Posts by Rich 11

Oz lad 'fell in love with' baby meerkat, nicked it from zoo, took it out for a romantic Big Mac

Re: He probably took it to MaccyD's...

I'd definitely want fires with my Big Mac. There's nothing quite like an evening's entertainment in front of the fire, people screaming and running all over the place.

Re: The real question

That reminds me, I've got to clean the litterbox.

Your cat shits gold foil?

The other option was throwing him to the lions.

Re: He got off lightly compared to Tufty.

I absolutely support these Meerkats doing their national duty

What do you mean, 'national duty'? Meerkats aren't British, they're Russian!

(At least I'm sure I saw that in a documentary somewhere. Bloody tons of meerkat documentaries on the telly, every 15 minutes at least.)

Where to implant my employee microchip? I have the ideal location

Re: Poor Reliability.. better idea

[1] If God is omnipotent then why does the devil still (allegedly) exist?

Because they're the best of friends. Haven't you read Job?

Bright spark dev irons out light interference

Re: Have you ever put something apparently useless to good use?

After Brexit there wont be enough apostrophes to go round. Well never be able to contract words and we wont be able to use glottal stops anymore. Its all the Brexiters fault.

Re: Have you ever put something apparently useless to good use?

I used to strongly rail against this (and split-infinitives)

It's incorrect hyphenation which really gets my goat. And then my goat eats it. Good goat!

Want to hack a hole-in-the-wall cash machine for free dosh? It's as easy as Windows XP

Re: Physical access is quite easy

Policy Rugby Team

Damn you, Autocorrupt! Damn you all to hell!

Re: Physical access is quite easy

& I wound up joining the Policeman's Bowling League

A better choice than the Policy Rugby Team. You spend every Sunday feeling like you've been thrown down the custody suite stairs, twice.

Brexit: UK will be disconnected from EU databases after 2020

Re: Ah, the UK gov

Actually given the current "Brexit means Remain" agreement that May wants us to sign up to, it's more like we hand over the keys but want to keep sleeping in the hallway.

This was inevitable, unless we want to fuck the economy into the toilet. Some of you may not care that the NHS gets underfunded and understaffed yet further, or schools once more lose the capacity to provide non-leaking roofs, but you know damn well that you are in the minority.

It would of course be easier simply not to leave the EU. Anyone who wants to rant about 'faceless bureaucrats' or 'unelected MEPs' or 'shiftless immigrants' in response is now welcome to do so. If you haven't learned anything about such basic aspects of reality by now, you never will. And the rest of us will laugh at you.

Re: Tory Unity

All hail the party! Forward together!

Re: Ah, the UK gov

I've stocked up on whisky and spam and pot noodles.

Thinking about that list, I'd better get a big stash of Vitamin C supplements too.

Douglas Adams was right, ish... Super-Earth world clocked orbiting 'nearby' Barnard's Star

Re: Jack Vance?

Probably.

France: Let's make the internet safer. America, Russia, China: Let's go with 'no' on that

Re: The Likelihood of Macron's Macro Meanderings becoming a Reality for CyberSpace Flight Crew

amanfromMars 1Is the perfect troll.

I'm pretty sure amanfromMars1 pre-dates Internet trolls. He/she/it/xe falls somewhere between a prose-poetry generator and certifiable (but usually of the gently amusing variety).

Brit boffins build 'quantum compass'... say goodbye to those old GPS gizmos, possibly

Acceleration

As the atoms move, their wave properties are affected by the acceleration of the vehicle. The optical ruler can measure these minute changes very accurately and then with a few relatively simple equations it is possible to figure out exactly where you are.

Great stuff. I suppose that if you know where you already are then you can determine your angular acceleration with regard to the centre of the Earth and your overall acceleration with regard to that of the Earth around the Sun. Obviously I can see that one might be overwhelmed by the other, but it'd be nice to know for certain how this factors out in a fortnight's time.

Bloke jailed for trying to blow up UK crypto-cash biz after it failed to reset his account password

Not me.

Townsfolk left deeply unsatisfied by Bury St Edmunds' 'twig' of a Christmas tree

Why can't our beautiful town have a Trafalgar Square type tree.

Two reasons.

1) You don't know how to use a question mark.

2) The Trafalgar tree is an annual gift from Norway to all* the people of the UK, sent as a thank you for coming to their defence in 1940 and for supporting their resistance movement all the way through to the end of the war (which of course turned out exceedingly well for all of us, especially given Telemark). The tree the Norwegians will send us this year will be the 72nd one, and that's a damn fine tradition we can all be proud of and grateful for.

*Though I'm guessing we can agree on excluding Tommy Robinson and other pieces of neo-Nazi shit.

Windows XP? Pfff! Parts of the Royal Navy are running Win ME

I nearly cooked the dog.

You prefer your dog steak rare?

My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day

Should I dump the IDE model and keep just the USB one?

Nooooo!!!! One day somebody will need it. One day.

Data flows post-Brexit: 'Leave it to government to make sure you've got a smooth run in.' Er, OK

Re: There really is no hope

Oh, please, stop being so melodramatic. We're not doomed.

Only half of us are doomed. The other half will be just fine living off the corpses of the doomed.

If Shadow Home Sec Diane Abbott can be reeled in by phishers, truly no one is safe

I doubt she'll ever be Home Secretary, but...

...better to have learned the hard way than never learn at all. Of course we'll have to wait and see if she has learned from it.

Astroboffins spot one of the oldest, coolest stars in the universe lurking in the Milky Way

Re: Henceforth all my results shall have 5.0000sf

I see what you're getting at but even if it were a valid idea (and I suppose convention could make it so) the decimal wouldn't work like that. A value of 5.0 (or 5.0000) says that you've got zero uncertainty in the sixth digit, while 5.9999 says that you've got 99.99% uncertainty in the sixth digit yet a tiny step more gives you certainty. For that to be sensible you'd have to be describing the certainty rather than the uncertainty, and then you'd still have to have a way to calculate it. You can do that realistically for a well-known constant such as pi but much less so for any measured initial quantity. Wouldn't it just be better to stick to error bars, which don't have to be symmetrical either?

Re: Henceforth all my results shall have 5.0000sf

5.0000sf

I think you might be confusing discrete and continuous number spaces.

up to 1,000 kelvin (726.85 degrees Celsius).

Please, please, please, in the name of all that's unholy, how do you get a 5sf conversion result from an approximated 1sf input and believe it's good?

Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier

More AC/DC

Chunderstruck

(That's usually what happens if I mistakenly eat processed or hard cheese.)

I hate cheese

So these puns are all going whey over my head.

30 spies dead after Iran cracked CIA comms network with, er, Google search – new claim

Re: Kim Philby

More like Wacky Races on acid.

Clunk, bang, rattle: Is that a ghost inside your machine?

The sort of half-intelligible utterances that make you give someone a wide berth in the street.

Anyone trying to get a word in on the phone, then.

Now Europe wants a four-million-quid AI-powered lie detector at border checkpoints

sooner they stop those Lancastrians infiltrating via the woodhead pass tbe better.

Comin' over eer wi' their black puddin' an' tryin' ter barter it fer a good fish supper...

You're right. We need to clamp down on freedom of movement. We should section off each country and each region with each country into separate military districts and block all movement between them unless a citizen has the appropriate visa. It worked for Soviet Russia and it will work for us.

'He must be stopped': Missouri candidate's children tell voters he's basically an asshat

Re: There are some people that the

Smart people work from home.

If you've got enough good land for a productive smallholding then, yes, maybe. But if you're talking about working over the Internet then you'd better pray that some telecoms company somewhere sees you as worth connecting up, because your teeny weeny ickle wickle tax-starved government sure as fuck isn't going to make them connect you up as part of a move for the common weal.

They would have voted for ANYBODY who was the republican candidate.

Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a man of wealth and taste.

Where the fuck did we lose our way here in the US?

You allowed your political system to result in just two parties of any consequence, both paid for by billionaires. You allowed gerrymandering and voter suppression. You politicised your judicial system. You have a significant percentage of your electorate wrapped in either the cross or the flag (but usually both), too readily manipulated by appeals to God and jingoism. You have developing-world levels of inequality and corruption, with even the most miserable attempt to decrease them denounced as full-throated socialism.

Let's face it. You're fucked.

Re: There are some people that the

Some people have no idea nor memory of when we did just fine without many taxes

By 'just fine' you mean 'didn't have many roads'.

BT: We're stocking warehouses with kit ahead of Brexit to avoid shortages

Re: import from America or else where?

The day that Gove, Farage and Boris are charged and hung for treason will not be a day too late.

No. Absolutely not. This is beyond the pale. It is totally unacceptable. You should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

It's 'hanged', not 'hung'. People are hanged, washing is hung. Get it right next time.

A timely reminder...

... that it's the first weekend after payday and I should spend a chunk of my hard-earned cash on adding another crate of single malt to my post-Brexit stash.

Note to self: don't drink any of it this month.

This one weird trick turns your Google Home Hub into a doorstop

Re: Security PAH who needs stupid security

Alexa can understand my television. A few months ago I was listening to an American comedian doing a routine about white people in rural Montana when Alexa spoke up and said "Searching for white Mondeos" and presented me with a list of wing mirrors for sale on Amazon.

This is why I don't fear the AI-pocalypse. AI might crash a few cars or planes, but generally it's going to end up doing so much annoying little stuff that we'll give up and switch it all off. My tablet is now rarely left in the same room as the telly. I limit each room to just the single device capable of turning me into a lazy lardarse.

Bomb squad descends on suspicious package to find something much more dangerous – a Journey cassette

Re: Bring back the 70's

I was thinking more of Anarchy in the UK and Eat the Rich.

Boffins have fabricated microscopic sci-fi tractor beams for real

Re: using beams of light to manipulate atoms.

If you are looking towards the sun you are actually experiencing being pushed backwards by the sunlight, be it very very very weakly.

Though that force always feels a damn sight stronger if you're hungover.

Re: using beams of light to manipulate atoms.

would you need Newtonian mechanics to service your tractor beam?

No, quantum mechanics, but the problem with them is that you can never quite be sure whether they turned up.

Woman who hooked up with over 15 spectres has found her forever phantom after whirlwind romance and plane sex

They keep up the charade, trying to one-up each other with faux sincerity

In my experience, whackaloons with a shared interest will happily regale each other with their latest interpretations and newest ideas even when they are mutually contradictory. I think the ones who've gone off the deep end (or are happily teetering on the cliff edge)* don't question anything which sounds even vaguely supportive in case they might be obliged in turn to question their own beliefs.

*Pardon the mixed metaphors. It seemed appropriate in the circumstances.

Hi there, Hubble, glad to hear you're doing okay

If Clarkson is a national treasure then that makes Hammond a national tarsier.

Techie was bigged up by boss… only to cause mass Microsoft Exchange outage

Ideally you should time the alert to reach you just as everyone arrives for work. Ensure you're standing in the lobby juggling a hot coffee and a disposable but impressively heavy manual, drop the manual to grab your phone when it plays a klaxon at top volume, yell "Fuck!" when you see the screen, drop the coffee and race for the server room. When everyone arrives at their desks to find all systems up and running just as if nothing had ever happened, they'll remember you.

we’re on the hunt for spooky tales for a Halloween special of On Call

To be titled 'Ghost in the Machine'?

Watchdog sceptical UK.gov's Universal Credit can handle 8.5m benefits claimants

Re: Why bring in a political party?

not a single one would be able to do it without someone, somewhere being negatively impacted. To say otherwise is fantasy.

Quite true, but it doesn't mean that they have to be actively driving people into misery and hardship. When UC was announced in 2010 Parliament were told that no-one would lose out. Since its introduction in 2013 there have been nine changes made to payments, most of them cuts, in an attempt by the DWP to balance their books given the cost overruns on the rollout. Vulnerable people are being made to pay for the incompetence of government.

China tells Trump to use a Huawei phone to avoid eavesdroppers

Re: Where he tweets from?

It ain't so.

(I'm lying.)

Re: Where he tweets from?

He uses an iPhone to send his tweets. The iPhone his security people told him to stop using. And then -- get this, it'll really surprise you -- he lies about it.

Assange catgate hearing halted as Ecuador hunts around for someone who speaks Australian

Re: For Up Voting .. A.N.Other Perspective and SMARTR Parallel Tract ...

What say El Regers

I say that I don't give a toss about any of that. I do enjoy laughing at Assange's stupidity and arrogance, though.

Excuse me, but have you heard the teachings of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Chr-AI-st?

Explicator Extraordinary

This could be ultimately used, for example, to turn complicated information into an easy-to-understand explanation, automatically by a computer, of course.

If the AI can provide a rational, coherent and consistent summation of the events of the Day of Resurrection, incorporating all the reports in the gospels and not leaving anything out, then I might think it could one day have some real-world value.

Re: No impressed

Was the translator his seven year old son?