Posts by Aaron Em

Google data center links shot down by 'bored' riflemen

Not to be pedantic, but...

...we *are* Cro-Magnon. If you want the subspecies our ancestors out-competed, try Neandertal.

Wow. Seriously?

You're going to tell this Mississippi boy what is and isn't a redneck, you limey bastard?

Fuckin' rednecks, man.

I grew up with people like 'em, and when they're "bored" (by which, of course, we mean "drunk") they will shoot at anything that looks like being both fun to shoot at, and unable to return fire. They probably won't *hit* it -- the insulator's a big fist-sized lump of glass, and the fiber's just a skinny little cable, so there you go -- but they will definitely take pot shots at it.

Prosecutor won't resign over lewd texts to 'hot' crime victim

Mentally ill, my left nut.

He's just a fucking creep, that's all. Last I checked, there's no pill for that.

Naturist club objects to erection of five storey tower block

Naah

Blackouts, remember? And it's not like you could make out anything shocking from a few thousand feet up, not without the aid of powerful optics -- and see my other comment, below, for why you wouldn't want to.

Man, that's no joke

As you'd know if you'd ever visited a naturist club.

Steve Jobs lectures devs, dodges antitrust action

"crushing cars with your face"

Holy shit, maybe I should get an iPhone after all.

Assange under fire from Wikileakers

It's called ratfucking

And here in the US, it's our political specialty.

Boffins baffled by mysterious Martian crater

I dunno...

...but I think you can see his house from up here.

Probably easier to make out in the full-res photo, though.

OED goes the way of all flesh paper

Because it'd be huge and unworkable

The full OED is over a dozen volumes. Each volume is easily a megabyte or two; having once seen them, weighed them in my hands, and had a chance to see just how much tiny print they fit into each volume, I'd be willing to bet each volume is more like ten megabytes at the very least just for the text, exclusive of the fairly complex markup that'd be necessary to correctly represent the content, and the additional font that'd be required to correctly represent the pronunciation guides. I guarantee you there's not one ebook reader in ten which is capable of correctly representing a page of OED print, much less making it searchable in a way that works -- what would take you or me maybe ten minutes of page-riffling is going to take that dinky little ARM in your Kindle from now until the end of the universe, more or less.

Are these good reasons *not* to work out a way of distributing the full OED electronically? No -- but they *are* good reasons why an ebook version isn't going to replace the paper version.

Seconded

In five hundred years, the Wayback Machine won't even be a memory.

Flesh paper

See, the strikethrough doesn't make it into the RSS feed, so it looked like a comparison between the OED and the Necronomicon, which struck me rather funny.

That is all.

Boffins build lie detector for crooked CEOs

SVM applied to excessively vague problem...

...SVM produces effectively meaningless results. Film at eleven.

Schmidt: Erase your identity to escape Google shame

"Human point two"

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he claims. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

So when do you think was the last time Eric "Cyber-Controller" Schmidt spent even as much as five minutes in the world of humans?

Judge halts domain registration scam

Where do I go...

...to tell them to give the same kind of attention to this rip-off outfit called "Domain Registrations of America"? Not less than a dozen clients a year get mail from them -- they even tried to snake one of *my* domains out of me this year!

Feds admit storing pervscanner pics

well that didn't take long

Of course we all knew it was a lie from the start, but I figured it'd be at least a little while longer before that became obvious to everyone...

Miniature Apple display spotted in the wild

'Deep inside the throat' - 'Deep Throat'?

Perhaps someone's been reading their recent US political dirty-tricksery history, or is just an X-Files fan (God knows why), and is obliquely referring to some clandestine source at Apple who either gave them the screen directly, or tipped them off where to look for it.

No idea what "code A08" might be, though.

Web happy iPhone dev kit grants free evals

Wow

Right up with you until "$4 per user per year". Srsly?

Online crims not just 'speccy geeks', researchers warn

No shit, Sherlock!

It was "speccy geeks and pranksters" in the beginning, sure -- right up until there started to be real money in it. Is there anyone (not counting management of course) who's been in the business more than five consecutive minutes and still hasn't figured that out?

Animated CAPTCHA tech aims to fox spambots

Doesn't seem to solve the problem

That's nifty and everything, but if the problem is that people are using sweatshops full of *people* to circumvent the CAPTCHAs, and the proposed solution is one which would make CAPTCHAs a lot harder for bots but not even a little harder for humans, then I think I see a slight problem with the whole idea.

More iPhone 4 angst: fanbois howl over head sensor

Early adopters: PRE-ORDER new "Pattern Recognition" from Basic Human Capabilities Inc.!

Seriously, if I had even a US nickel for every time I've heard somebody whine about how the first-release camped-out-for-a-week-to-get-it only-three-in-the-state gizmo they've just bought doesn't work right, I'd be rich.

nCircle purges posts after researcher's arrest for explosives

Even Canada? Jesus.

The whole English-speaking world is going mad.

FCC takes baby step towards net neutrality

Anyone found out how to respond?

The PDF says there's instructions on how to reply at broadband.gov, but I can't find the first mention of it no matter how I look. Granted I'm kind of crap at Google, but I'm not *that* bad, and you'd think I'd be able to find some mention of it somewhere. Am I just hapless? Or are they just slow?

HP and Yahoo! team up to print ads in your home

"US law prohibits unsolicited ads being sent by fax"

Yes. And, as we all know, the swift and draconian enforcement of that law has *completely stamped out* the problem of junk faxes in the United States.

Researcher shows how to strike back at web assailants

"I for one" recognize the vicious blundering insanity of the country I live in

I can absolutely believe we'd see a white-hat type, or even a civilian, prosecuted for striking back at a botnet operator -- this is the United States, after all. If there's a way to be in the wrong on something, then sooner or later, we'll find it.

Firefox's oldest friend dumps it for Google Chromium

Seriously, nobody cares

Except the six people who develop it and the three people who use it. Seriously, look at their website -- apparently, even the hipster dickheads who make up their target market can't be bothered to make any use of the damn thing.

BP targets Twitter to clean up oil spill

Who the hell is Norman Tebbit?

And why should I care what he thinks of my president?

Apple adds 'make the web go away' button to Safari 5

Nah

Javascript browser detection is harder to fool; Opera does an okay job, but it's the only browser I know of that implements the feature natively. I don't know how extensible Safari is, but I can't imagine it being all that likely that either a) it's extensible enough to let you work over the guts of its Javascript implementation in such a way that they're no longer recognizable, or b) Apple's going to implement a "mask as Internet Explorer/Firefox" feature like what Opera has.

Jodrell Bank gets swanky visitor centre, infuriating maze

How much are they spending on the maze?

Because with that kind of structure holding up the dish, all they need is a few dozen planks and they can make an amazing 3-D maze with only a minor* risk of broken arms, legs, spines, and necks.

* Caution: Risk is not actually minor.

Bill Gates backs ball-busting ultrasound

Comical

I am greatly cheered every time someone suggests a new possibility in male contraception, because it means I will shortly be entertained by watching men get all protective of their ever-lovin' nuts. Like a few ultrasound waves (or, as in the case of an Eastern European doctor who was in the news a few months back, a few volts) is going to rip your balls right off your body, or turn them purple and evil, or make them swell up and rot, or some damned thing.

You're confusing sperm and semen

The fluid you ejaculate is semen, not sperm; it contains sperm (assuming you're producing them and there aren't any blocked tubes or similar), but sperm cells make up a tiny fraction by volume of the ejaculate, so their presence or absence doesn't make any macroscopic difference at all to what comes out the end of your dick.

And, no, you don't need sperm production to orgasm -- hell, you don't even need to *ejaculate* to orgasm, for that matter. For further insight, apply your programmer's deductive reasoning skills on the following question: Why is vasectomy not equivalent to castration?

Or just go on Wikipedia and redress your appalling lack of knowledge. Seriously, how did you make it to adulthood without knowing how your own genitals work?

Green Berets to get Judge Dredd computer smart-rifle

"Holy shit" rifle

It's a frag grenade that throws itself!

iPad users are young, rich geeks

"My wife spends all my money" jokes, how quaint

Get Henny Youngman's corpse on the phone.

No penis pumping for Papuan plod

Not hard to find an equivalent, I think

They have stinging nettles in England, right?

Don't try to sleep with your iPad, doctor warns

Oh grow up you muppet

If you're going to worry about the fifty or a hundred milliwatts of radio waves emitted in short, widely spaced bursts (if that) by the Wi-Fi adapter of an idle iPad, I bet you must be scared as hell of the sun, right? Because in a fraction of a second's worth of full sunlight, you get vastly more incident energy, including long-wave UV and OMGSCARYMICROWAVES!!1!, than you would if you stayed in the basement and replaced your usual tinfoil toque with an iPad for a whole twenty-four hours straight -- even if you had somehow installed a BitTorrent client on that iPad and set it to download the whole series run of 'The X-Files', just to make sure the Wi-Fi antenna never got a chance to cool down.

Or, wait, what's this you're telling me? You read some bullshit neo-Luddite scare story about how wireless radios and cellphones are giving us all testicular herpes cancer of the brain, didn't stop to think it through for even a couple of seconds and weren't mentally equipped to make sense of it anyway, and went batshit stupid with this idea that sleeping cuddled up to an iPad would turn your brains to jelly? -- not that that'd take much in your case, mate.

Swiss police thwart 'eco-anarcho terror' attack on IBM

"opposition to all forms of...weapons."

Except, presumably, those they have earmarked for blowing up IBM's facility...

Facebook farms out 'social graph' to Microsoft and chums

Hey, cool!

Another reason not to use Facebook!

Hentai malware publishes web history of marks online

Reading comprehension

Nobody said they were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, just that they were being sold for that price -- and the use of 'extortionate' implies a negative judgment of its own with regard to the value for money there.

KIN'ell, Microsoft! Is that a breasticle I see before me?

Must be nice

Not having to actually work for a living, I mean to say.

Man coughs to sex with donkey and horse

Eleven years?

Holy crap, that's some statute of limitations!

Apple drops HTML from iPhone and iPad

april fooled!

Aww -- you got me. Well done, sir!

DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC!

New Reg feature request

We badly need a "buy this author a drink" button, preferably right up at the top next to the byline. Well done, sir.

Penalty for silent calling goes sky high

Wanker

Yeah that's "revenge" all right, spreading the misery around to some poor bastard whose only sin is not having the skills to make $10 an hour any other way. FIGHT THE POWER

Oscars can Sacha Baron Cohen Avatar skit

Really?

James Cameron likely storming out in a blazing purple huff doesn't seem even a little bit funny to you?

SeaWorld killer killer whale must die, Bible insists

And *should* die.

Yeah, I said it: I'd like to see something like that happen at a zoo or a "Sea World" every damn day.

Sexy is as sexy does: UK.gov struggles with sexualisation

Less sexualized? Not hardly.

"...a future in which children may be slightly less sexualised..."

Most child molestation happens at home. I can understand why politicians, with both their institutional cowardice and their personal propensity to be given to levels of cravenness which would put a teacup poodle to shame, do not wish to address that problematic fact, but if we're really talking about how to bring about a future in which children don't tend to have, you should pardon the phrase, more intimate working knowledge of sexuality than most of their elders, then that's the place we should start.

Gmail Labs' experiments: What's in, what's out?

That's awesome.

I want nothing more in my life than a mail client whose capabilities are mutable, on a day-by-day basis and with no opt-out, at the whim of someone other than me.

BOFH: The PFY Chronicles

Goodnight, sweet Bastard...

...and may a flock of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Obama plagiarist has a legal posse

Boing Boing too

To hear the Boing Boing trust-fund kiddies tell it, Fairey can do no wrong -- he's a buddy of theirs, after all, whereas the Associated Press, being composed mostly of people who have to actually work for a living instead of getting to play with websites and TV shows and what-have-you as they please, is their implacable enemy.