Posts by The Mighty Spang

Vote now for your fave sci-fi movie quote

Brazil = Superb

You know every day I feel like life mimicks that film a bit more.

The major difference is that now being a mature student at Catford University of Don't Throw Them Out Because It Reduces Our Income And Still Costs The Same - I'm surrounded by a lot more utter fucktards than surround Sam Lowry in that film. People who say you shouldn't beat children should be made to spend a few months in the same class of them.

It's not just the students either. The admin department seems to be run by people who are too braindead and give less of a shit about the 'customer' that could even be tolerated by the local council.

7000 Leap Year Babies attack Steve Ballmer

@ count ludwig

you're "or even" code is worse than JP's code - at least thats right a few times

your code will always return 28. even if it would run (missing '$')

average reg reader braincells seems to be on a downer here.

@JP

Yep thats definately it, everbody should start using that code.

of course that's sarcasm. you should reread the article and look for the clues that suggests it might be a bit more difficult than that (clue: 1900)

then perhaps wikipedia?

Google encourages 10 teams to rocket to the moon

for fork's sake

I hope the people having ideas about putting impact craters on the moon have a bit more originality than the people who called it "moon 2.0". I am incandescent with loathing for the nobhead who thought that one up.

US declares 1400-mile Pacific sat-shoot exclusion zone

all too difficult

send blokes up in the shuttle to paint a union jack or a picture of John Simpson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Simpson) on the satellite, then let the US air force know about it, im sure theyll find some way of blowing it up. and your troops don't have to come to your ally's country to explain why you did it whilst out on a jolly.

little bit of politics ladies and gentlemen, my name's ben elton, good night!

Oil rig dream bomb taxpayer bill 'astronomical'

@ivy

>surely the only costs will be fuel

yeah my local private pilots group operates like this, only fuel needs to be paid for, the expensive maintenance of something that can drop out the sky is catered for by the money tree in the garden

EFF and chums sue Feds over border laptop inspections

another reason why i wont go

well, thats kinda covered me not going on the uni trip to the states next year. hell there wasn't much chance of me going anyway, couldn't really afford to give the lecturer to give a free holiday as it was, and the previous grilling/fingerprinting of schmucks, sorry, visitors was enough to make me refuse as it was. add to that like 6 hours in an aluminum sausage surrounded by the young idiots on my course, total no no.

mind you i did refuse a US work placement from my old (US) employer a good few years ago now way before this current climate - they couldn't quite understand it. Hell if I want to eat globo-conglomoro-burgers and watch hollywood movies and unfunny US sit coms and speak english I don't have to travel 5000 miles for that.

I'd love to go and see Yosemite national park (big fan of the work of Ansel Adams) and the Grand Canyon though.

US military prepares for plummeting spy satellite

stupidist thing i've read on this site

"Although solar is the norm now, it doen's mean there isn't a back up power source as this is a 24 hours military satellite which by it's nature isn't in the sun all the time."

yeah because all geostationary satelites go offline overnight don't they. can't wait till summer when sky can broadcast past 5.30pm in the evening...

psst if you don't get sarcasm, they've got batteries that are charged in the sun.

New Bond film title voted a 'Licence to Thrill!'

quantum of thuggery

this new bloke looks like a bouncer, a thug in a dicky bow.

bring back something we can aspire to please.

Banksy artwork tops £200k on eBay

summed up nicely by banksy himself

"I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit"

Sony, Nintendo sued in console controller patent clash

lunacy

identifying where the transmission came from? sod it im going patent putting any kind of identification in letters and email

Lord Triesman on P2P, pop-ups and the Klaxons

seems a bit one issue

where are the plans for protecting photographer's rights, their work is being ripped off on the net as well.

oh sorry they dont have a multi million pound lobbying agenda and close links with the cabinet.

Mk II... er, Tank Chair trundles into Las Vegas

nah i want something else

saw june whitfield advertise this motorised 'comfy chair' once, zooming around a living room like a chintz davros. fell out of *my* chair laughing

Exposed! Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft

good and bad bits

the 'celeb alternate careers' thing went on way too long.

the callback to the stuff placed on the car at the end - must have had a propert writer on it at some point

Sears admits to joining spyware biz

what font for 54 pages?

3000 words is 54 pages? frightens the shit out of me trying to write a 1500 word essay... no way i can write 27 pages on this crap...

Wishing you an EMF-free Christmas

the rules

scrap school, just have 2 rules to be tested on:

#1 anything that seems to good to be true IS too good to be true

#2 there are plenty of chumps about who ignore #1. So screw them over and get rich.

Net Asbo slap for boasting Bebo teen

glorifying criminal exploits

poor bastard, in a world of eastenders, rap music, certain films, slebs doing bad things HE is the one who gets the abso?

to quote private eye: shurely shome mishtake?

Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia

themightyspangs first law of humanity

asshat+asshat = clique

Celebrity spam gang whips up a storm

people are morons

i had a friend who worked at APACS - the british credit/debit card security type firm. They would always be sending out stuff saying "dont give out your phone number/date of birth etc on social networking sites" but still send me "look at this its r3lly funneee" type emails with powerpoints, word docs etc in there. No matter how many times I explained about 0-day exploits, it seemed they'd just open files from friends because it had "scanned by blammo-virus scanner and found safe" at the bottom of the mail.

what does this say? the average worker is so bored they couldn't care less about security over taking their mind off the crappy work they have to do. I'd sack anybody who do that....

Dell fills out XPS laptop line

doesnt look widescreen

in that top pic, that isnt a widescreen display, look more 4:3 to me. im looking at it on my sony widescreen laptop, the aspect ratio is completely different. wrong model pic?

Where does Web 2.0 leave the BBC?

lol

"Granted, the BBC should not be promoting left-liberal causes such as Make Poverty History"

why not? gives plenty of time over to football which is just advertising for a bunch of large corporations and has fuck all to do with news

"reaching some sort of nadir when, during an Olympics, it reported that a Brit was 3rd in some track event but omitted to say who was first and second."

Dead Belgians don't count. We don't care about disasters round the world unless at least one brit has been killed, then we name them but not the other 195 on the plane. Maybe if news programs stopped having time wasted on "sport" we might be able to care more. oh sorry 3rd place is sports news and I DONT CARE

"In addition the french public channels ... even ruin sports coverage with up to 10 minutes of advertising between halves."

how can that ruin the coverage? its between halves. where soccer fans got for a slash, get another beer, beat the wives and kids etc. Oh you think overpaid twats babbeling over replays is quality coverage?

"I have and always will object to being FORCED to pay for this load of rubbish just because I was born in this country."

nope its because you LIVE in this country and decide to waste your life in front of a box of flashing lights. I'm 2.5 years from owning a TV now and you know what I think I might be smarter. either than or I hate people talking about big brother much more than before.

BBC News online has gone down the bog badly though. I object to "sleb" news appearing on the front page. in teh run up to MI:3, every day had the frontpage with some new midget interest story.

Remembering the IBM PC

68000? I have to add text here as apparantly "68000?" doesnt count as a comment title

if only they had picked the 68000, i reckon something like 7000 billion years worth of human time could have been avoided arsing about with the 640k limit, loadhigh, quemm etc. With the amount of cash that intel got, motorola could have RULED.

From somebody who coded in assembler at that time, I wouldnt code 8086, it was like a glorified z80, whereas the 68000 made some sense and didnt involve shoving registrers into memory every 4 instructions.

credit where its due though (and through law of unintended consequences) the segmented architecture really worked for dlls in 16 bit windows.

BTW Atari Amiga? hand in your geek badge at the door man

Surge in encrypted torrents blindsides record biz

Simple counterpoint

I'll make all my data available to the RIAA if they beleive that hiding information is tantamount to admitting guilt against some kind of law once all their artists remove NDAs from all staff, allowing anybody to say anything about what they have done, photograph them without makeup and sell the pictures, talk about drug/alchohol problems without fear of being sued into oblivion

Because musicians are such upstanding citizens and would never stoop to breaking drugs laws or speeding or drink driving or smoking in enclosed spaces or assulting people or having their 'minders' assult other people.

We should also have access to all communication from the artist, management, record label etc just in case they want to stitch the public up with predatory pricing, restrictive practises etc.

Yeah like that's going to happen.... thats almost like a level playing field

X-Factor singer withdraws over 'happy slapping' vid

reality tv is for morons

turn the fucking tv off, read a book perhaps, stop blaming schools for not educating your yowling offspring and get with the program.

Irish man rescued after falling for 419 scam

ac a moron

>Just because you've had one of the more obvious ones, doesn't make you an expert....

You know what, I don't need to know anything about current scams because I engage my brain. random person you don't know contacting you... check... wealth beyond wildest dreams for nearly no work/outlay... check... hmmm might be a scam!

I'm convinced school is basically not working. For me, it should have 3 hours every monday morning them writing out "if it seems too good to be true, then it is" over and over again.

unfortunately the bad guys realise that there's one born every minute. hell a friend of mine who lectures in HE got caught on that "women empowering women" pyramid scheme despite me saying "its a fucking pyramid scheme"

why do social engineering scams work? because people are morons (i listened to my friend the other day give out her passport number duh). why do 419 scams work? because people are greedy morons. Why do alternative therapists make so much money? because people are spiritual morons.

Man I wish I was heartless enough to take advantage of all the wallies out there waiting to be fleeced but i've got too much dignity. maybe i should convert to a religion then I could fleece people then be admonished of my sins....

The broadcast has been brought to you by the "Everybody in the world is a fucking moron" party

Sun: MoD has Bond/Potter/Klingon cloaking device

Cameras?

Fine if you are sitting still in nice weather, how long till the camera grots up doing something like moving around or when its raining.

plus the antidote to this is probably infra-red cameras.

also not sure how its going to work as camera-projector is just one angled view, hows it going to work in full 360?

Carmack's X-Prize rocket explodes on pad

llrv

was powered by a jet engine, not a rocket engine, though hydrogen peroxide rocket motors (as used by the CM & LM) were used for maneovering

California teen offers GPS challenge to speeding rap

hill accuracy

I thought it would be way out on hills, but do the math. for a 1 in 4 hill it would only be about 3% out if only using 2d calculations.

Google launches YouTube video-blocking contraption

fair use?

Will this incorrecftly flag up vids with clips from copyrighted files? Under fair use you are allowed to use them for critical purposes.

Oscar Wilde voted top Brit wit

'ishness

How do you define an ishness? I know there are dubious examples like greg rusedski but Spike was born in India under the British Raj. He then moved to England and lived his whole life there apart from stints in Australia. After some form of cockup with children of the Raj's nationality he took Irish citizenship.

Please define why you think he is Irish? My grandfather was italian, that doesnt make me italian.

anyway the true crime on this is that Peter Cook is missing. Bloody kids.

Canadian prof develops drunk-driving sim

too technical

I remember as a youngster playing table hockey (that thing with the bed of air, a puck and a couple of bats) sober, then playing it after 4 pints. half the time couldnt hit the bloody thing, let along in vaguely the right direction.

sod simulations, its just a game.

Hospital's brand new '£1m' server room goes up in smoke

another failure mode to watch for...

is that your aircon status panel cannot fail in a condition you cannot spot.

worked in a place with 5 Vaxes in a room, spring came, i thought it was getting a bit warm especially behind the 8650. told sys admin, he looks at the aircon panel, no failure lights were showing (3 separate aircon units)

anyway 1st really warm day of the year, cant log in to anything, mosey over to the server room, the loading doors were wide open and the sys admin was going around spinning down the disks. the console printers were going mental as each machine lost then remade contact with each other (and it would report every other machine in the cluster doing the same thing)... eventually full power down.

i was right, it was getting warm. basically 2 of the units had bust but the panel was bust too, so the failure lights didnt show. on the 1st really warm day, the final working unit found it all too much and gave up the ghost....

NASA gives Beagle 2 another shot at glory

@James

Of course it's spend it higher - it's been proved to work!

How they going to power it if its in a shaded crater? rtg?

Facebook gags verbal dissent group

Jim Davidson is a C***?

That pales into insignificance compared to the importance of "I Hate Ricky Gervais Even More Than I Hate Bono & I Really Fucking Hate Bono"

Firefox-Google marriage on shaky ground?

we need a "reasonable advertiser network"

I'd be quite happy view any static adverts, hell occasionally they have been useful, alerting me to new products i didn't know about.

but animated ads, ads with noise, ads that float in on top of the content, i've had enough and installed ABP. If all the sites I use block ABP and any other blocker (probably technically impossible) you know what? I'll just go back to reading newspapers and books.

The fact all those "click here and win a free ipod" type ads are STILL going just shows you the world is full of fucking morons. I think education in this country should have a whole year of writing down "if it seems to good to be true, it probably is" 8 hours a day and hopefully it might stick in their heads.

Church hall bans 'unchristian' yoga for nippers

it never got in the news

but i tried to hire the local mosque to host my birthday hog roast for me and my scientologist friends and they turned me down....

"church stands up for what it believes in shock horror"... i wish this would happen more often, chastising the middle class asshole who has a breakdown and goes to india on an ego-tourism trip, whining on about "how they are so spiritual in their poverty maaaan" when they could have just gone oop north to some awful poor ghetos.

the stupid treat 'spirituality' like some kind of holy pick and mix then claim they are something like "christian" and get all high and mighty, not quite understanding any of it.

BTW I'm an atheist, I think they are all mad. Nothing worse than a hyprocritical idiot though....

Cursing senior plod samples electric justice

its a scam!

yes, definately a scam. bit like when you look at overhead power lines, birds land on them and don't get electrocuted. erm...

Archos 605 Wi-Fi personal media player

should be a camera card reader as well

plug in a CF or SD card, one touch backup onto the hard drive (with verification) and an image viewer (that handles raw formats)

the canon M-80 cost me £450, has slow data transfer and locked regularly whilst trying to back up cards, so i took it back.

Texas Instruments stands out with 3D TV

warning to content providers

for those of us with a low inter-ocular distance (eyes too close together) you may make content that we can't really use.

with a low IOD, very close objects that seem fine to everybody else break into 2, killing the 3d effect and causing you to squint to try and get it back into 3d.

i found out about the low IOD whilst having a demonstration by a VR company back in the early 90s. anything close just exploded into two.

I was experimenting with my own solid shaded mode-x red-blue glasses 3d engine back in about 93. very early on I realised it needed a control to vary the "eye distance" when projecting, not just because I needed it quite low, but moving from a 14" monitor to the boardroom projector needed different settings.

there are other problems though, that the 3d images are all in focus, which isn't how we tend to see things normally.

BBC confirms Doctor Who series five

Royal Stuntcasting Company

bah. cancel any lottery money and grants they have.

David Thewlis for Dr, Alan Rickman for the Master... i'd watch that.

Nuke-frying raygun 747 all ready bar the raygun

defence:

develop a significantly cheaper ground based version that is effective to 401km...

Trade unions demand right to Facebook

what's next?

demand the right to watch porn at work?

if you work for somewhere you abide by what they want you do with their time and equipment. or quit.

Hit the Pano button - desktops go virtual

i like the idea

apart from developers and gamers, nobody really needs a pc on their desk. it is a giant waste of resources building thousands of cpus that mostly run at under 10% usage.

for the it dept this is great, less engineers needed to run about changing cheapo PSUs. no more people storing critical information locally on hard drives, eschewing storing them on backed up network shares.

great for facilities management, less aircon needed in user areas to eat up all the wasted heat.

what we just want now is a way to give them to 'needy' home users (like parents, grans etc) at the end of a DSL cable. it will keep their firewall, anti virus up to date, allow safe installing of software and give the rest of us a bit of peace and quiet :)

BioShockers delivered from DRM hell

will wait for warez version

actually i wont, i tried the demo out and it doesnt run with all the nice stuff turned on on my laptop which kinda defeats the point. plus it all seems like yet another fps on rails, quite dull.

as for limiting reinstalls and an activation server, bugger that. I re-installed Deus Ex a couple of days ago and playing that yet again, a game from 2000. Could I do that with limited reinstalls and perhaps an activation server that might not be there 7 years later (though it looks like the bioshock gameplay doesnt warrant that amount of replay anyway)

one more thing is it important its set in 1960? cause the environment looks more 1930s art deco to me.,

Worn out your vibrator? Relief is at hand

@tanuki

We'd need to get trevor bayliss involved to create a wind up one, 30 seconds of rotating to provide 30 mins of fun...

Wacom Bamboo tablet

does that pen holder attach

to the main unit? if no they will both disappear down the back of the desk in no time at all.

Sony threatens to evict naughty gamers from Home

2nd hand value?

If they can block the actual machine, makes buying one on ebay a bit risky...

The great Passenger Name Record sell out

Only for US flights?

I assume the data is only shared for flights to Burgerville? Not for anybody who would like to go somewhere interesting like Europe?

Harry Potter and the Virus of Doom

isnt this website aimed at adults?

what next, a critical look at the story in "where's spot?"

hp seems to be an incredibly long version of "the karate kid" with added rubbish. i mean quidditch. makes american football seem like a sensible sport.

Beeb exterminates Tomorrow's World rumours

@dillon

we already have "top gear" for crap like that

its bad enough that horizon has gone down the bog in the last 10 years. no more information/discussion on science issues, its all about wonderful videography, personalities and 'controversy'. They don't bother to explain what the actual idea is in detail any more.

and about Dr Who. Stunt casting again. And yet another person to act tennant into a cocked hat.