Posts by AlistairJ

London tenders for speed cameras

Sod London

I want one of these in my village. Speeding isn't necessarily dangerous but it can be highly anti-social.

Police told terror ads too terrifying offensive

The irony

All of this oppressive policing is coming to you from the generation who grew up in one of the most liberal regimes in human history.

The future is black, comrades.

Polaroid 300 instant print camera

Great work Sarah

Love your instant self-portraits, but what you really want for creative serendipity on film is a Holga.

Humongous star ejects jumbo jellyfish

What a wonderful instrument

You can almost see the glow from the Andromedan's chimneys.

I applaud this great mission.

God particles breeding like bosons

Let me be the first to say

Do not underestimate the power of the Dark Side!

Anyway, these particles only appear briefly in high-energy events. Looks suspiciously like a billiard ball getting briefly airborne, for that moment its no longer a billiard ball, its something else, not on the green baize of 4-d space time, but it soon returns to a natural state. Either that or embarrassingly you have to retrieve said ball from under someones bar stool. But I digress. Sooner or later our inter-dimensional neighbours are going to get fed up with all of this particle-flinging and send in their portal-ready shock-troops, equipped with broken off cues and smashed beer bottles. Potentially nasty.

Key Star Trek tri-corder boffinry breakthrough

Units pedant alert

The Tesla is a unit of magnetic flux density, not magnetic "field" or even field strength.

Shame on you El Reg!

US boffins claim record for fast integrated circuit

I do the math, you read

That's a wavelength of about 0.45 mm in free space. Infrared starts at about 720nm, so there's still three decades of sub-optical spectrum available for the galaxians to use, should they need it.

I for one would welcome the galaxians.

Galactic pile-ups feed supermassive energy output

When galaxies collide

I pity the poor aliens who once inhabited these galaxies. Or, if you will, the galaxians.

Will Google have its chips?

Informed comment in a sea of idle speculation

Quite right Torben. Glad someone here has got a clue what they're talking about.

Spaceship 'salad units' to farm special astro strawberries

Have no fear

Flight officer TJ Creamer is on the case

NPfIT ignored NHS culture, says Halligan

Holby City

Future episodes to be more dull?

El Reg PARIS team fires up the GPS tracker

Naughty!

In all seriousness, I hope you are not going to have that mobile switched on when its off the ground, are you?

Leonard Nimoy in 'no more Spock' shock

Live long and wha ..?

Have you seen his photography? I recommend a quick gahoogle for it, unless you are easily offended by pictures of bare naked ladies of a large-waisted persuasion.

'Goodness, evilness makes you powerful' - like the Force

The alternative finding

Is that, subjects in psychological experiments tend to behave the way they think they are expected to behave.

UK IT job outfit punts 491 private email addys

Recruitment agents, is there anything lower?

Title says it all really. To these people, your career is merely raw material. Your future is their sales target. They like to call themselves "recruitment consultants" in the same way that bookmakers like to call themselves "turf accountants". A grubby and shameful business, conducted by uneducated spivs. Our company no longer deals with agencies for recruitment, thanks to their own activities.

Hey you, out there in the cold with your freshly formatted CV, think carefully before dealing with recruitment agents.

Obama 'deep space' Mars plans in Boeing booster bitchslap

Just a question of timing

Now isn't the time to be spunking huge piles of cash on grandiose schemes, especially not ones dreamt up one hot Texas afternoon by your predecessor. Better to have a rethink, and do some domestic political bitchslapping while you're at it. Once the megarecession is over, assuming it does have an end, start spunking the green like a good 'un.

Astroboffin says 'black holes murder galaxies'

There seems to be several mistakes in this

Firstly, this research seems to ignore the fact that the galaxy size and black hole mass are closely correlated. They have found that each galaxy has a supermassive black hole of about one thousandth the mass of its parent.

Secondly, even if the galaxy was too hot for star formation for some period of time, all that gaseous hydrogen does not just disappear, in fact it stays there, in warm lumps presumably. Once the galaxy approaches "death" as dramatically reported here, it will again be cold enough for star formation.

A low-quality research finding of dubious accuracy.

Attacks exploit unpatched weakness in Adobe apps

Executable content

Why?

Who the fuh?

FAIL

Brown promises no change to basic tax rate

My name is ... what?

So why is this ancient but wealthy Los Angeles resident supporting the Tories?

Turk unwraps doner kebab robot

Doner card

I would like someone to help themselves to my kebab after my death.

Facebook gives you the clap: Official

Not a story

Firstly, 30 or 40 cases a year in a region the size of Teeside could be down to a single promiscuous individual. Secondly, facebook is clearly not to blame, unless you are looking for an IT-related story.

Greatest Living Briton gets £30m for 'web science'

Greatest living Briton? Pah!

It was I who first had the idea for the WWW, way back when. Only I quickly decided it was going to be used mainly for spreading filth and falsehoods. So I decided against.

WiMAX Forum begs for speedy spectrum release

3G fail

So why was the 3G TDD spectrum never used? The big mobile operators paid gigabucks for the spectrum, which came bundled with their FDD allocation. Was it simply a case of the 3G standards process not delivering a network architecture that anyone could make money with?

ISS pair return to terra firma

Is it just me

That finds the name TJ Creamer a bit hilarious?

First WiMAX phone to debut next week?

Something of a chimera

How strange, a mobile telephone that is actually a computer that uses a wireless network designed for computer data traffic, used to make ordinary telephone calls over the public switched circuit telephone system.

I suppose the marriage between powerful pocket computer and mobile OFDM-based telephone makes sense, as you can devote all of those power-hungry GHz to making the telephone work when you're making calls, and make it run eWidgets when its not.

Twitter bomb hoax man changes plea

A applaud this man's stance

Against heavy handed and to be quite frank, moronic policing.

I expect this important testcase will establish whether posting something on Tw?tter is considered "sending" under the terms of the charge concerned. And well done Doncaster Airport for the complete sense of humour failure.

Robot mini space shuttle is go for April, says US air force

That is feet and not inches?

One is reminded of the rather small Stonehenge that featured in the Spinal Tap stageshow.

Hmm that makes it about the size of a small double bed.

Carly Fiorina downs sinister Democrat hot air balloon

I'll have what she's having

As long as I don't have to put up with USA corp. bovine waste product for decades just to get there.

McAfee inadvertently speeds creation of Metaploit IE exploit pack

McAfee = sh!te

That's all I have to say.

Home Secretary swats away calls for Mosquito ban

It sounds like ... the future

I can see why you'd want to remain anonymous with attitudes like these.

Obviously, it does no good to treat your young people as vermin. If you have a graffiti problem, why not provide them with something positive to do instead?

Man of God backs Beverley porncoder

Well I never knew

That Beverly is so open minded.

Beam me directly to sick bay, Mr O'Brien!

Web wags stage IE 6 funeral

That's great!

All we need now is a way of actually un-installing it from our computers.

New use found for 'world's most useful tree'

That's great!

All we need now is a way of making Stella Artois drinkable.

Vulcan kept airborne by £400k refuel

Thank goodness that never happened

Because if it had, they would have got about 10 miles inside the Russky air defences at best.

Tricorder/Aliens-motion-tracker handscanner kit gets $6m

Micro changes in air density

That's what you want to key off. None of this weak electric field nonsense!

Ex-Army man cracks popular security chip

A title

Well for a start, Infineon are a German company, not a US one. And cloning the IP of the world's most popular security chip is not a simple matter.

Secondly, you can design a chip anywhere in the world, but to manufacture them cost effectively, you need a massive big facility. This is a billion dollar investment so you need a big flat area of land that is also free of earthquakes. Then you need access to a well-trained but not especially academic workforce, to wear the bunny suits. finally of course you need to do this in a country that has relatively lax laws regarding the use of lots of nasty chemicals.

Watchdog takes hard line on 'adult film xtras' ad

We have a vacancy ...

Is there no depths to which a "recruitment consultant" will not sink?

Swedish mother-daughter saint skulls are ringers, say boffins

Mother and daughter

Medieval relic forgery was a big business. These two died in Rome, but in order to get a decent pilgrim footfall, the nuns pretended their skulls were in residence. Their holy attractions thus enhanced.

US sorority girls in booze-fuelled orgy of violence

Hit me again

I for one welcome our new grog-swillin' bitchslappin' cheerleadin' underachievin' female undergraduates.

OpenOffice is the new David Hasselhoff

wot no gimp icon?

And do you conduct your social life whilst hiding behind the gimp mask of anonymity?

If only our company would embrace OO!

I work for a big German company, and wunderbar though it is, we all have to write our documentation using structured framemaker on Solaris. Yueech!

Bishop Hill: Gonzo science and the Hockey Stick

okay then

Leaving aside the geopolitical aspects of the climate change debate, here are the top three anthropogenic problems as I see it:

1) overpopulation

2) deforestation

3) destruction of marine habitats

Almost as bad as that other pseudo-science Economics.

Basically neither is a proper science because science is based on the simple premise that you can test your theories about the world under repeatable, independently verifiable conditions. You can't do this with single, world sized-systems such as the global climate or economy.

The best you can do with the climate is to test your theories by looking at tree growth, lake bed sediments, sedimentary rocks, ice cores, and so on. Then look at atmospheric gas levels, particulates from volcanic eruptions (back to the geological record again) etc. Then *carefully* check one against the other.

I say carefully because even the most honest and methodical researcher will find it very difficult to do this without imparting at least an unconscious bias, by way of data series selection, choice of statistical analysis methods and so on.

Obama scraps Constellation moon mission

Welcome, etc

Let me be the first to say that I for one would welcome this outbreak of sensible planning from our space-faring overlords.

The pathetic attempt by the previous administration to recreate the golden age of Apollo programme without even understanding why or how that was such a success, or even funding it properly, had to fail sooner or later. Just another example of how Obama is having to spend his time cleaning up their mess.

Stranded Hartlepool pair refuse coastguard rescue

Wrong, not all happy

Why? They went home without the driftwood after being dealt with by heavy handed police acting illegally. Jeez, try to see beyond the Sun style reporting of "look at these idiots" story lines.

I really can't believe you lot

First of all, they didn't ask for the massive over-zealous rescue attempt. They were merely scavenging for driftwood and got a bit wet and chilly. Big deal, none of this is even slightly illegal, except perhaps the twocing of a shopping trolley.

Minor Hypothermia = shivering. Again, bigo dealo.

The real story here are the police acting illegally in seizing the driftwood which they had no power to do, and secondly the clearly illegal disposal of said driftwood.

I donate to the RNLI they are mostly a wonderful service and deserve great praise for most of what they do (although they can keep their patronizing periodicals). Any of you lot who cite Darwin or think these people must be idiots really must learn to read properly. Jeez. Monday already.

India eyes man in space by 2016

Wot no loo icon?

That iPoo would prove very useful in many of our British towns and cities.

NASA's Spirit rover stuck for good

An ode to the wandering spirit

Rest now wandering Spirit

Your wheels have done dust bit

It seems your lengthy Martian flit

Was the interplanetary chiznit.

Chavez decries evils of PlayStation

Re: Incoherent rant 2.0

In my attempts to catch on my reading of history, via your excessively long diatribe (are you and Hugo related by any chance?) I detected that you are a Castro hater. And it seems that Chavez merely took a few pages from the Bush family cookbook. Enough said.

Vomit cannon to protect vessels from pirates, paparazzi

Sickest dude out there

Sounds a lot like those fake "bomb detectors" they are selling so many of in Iraqistan. Would it be effective against jetski-jihadists?