Posts by Tom_

Web is turning us into kid-ults with no 'private identities' - report

Re: I admit

Maybe people will just begin to get over the idea of people having made embarrassing statements in their past.

Previously, we sometimes made embarrassing mistakes or said things that were a bit stupid and generally this wasn't recorded. That meant that if someone unearthed one of these past indescretions, it stood out as unusal and made an impact. In future, when anyone can go back and look at everything a person did or said, it might just become so normal that nobody gives a crap any more.

Climate watch: 2012 figures confirm global warming still stalled

Re: @Anon 16:48 - Cherry picking 1998

I think the difference is that the UK is an island and the US is a continent. Warm air coming over the UK has usuall travelled over the Atlantic first, so has had the chance to pick up more water and then drop it all over the country. In the US, warm air that's picked up water from the Pacific has already ditched it's moisture on the Sierra Nevada before reaching the nasty dry bits in the middle.

Scientists spin carbon nanotube threads on industrial scale

Alright...

...don't lose your head.

Unbelievably vast quasar cluster forces universe-sized rethink

Re: 1.2 billion light years was the upper limit for the size of a structure

It depends on your compiler.

5.6TB helium disks could balloon, lift WD onto enterprise throne

Re: Leakage?

One of the best, but least hyped things about hard drives as you don't need them to float around like balloons, so you can use slightly thicker metal.

Bob Dylan's new album is 'Copyright Extension Collection'

Re: I don't understand this

Isn't the point that they're releasing recordings that hadn't been released during the initial fifty year period? OK, they're the same songs, but this one has a bit where Bob cleared his throat and that one had a bit where a spider farted in the corner of the recording studio, etc.

Chinese spacecraft JUUUUST avoids smashing into Toutatis

Re: Micro gravitation changes?

"Does such a close encounter have any gravitational affect on the asteroids orbital path?

Might it now be on a collision course with us in another 5,000 years?"

Lucily, launching the probe from Earth on a one way mission means the Chinese have also adjusted the orbit of the Earth and it's possible they've done so in such a way that they have prevented a future collision.

Samsung's smart TVs 'wide open' to exploits

Any more detail?

I have one of these TVs and it would be nice to know ia little bit more about this vulnerability. Is it just a flaw in the web browser. for example?

At the moment it's a bit like being told somebody's found a security hole in my PC. Well, that sounds bad, but it doesn't help me much, does it? :)

US Army demos first robot Black Hawk helicopter

Meat Eating Robot Tanks

There's what you really need. That way they won't run out of fuel and turn into Robot Metal Boxes.

NASA confirms ice at poles of Mercury

Careful language?

'"We know of no other compound that matches the radar data, neuron readings, thermal signature, and reflectivity of the substance other than ice." In the careful language NASA always uses...'

Are you sure?

Elon Musk envisions small town of vegetarians on Mars

Prep

Maybe they should work on redirecting a few asteroids and comets into Mars first. Just to warm it up a bit and wet it more.

Just bought an Apple product? Need support NOW? Drop an F-BOMB

F-Bomb, F-Bomb

Yeah, where has this stupid term come from? It just sounds ridiculous and childish.

I wish it would shit off, to be honest.

LARGEST BELCH EVER SEEN devastates gassy GIANT Saturn

Make your mind up

"...the peak temperature was only 220 Kelvin (minus 53°C or 63°F)."

Come on.

Payment protection tops list of SMS spam scams

Re: EASY

Because you've been lucky so far.

Whitelist

Why can't I just set my phone to only accept sms and/or calls from numbers on a whitelist that I control?

Major Freeview EPG revamp to go ahead after appeals rejected

WTF Why?

Why do they keep screwing around with this shit?

I can just about cope with things like that changing, but it'd help if there seemed to be any need for it at all.

'What was Google going to do, force Apple to change its mind?'

Re: "We think it would have been better if they had kept ours."

They were supposed to keep the Google maps app and not supply turn by turn navigation for now.

NASA releases stunning image of our universe's distant past

Re: Gravitational fogging

It doesn't work like that. The further away galaxies are, the faster they are moving away from us due to the accelerating expansion of the universe. This means that the further away they are, the more the light from them is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum and eventually beyond the visible spectrum entirely. So if the universe had been doing this for long enough, you could look far enough away/back that you wouldn't see anything at all.

It would just be black.

Apple's brilliant plan to fix iOS Maps: Get YOU to do it

Re: iOS 6 Maps - Cloud Based Satellite Imagery

One of the UK's major cities?

Come on. :)

China plots 2017 mission to plan MOON COLONY

Re: So we'll end up with three designs of wheel....

Sounds like a useful bit of redundancy in a risky endeavour.

Fans rap Apple's 'crap' Map app

Road colours are wrong too

It really is rubbish when they've got A roads in yellow and B roads in white. WTF?!

DARPA builds faster-than-Usain-Bolt Cheetah robot

Re: Scary and cool

If it had frikkin lasers it wouldn't exactly need to run after people.

Sony slims down 3D headset, cooks up eye candy

Nevermind Sony...

The Oculus Rift is the headset tech that has the games industry excited...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game

Loads of developers are talking about this.

Boffins zapped '2,000 bugs' from Curiosity's 2 MILLION lines of code

Re: Why C

JPL's C Coding Standard is available online (http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf) and makes good reading for any C programmer, really.

Apple now most valuable company OF ALL TIME

Hindsight

Many moons ago, a colleague of mine spent his bonus on Apple shares at $20 each, while I spent mine on DVDs. Not shares in DVD making companies. Just DVDs.

Skills!

Chinese man's six-ton balls save lives

Lucky

It's pretty lucky that it didn't land in the water with the hatch facing down.

Outlook.com launch a gold rush for jokers, spammers

Really?

Rushing to grab your [e-mail] seems a bit like rushing for an AOL or CompuServe address.

LG, Samsung, Sony: Smutty Smart TV apps turn us off

What?

"Bought a "dumb" 32 inch TV, bought some right-angle adaptors and appropriate cables, run everything off other boxes instead.

I don't WANT another computer to manage."

Why did you buy one then? You could have just got a Smart TV and not had to manage the computer you've stuck under your 'dumb' one.

What happens when Facebook follows MySpace?

1990s tech

The 1990s had this covered with what they called the 'home page'.

Sony delays micro-PS3 and colours current crop

Re: Say what?

This is so you know they're not releasing a Scarlet* Johansson themed PS3.

*I know there would be two Ts in there, but still.

New UK immigration IT system late and £28m OVER BUDGET

Staggering

There seems to be an awful lot of money going to somebody.

How do I get into this chickenshit outfit?

Ex-Google Books man hired to drive private MOON BUS

Just checking the maths here...

2012 - 1972 = 40, not 45.... right? :)

Fake sandwich shop's big fake Likes leave Facebook looking flaky

50 million

Does anyone believe that? Only 50 million?

Next they'll be saying most twitter accounts can be mapped directly to actual human beings.

Chemical giant foils infected USB stick espionage bid

missed opportunity

It would have been neat to set up some new user accounts and carefully let the malware run on them, so it sent out passwords to those accounts only. Then they could have watched for people trying to log into those accounts and maybe learned more about who was trying to hack them.

British Gas bets you'll pay £150 for heating remote control

Re: Open networks

Things certainly don't get much more amusing than imagining your next door neighbour putting a jumper on.

'Biologically accurate' robot legs walk like an Egyptian

Re: This is all we need. Robots that can climb stairs.

Fortunately, a pair of wire cutters will render them powerless.

Olympus MEG4.0 smart glasses will photoshop the REAL WORLD

Rainbows End

Coming soon. :)

Computer error triggers mass rocket launch

Result

Fireworks can be nice to watch, but not for quarter of an hour.

First lady taikonaut and pals plunge into the dirt after space mating

Great result

How fantastic must it feel to sit relaxing in a camping chair in front of the capsule you just returned from space in? :)

Ministers consult public on 'opt in for smut' plans

No kids

No children live in my house. Would I still have to tell my ISP whether or not I'm a wanker?

'We've got $6m and we will use it to REVOLUTIONISE storage'

But...

Isn't the whole point of going from a spinning disk to a solid state drive that it's NOT revolutionary?

Thank you, I even made myself smile slightly* with that one.

*mentally, anyway. Not in a way that anyone sitting nearby would have been able to see.

RBS IT cockup: This sort of thing can destroy a bank, normally

Transferring accounts

The only time I did it, they transferred SOME of my direct debits, but I didn't realise one had gone missing until Vodafone cut me off. Vodafone didn't contact me to tell me why, either.

So I ended up having to move bank again and change mobile networks.

Another partial success.

Gigapixel camera heralds new world of snoopery

And what are they competing with?

The telephoto lens.

So you wanna be a Wall Street techie? Or anyway, get paid a lot

Re: So Google has not learned from Microsoft?

Is it because manholes are round?

Samsung's projector phone beamed up to Blighty

A 50 inch beam, you say?

It makes me want to weep to read this kind of assertion.

What do they actually mean? Is it a rectangle with a 50 inch diagonal if projected onto a surface some specific distance from the phone? If so, then why not say how far away that is? It's just noise otherwise.

Amazon's Lovefilm HD shuns Sony fanboys

Not much content?

"We counted ten episodes of Lost series one, the BBC's Planet Earth mini-series and seven kids' movies"

That sounds pretty much like Lovefilm's entire streaming offering, to be fair.

Super-powerful Flame worm could take YEARS to dissect

Re: Years to dissect? Really?

It takes a lot longer to fully analyse a piece of software than it does to look for the places where the DRM is checked and change them.

It's weird to have to point that out on this website, though.

Ten... Star Wars videogame classics

Super Star Wars

I loved Super Star Wars on the SNES. It looked great and sounded amazing.

Report: SAP exec charged with $1,000 LEGO bar-code caper

LEGO

Do LEGO actually promote their brand as 'LEGOs' in the US or is it something that's come about naturally? It always grates the English ear to hear people say "Legos" insetad of just "Lego".

It's like hearing someone talking about "Sheeps."