - and then what seemed like about 10 french-speaking ones playing only the "finest" Europop. And nothing else on FM - for some reason I didn't check MW/LW. Probably post-traumatic stress from the following:

First station I tune into, in my new flat in my first foray into living in a foreign country. And I just hit the end of the ad break and the DJ comes on saying, "The next 2 hours will be dedicated to the music of Johnny Hallyday!" I did keep tuning back in, and as far as I can tell that's all they played for the next 2 hours. Ugh!

After that my radio stayed mostly dedicated to the BBC World Service - and I listened to CDs instead.

Still got bombarded with Europop at the check-outs at the supermarket though. They even had litte 15" screens so you could watch the dancing while you waited to be served.

You weren't there man! You weren't there!

Introducing 'Happy Quit', where Chinese smokers are text-spammed into nicotine abstinence

Re: Smoking is a very significant issue in many poorer countries.

Oi! Are you sayin' my ole Mum looks like a burly docker? Them's fightin' words!

Re: Not chewy.

Just testing what happens with the new threading when I answer jake, rather than the OP...

Picture of Queen Victoria?

No thanks. I'm trying to give up.

Re: Smoking is a very significant issue in many poorer countries.

Remember in the days when smoking was 'cool', cigarettes weren't massively taxed - and so it was a very cheap habit to maintain.

It was so cool that when my Mum was asked if she smoked by a government survey at school, in about 1952 (she was 14), she said yes. They nearly trapped her with the trick question of what brand, but she remembered Senior Service in time to not get rumbled.

One presumes the 'Happy' part comes after you have quit and are no longer being annoyed

Along the lines of the question, "why are you banging your head against that wall?"

Because I'm looking forward to how nice it'll feel once I stop.

London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones

Probably wherever you had it last dear...

Re: Something doesn't fly right with this story

Why would they take the lights off? Maybe they want the drones to be seen and disrupt the airport. If not, why do they keep flying back, even with the news story ongoing?

Methinks this is a bloody awful day for drone hobbyists. Legislation incoming at 12 o'clock. And we all know how well formulated this kind of emergency legislation with cross party support ends up being...

Re: I wonder if...

Why use shotguns? Can't we find the control signal and use a radio guided missile? No controll signals should me the drone will auto-land. And people who've been blown up don't tend to re-offend.

Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is: 1. More ad revenue, and 2. Good PR. Lots of love – Mark, aged 34½

Re: Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is:

A flamethrower?

Actually I'd suggest we take off and nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

We had our office Christmas party last weekend. A temp, who we've since hired, came along. She must have had either the Google or Facebook check-in stuff enabled. As soon as she next signed into Facebook it offered her the people from our biggest client (that we'd also invited) as new FB "friends". Either because one of them had check-in also turned on - or one of us who's "friends" with them did.

Another reason I don't use Facebook being that it gives few easy ways to separate different groups of "friends". Though it's better than it was when Google+ first came out with the rather nice Circles feature.

I have an FB account linked only to family, and using an old email address that does nothing else. But real friends have shown up as options of people I'd like to be FB "friends" with. My guess is that FB has correlated family and friends who have my real email address on their phone's address book - and use the FB app which lets them steal all that info to link that to my unloved FB account.

They really are a horrible, insidious company - as well as having built a global face recognition database for nothing more than making it slightly quicker to link photos to all your "friends" accounts and up the reading numbers on posts about parties. A database that I'm sure has fallen into all the wrong hands (i.e. ones even worse than Facebook). It's all rather depressing.

In fact

How about going to google.com and then clicking on the link aptly named "Gmail" that can be found in the upper-right-hand-corner of the Google page?

Don't be ridiculous! That's too hard! As is clicking on the bookmark you set up for me when you showed me how to do this a year ago.

[Me bangs head against wall, and gives up.]

Chill, it's not WikiLeaks 2: Pile of EU diplomatic cables nicked by hackers

Isn't it obvious? A cyber security firm hand journalists some boring info they found floating around on pastebin or somewhere. But it's exciting because... diplomatic cables...

It's basic PR. Get articles published in the press that mention your company. If they can also worry people about internet security, then maybe they'll get some sales out people who hope to prevent their stuff leaking online.

The External Action Service is bound to leak like a sieve at lower levels. It's got representatives of every EU government in it - and most of those governments have ties to other non-EU countries that those EAS reports may be about. Which is why important stuff still mostly gets down at national level. Although Catherine Ashton did improve the EAS's (and her own) poor reputation during the nuclear negotiations with Iran in the Obama era.

Bonne année, Google, Facebook! France to tax tech giants from 1 Jan

Re: Sounds fishy

I believe it's called Enhanced Cooperation in EU speak. If you can get sufficient countries to join you, then you can push a policy through the EU - but that's optional to join.

This was the approach tried with the Tobin Tax after the financial crisis. But nobody could agree on what they wanted, even amongst that subset of members that joined the group, so it all fell apart. Not helped by the Commission's analysis that a Tobin tax would have generated negative revenue - in that it would have shrunk the countries' economies so much that they'd have lost more revenue in other taxes than they gained from the Tobin tax.

LG's beer-making bot singlehandedly sucks all fun, boffinry from home brewing

Re: Why?

Isn't that a baking cloche?

But I find it just as easy to replicate a steam oven. Simply boil a bit of water in the kettle, and then pour it into a shallow-ish baking tray and put that on the bottom shelf of the oven just before you put the bread in.

This also works in other ways to replicate a steam oven. My friend roasts lamb with a baking tray full of garlic and water below it - then at the last minute throws veg in their to boil. Makes the whole house smell of garlicky lamb - which is no bad thing. And in fact spreads the bread smell further as well, when I do it.

My brother has an automatic steam oven, of which I'm rather jealous. This has a setting for warming up leftovers, which avoids the microwave sogginess - but also massively steams the oven so avoiding the oven-induced dryness as well.

So I highly recommend bowls of water in your oven.

French fondant potatoes do something similar. You roast them in a tray of mixed butter and water. So only the tops really crisp up, but the evaporating water sort of pulls the butter into them, makes them very fluffy, as well as keeping the roast meat moist. Not the healthiest though...

Re: Why?

Richard Cranium,

My bread maker cost about £30. So I could afford to buy ten of them, and still save on buying that book...

Re: Why?

Bollocks to all that! I like an espresso every now and then - at which point I shall pay someone else to make it. I can't be arsed to maintain the machine - which in my hard water area would die pretty quickly or require the use of softened water.

What I mostly want is coffee. Americano is NOT coffee. It's watered down espresso. Which is fine, if you like that sort of thing, but I think is fucking horrible. Because it uses the same beans as espresso, which tend to be dark roasted and so lose most of the nice flavours that you get in a medium roast filter coffee. Although I believe coffee fashion is changing in favour of lighter roasts at the moment, even for espresso. So to make proper filter coffee of decent quality, you just need some nice coffee, kept in an airtight container, preferably in the fridge and a caffetiere/french press/plunger. keep it simple. I think it is slightly nicer if freshly ground, but not so much that I can be arsed to do it every time I want a cup. It would be interesting to know if the coffee snobs can tell in a blind taste test - something that has caught out a lot of supposed wine experts who've given totally different ratings in the same tasting to two identical wines in different bottles.

Re: Why?

trollied,

Bread makers are an excellent invention. Even if you only use them for nice breads for parties.

My only problem with mine (and most of them I've seen) is that the loaf is a slightly odd shape. Which leaves you with slices that are too big for convenient sandwichery. But the bread's pretty good - and can be achieved with little more than 5 minutes of effort.

You get to have a bit more fun if you make bread by hand - as if you experiment too much with bread makers you risk the very precise balance/timing going wrong, as the machine is set for each recipe. However kneeding alone takes as much time as measuring the ingredients into the bread maker. Let alone all the faffing with proving, rising, knocking back etc.

Mine does a very nice wholemeal seeded, that's consistent, way tastier than even the posh supermarket loaves and lasts at least 4 days before it's only fit for toasting. Admittedly that does take 4 hours, but so long as you're there to take it out within ten minutes of the cooking finishing, that's no problem.

Re: Does it despense vast amounts of bog rool??

Hence the famous quote, "If you drink too much real ale, the world will fall out of your bottom."

Hole-y ship: ISS 'nauts take a wander to crack Soyuz driller whodunnit

Re: "as much value as a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory"

Atmospheric re-entry dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.

Atmospheric re-entry dear Henry, dear Henry. Then pray!

Re: New old song

With epoxy, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.

With epoxy, dear Henry, then scarper. Blyat!

Phew, galactic accident helps boffins explain dark matter riddle

Re: Surely it's easy?

I think Dublin is just an over-priced visitors' centre nowadays - and it's actually made in Cork.

Although perhaps they know something about cosmology that the rest of us don't?

In which case, do Guinness manufacture the dark matter, or is Guinness just made out of it? And given the post-Guinness black poo issue, have we found an area where dark matter directly interacts with normal matter? [Insert your own joke about dropping heavy particles here...]

Re: And there I was thinking ...

The problem is these modern self-driving galaxies that people insist on testing out on the public space-time continuum.

They're dangerous. At this rate we'll have to build more hyperspace bypasses.

Re: Surely it's easy?

Neil Barnes,

I think you're utterly wrong. Though I didn't downvote you.

I think you'll find that dark matter isn't there in young galaxies because they're footloose and fancy free. It's when they start to age, that all the existential dread comes in, from children mortgages, fear of impending doom etc. Thus dark matter = existential dread.

I'll take my Nobel grant in beer thanks.

Qualcomm all ye faithful: 5G's soon triumphant... like 2020 soon. Really

Yup, I clicked on this article entirely to make a similar post. I'm not a huge fan of the traditional "supercali..." headlines - but this one is spectacularly good. And that's against some stiff competition from other high quality El Reg offerings.

I'm sure when the headline writer sits on Santa's knee they'll be told that they've been a good little subbie and that they'll be getting something nice from his sack...

Official: Voyager 2 is now an interstellar spacecraft

Re: Somewhere ...

Deespatch var rocket Ajax to breeng back ze body!

Doom: The FPS that wowed players, gummed up servers, and enraged admins

Re: Scorched Earth? Howzabout...

Duke Nukem. "Ahhhh, I needed that!"

I never really liked Quake for some reason. Having loved Wolfenstein and then Doom, Duke Nukem was the next FPS game that I liked. But the same friend who had that, also had TIE Fighter - and that was a rabbit hole I fell down for many happy hours.

Re: Patience

I'd forgotten the friendly fire thing. You could sometimes run through a room full of those fireball chucking demons and then out the other side - and go off to kill some other stuff. Then most of them would have killed each other by the time you got back.

Re: The Phone Rings

I didn't really like the chain gun. I preferred to pick enemies off with the shotgun and use the rocket launcher on big groups. With the odd bit of chainsaw action when you got to knife-figthing range.

Re: Doom II

My brother had got 2.1 sound on his PC. Mine only had tinny speakers. Plus he had a 486DX with 4MB or RAM, the flash bastard! So on a visit to his place in London I got that lovely thrilling deep boom sound as you pumped the shotgun into the fire demon's faces. Lovely! But then there was also an alarming bass rumble to the door opening sound - so you're alone in a dark room - lights off and just reflected light from the monitor, and this being Doom there's not much of that. Then the sound coming from behind you of a doro opening, and the grunting sound of those pig demon things. Coming towards me! I physically turned my head to see what was coming to get me, and therefore was too slow to use the keys to turn my character and got my face eaten off.

Happy days! Games are much better now, but it's just sort of expected. My 3 gaming "realism" memories, are that early 90s Doom experience, playing TIE Fighter a few years later, and then being amazed by how good Half Life was on my new PC. The first time I got to drive the airboat I had this grin plastered on my face for several minutes...

NASA names the date for the first commercial crew demo flight

Re: Prediction

"We're going to have to blow the computer!"

[Big smile appears on face screen]

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

Re: move on down the road a piece

No need. They can just ask him to leave. If he doesn't? I'm sure they can get a copper or two to pop over and help.

The only problem is the PR. Once you've granted him asylum and claimed you're his heroic defender against the evil capitalist running-dogs - then it's a tad embarrassing to climb down and kick him out anyway.

Dine crime: Chippy sells deep fried Xmas dinner

My friend* came over for a spot of dinner on Saturday. And brought a packet of Walkers sprout flavoured crisps. I actually like sprouts - but those things are the devil's work! They taste of over-cooked or off sprouts, not nice ones. Ugh!

*Friendship status now under urgent review.

Re: battered?

Boiled for 9 minutes? You're not doing it right. My Nan used to put them on a low gas before she went to church on a Sunday morning, with the meat and tatties in the oven on a low-ish heat - so the family could come home to a dry piece of meat, soggy roast potatoes and weird green explodey things. When Nan served sprouts, you just touched them with your fork and they sort of slid/exploded apart into individual green slimey leafy things which used to float on top of the gravy.

Ah nostalgia, boiled ham, boiled tatties, gravy so thick you could plaster a wall with it and self-destructing sprouts. Then to add to the horror, tea involved crab paste sandwiches. Well it was the 1970s... And then there were Mr Kipling French Fancies, Cherry Bakewells and Jaffa cakes to follow. Vitamins? Missing in action.

Despite all that I actually now like a sprout or two. Steamed and not over-done. Even better with bacon and chestnuts.

Peak tech! Bacon vending machine signals apex of human invention

You mean a BACON _{lettuce and tomato} sandwich then?

Re: Learned Something New

John Savard,

We like bacon so much that apparently we've run out of room for pigs. So we've bought a lot of it from Denmark for years now.

Food markets are weird. For example the UK exports a lot of lamb to the rest of Europe and then imports loads from New Zealand to eat ourselves. Seems rather strange that we don't eat our own and let the Kiwi stuff go off to Europe - and save a bit of transport costs.

Amazon robot fingered for bear spray leak that hospitalised 24 staffers

Did anyone watch the Tour de France this year?

There was a farmers protest, where they'd blocked the road with hay bails. Normal procedure used to be that the peleton would slow down for protests and everyone would get on with their day with the protestors having got their free media exposure. But I don't think there's that kind of cosy relationship anymore, not even in France.

So the police are clearing the road, just in time for the tour to be able to get through - but they're pushing the farmers back from the road who're stopping them getting rid of the last bails. And oops oh dear! On live TV as well. The gendarme on the left gets what looks like an industrial sized bottle of pepper spray out, and has a go at the protestors who're already 10 yards from the road. Don't know if they said something, he saw something, or just lost his temper.

But our poor lad is no sailor. And hasn't checked the wind. So first he goes down in a coughing spluttering heap, and then the cyclists come through his cloud of pepper spray at 30 kph - and then all stop and wipe their eyes and cough and pour their water bottles over their heads and still hurt so go to the medical car who's now swamped. Half an hour later, after mechanics have been called up to put eye drops in for the cyclists, and they've all wasted tonnes of bottles of water washing themselves clear - the race continues.

Re: Actual danger?

Hmmmm. KARDASHIAN. Lemme think...

Killer Autonomous Register Droid - Authoring Spying Hacking and Intercepting Amazon News

Sorry, long acronyms are harder.

Falcon 9 gets its feet wet as SpaceX notch up two more launch successes

Re: Gruesome Post-Mortem

A few squirts of WD-40, bit of T-Cut....soon be good as new.

You'll never make a rocket scientist! You forgot the gaffer tape!

Waymo's revolutionary driverless robo-taxi service launches in America... with drivers

Re: Excessive Snark

I don't think this is excessive snark. It is very useful snark, carefully deployed to counteract some of the nauseating hype. And I love El Reg all the more for it.

I don't think this tech is ready for this level of incremental testing. Because I don't believe these driverless cars are safe enough to use on the roads unsupervised yet. To be fair to Google, they've set up their system rather better than Uber's slipshod effort. So they've not killed anyone. Uber's problem wasn't the technology failing - it was the fact that they had the "safety driver" filling in a fucking questionaire when she should have been looking out of the fucking window. Which is a horrific failure of both the staff involved for not spotting this incredibly obviously unsafe method of operation and the management who allowed it to happen. Or rather more likely given the awful quality of leadership at Uber - forced it to happen by deliberately cutting corners and generally not giving a shit.

Anyway Google presumably haven't had their drivers distracted by other work when they're supposed to be operating dangerous machinery. And worse dangerous machinery that works most of the time, but craps out occasionally - thus making for a much more dangerous operator boredom problem.

And now they're going to introduce paying passengers to that mix - risking the precarious concentration of their "safety drivers" in an already difficult situation where they're required to take over at a moment's notice.

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

When they can reliably operate the cars for weeks on end without incident, then and only then should they be allowed to take paying passengers as an experiment. At the moment it's not proven that the cars are safe, but the taxi bit is an easy problem, that doesn't need to be solved until we're nearer the solution to the not killing everyone problem.

This is just a way of continuing the hype bandwagon, at a slightly increased risk to the public and employees of Google.