Posts by Magnus_Pym

Boffins make graphene micro-distillery

ilegal Stills

Home distilling was made illegal because of the lucrative tax levied on spirits. The reason given might have been health and safety but money was always the prime mover.

I was under the impression that helium always leaked because it was small and would always find any faults or interstitial cavities. If the graphene layer is a perfect lattice then there are no gaps as proven by its ability to block helium. Water molecules must therefore be 'passed' through the graphene by some sort of active process like a molecular level machine or catalyst.

Big biz BlackBerry refuseniks adopt Apple over Android

How expensive is 'good'

Push email on a smart phone is not that special these days. Perhaps more companies willing to let their employees choose iPhones are less cost conscious and more likely to choose an expensive push email solution.

Groupon banned from selling SNAKE OIL

Perhaps they paid in coupons.

"temporary effects"

So "temporary effects" is a universal get-out clause for any and all claims in advertising. Well colour me cynical but I wondered why it had started to appear in cosmetic ad's recently.

Mornington Crescent

Sorry if it's the obvious move but...

... Angel

Vodafone manages to fight off £3bn tax bill, claws back cash paid

Vodafone Hate!!

The government is waging a massive campaign against the some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in this country. The old, the sick and the handicapped are categorised as either frauds or just too expensive to support. Increasingly hate filled measures are proposed for smaller and smaller gain yet hear a huge amount of money is 'given away' to people who are neither poor nor vulnerable but rich, arrogant and greedy by someone who is also rich, arrogant and greedy.

And their customer support is crap.

'Space Monkey' craze: Texan students 'get high' by choking each other

Two seperate threads

There appear to be two completely separate threads here. One set says 'yeah, yeah, we all did this as kids years decades ago' and the other says ' kids nowadays huh! They're all so dumb. Not like when we were kids'

Windows 8 hardware rules 'derail user-friendly Linux'

It's all politics in the end.

It's not Linux they care about. It's old versions of Windows. The fact that they can't get corporates off XP/Office2003 is a major fail for them. They need a way to force big users to upgrade Windows when they upgrade hardware.

Also why should ARM machines be treated differently? Because they threaten the cozy WinTel relationship that why.

George Lucas: 'No more Star Wars'

Red Tails?

If he wants to make a film about Black Pilots he have looked at the amazing eal life story of Eugene Ballard. But no he decided to make "kind of like ‘The Color Purple,’ only in airplanes"

I wonder if it is not really kinda like 'Start Wars' but in airplanes.

Skype is coming to Windows Phone - really

At last. An actually selling point

Large corporates that already have huge internet pipes between disparate sites can hive off all their intra-company phone calls through Skype, All their phone business through the mobile. Tie that into the corporate PC with additional services and you add a Winphone to the Windows/Office franchise. Now there is a lock-in Microsoft can exploit, err sorry, I mean a USP that Microsoft can sell.

You could communicate through the medium of dance, Like bees.

Work from home, find a new hobby, buy a fountain - UK.gov

I wonder...

If they will make it humanly possible to claim the available tax reduction for working from home. Oh no, I forgot, that would be a useful thing to do so it's not going to happen.

Taxman two months late on cyber-crimefighters deadline

Efficiency savings?

They get rid of half the staff in year after year, round after round of 'efficiency savings' and then wonder why nothing works. Turns out all those thousands of people that used to work for the HMRC up and down the country weren't standing around doing nothing in the first place. Looks like the Government was lying to us about how it could make savings without effecting front line services. Who knew?

Israel's stock exchange site knackered by hackers

Unless that script kiddy is in an apartment block in Washington and the collateral damage starts to look nasty.

Nokia flogs 350 vital mobile phone patents

I feel a meme coming on.

IP patents: a solution looking for a solution.

Murdoch slams White House over SOPA in Twitter row

What is there to pirate?

Maybe if Hollywood made some decent films then piracy might be a real problem in stead of an theoretical one.

10 years ago today: Bill Gates kicks arse over security

The information could be available and its integrity unblemished without it being confidential.

Australia should head-hunt Michael Gove

Absolutely. Some people obviously didn't get to the bit were he says industry leaders like Microsoft and Google helping to shape the curriculum. What a crock.

GiffGaff boots freetards off mobile network

1st law of supply and demand

If the supply is unlimited and free the demand will be infinite.

It's all fine postulating how these people use so much data and guessing that they are breaching the T&C's but when a resource is free you will find people are ingenious in their over use of it. When Cable first went in in our area cable-to-cable calls were free and unlimited. Some people used them as baby monitors while spending an evening with friends down the street. I new someone who had an un-metered water supply who used to leave a tap running 24/7 into his 50 m2 Koi pond to 'keep the water fresh'.

I wonder how much data a permanent skype/facetime call would use? What about sufferers of tweetarrhea with pics/video. What about Mr 'Oh I just leave News24 on all day just in case'? somebody somewhere is downloading whole movies, watching the first 5 minutes, getting bored and downloading another one.

Official: The smartphones that suck much more than others

Wow?

<sarcasm> That would be like if the electricity company started charging per KwH. Goodbye Air Conditioning and Hot Tubs if that where to happen!</sarcasm>

2012: The year when smartphones become smart?

helpfully intelligent?

or do they just want to find new ways to sell you stuff as always?

Microsoft de-cloaks Windows 8 push-button lifesaver

dumb users

Most users are dumb and there is a good reason for this: It is in the interest of the industry to keep them that way. I tell people (whether they ask or not).

1.The internet is not safe unsupervised for children (or idiots).

2. No computer is 'future proof'. The more you pay the quicker it devalues

3. Always create the restore disk before you do any thing else.

4. At the very least take back up copies of things you don't would try and save from a house fire.

Do they listen? Do they buggery. It's all 'The guy in the shop said...' or 'well, on the advert they showed...' or worst of all 'I know what you said but I thought...' Quickly followed by can you pop round and see why it's not working properly.

Well, burn my atomic-clock-powered new human renaissance platform

Worse than we thought? I depends how bad you thought it was in the first place. Some people here thought it was Armageddon so a headline like might be alarming to them.

"I'm looking forward to results of the Japanese government's investigation into what TEPCO knew, and when they knew it."

So am I. However, My thinking so far is that if you can 'cover up' a nuclear accident it can't have been that bad.

Nokia, Skype, ARM: Microsoft's big year in review

It's OK. Silverlight will render it.

Ofcom grills pirates, loses report under fridge for two years

h4rm0ny

A download is just not the same as a CD. Yes I can encode it if I want and make it the same as the download (except for the DRM). BUT I can also:

play it as a CD.

encode it as many times as I want.

play it on as many different devices as I want.

re encode when my mac/ipod get nicked.

convert it later into some as yet uninvented format.

be sure that the rights owner will not be able to take away my ability to play it.

give it to someone else or sell it.

take it back to the shop if doesn't work on my player.

peruse the sleeve notes long years after the website has been shut down

Samsung hauls Apple into court over emoticon patent :-(

I'm applying for a patent...

... on the practice of scamming the patent system by patenting something obvious and inevitable then suing everybody who obviously and inevitably stumbles into it.

ISIS signs Gemalto, aims to scoff Google Wallet's lunch

NFC? No F**king Chance

Not on my phone anyway.

Is Bill Gates mulling a return to Microsoft throne?

It would only make a differece...

... for the shareholders. They are getting pissed off with Balmer's lack of success. Getting Bill back at the top would temporarily help MS share values until he too failed to grow the brand.

When MS came to dominance it when word-processing, spreadsheets and databases where the killer apps. He brought the dominant products to DOS and assimilated them into office. He saw the existing situation and gained control. MS business plan is to be behind the curve and then buy it. It is how they started and all they have ever done since.

New account of Flight 447 disaster published

In all fairness...

... the storm was the primary big nasty one.

My guess is the pilots had very little information to go on due to the possibility of failed instruments, The huge storm throwing the plane about like a toy and the lack of good visibility. They made a judgement call on very little information and it turned out to be a wrong one.

UltraViolet: Hollywood's giant digital gamble is here

Dis'nae like it

Disney's business model is to sell the same old crap to each new generation of mother-and-toddler. They even do cinema releases of old stuff every so often.

Licence for life doesn't at first appear to be compatible with that.

Yes. It sounds like another way of selling-without-selling to me. Another way of have their cake and eating it. Essentially they want you to buy something but after you have bought it you don't own it and you can't sell it. If anything about the industry or media changes in the future only the consumer can lose.

Navy pays 2x purchase price to keep warship docked for 5 years

Raise Gov' funds old style

Privatise the navy and send them out to beat the pirates at their own game. They can haul the booty back to Blighty for a chance at a knighthood, position in government or stately home out in the sticks. Governerships of small countries might also be up for grabs. Might even be able to lease out the mothballed ships for extended tours of the Horn of Africa, South China seas, etc. I hear there are high value cargoes traversing the Gulf of Mexico these days.

If it takes off we might be able get the Victory earning it's keep again. More than a match for a cross channel ferry I'll wager.

That's how they did it in the old days. No reason it won't work today

Turn your WinPhone into an Xbox remote

Both Barrington and myself pointed out a perfectly reasonable explanation for this and got down voted without any comment or reasoning. Bitter somewhat?

apple vs ms

The difference is iTunes for Windows. Apple say "We would clearly like you to buy a mac to go with your iPhone but you don't have to. On the hand, MS say "Got and xBox? Well get a Windows phone or F**k off.

It's the LAW!

AFAIK the BBC are not allowed to charge domestic users for content (apart from via the licence of course). Microsoft doesn't allow stuff on the XBox that users don't pay for. Cue stalemate of ideologies.

US trade commission delays decision on HTC

The US International Trade Commission seems to be having a tough time making up its mind that HTC has violated Apple patents, postponing the day when they will have to come up with a reason to hand Apple the win, postponing a decision due today until 14 December.

Chrome passes Firefox in global browser share

hits vs users

Wouldn't the 'number of hits' metric favour browsers that are more likely to allow pop-ups? Just sayin'.

No Samsung ban for Apple in US

AC 20:01

"Does your wife work as lawyer for a hatchback maker? No? How's your post relevant then?"

Because the suggestion is that if someone not necessarily well versed in the subject thinks two things look similar then they must be the same and further that one is a copy of the other. This is clearly bullshit. They are trying to suggest that the age old 'man in the street' test is applicable to IP patents. IP patents are flaky enough as they are but this is frankly laughable.

My wife can't tell most modern hatchbacks apart. Doesn't mean they are the same.

James Bond savages the Kardashians

It's not audiences that want English language versions...

The studios must produce 'x' number of films a year or stand idle, losing money. They will remake, rehash, sequelize, prequelize, extend and ultimately destroy any story just to get 'product' in front of the public. Oh yes, and they don't like taking chances. So of course anything that looks like a safe bet will be made.

Don't confuse what the public want with what the public get.

I find it difficult...

... to disagree with his analysis.

Bankrupt Borders flogs 65,536 IP addresses at $12 a pop

OMG!

ipv4 address are running short! Obsolete network hardware is outdated! It is costing corporations for not thinking ahead! Who could have imagined that such a thing would happen!

Oh yes. everybody. Panic over, as you were people.

Chancellor to raid pensions, Whitehall to revamp UK broadband

Notice to all banks.

Lend away! We, the Government, will underwrite it all with borrowings from the World Bank.

(good job the banks are so trustworthy otherwise this might have been abused to pass bad debts onto the tax payer)

@Nextweek

We have to get the entrepreneurs to stop spending money on stupid get-rich-quick schemes. They nearly always involves sharp practice, microscopically short term goals or a government bailout. If you want to invest in Thorium then look to the government not the market.

Properly built and managed networks, infrastructure and production facilities are not of any interest to the markets.

Thorium whilst a great on paper, needs long term investment reach its full potential. Universities need to start prioritising on educating our next generation of scientists and engineers not trying to turn a fast buck by selling the good names that it has taken hundreds of years to gain. Let the entrepreneurs create the next generation hair care products and anti wrinkle creams. Some things are too important to leave to chance.

"George is asking pensions schemes to invest....not raiding the pots as Gordon did"

I think we may find that only the Lib Dem's have a clean slate on the whole raiding pensions and not being able to pay it back thang (Thatcher... cough... Royal Mail... cough, cough) but only in the same way as they have a clean slate on most things.

The question is; why is borrowing to stimulate growth a bad thing and yet conversely borrowing to stimulate growth is a good thing?

Pumping in cash...

is the new borrowing from investors. Still has to be paid back.

Stonehenge finds hint at rituals far more ancient than the stones

pits may have held:

1 large standing stones,

2 wooden poles

3 totems

4 fires

5 shit

Ancient Ceremony?

Perhaps rather than ancient ceremonies and rituals it was just mark the summer solstice to help set the calendar for the year to come. Useful to farmers and ancient priests alike.

Terry Pratchett computer sniper-scope: Spec-ops mini version

How long before...

... the spotter takes a picture of the target. Sniper downloads picture to gun. Gun 'fires' a miniature robot which runs up to the target and shoots him.

NHS minister's bombshell: I get emails from dead people

Precisely. Does it really make sense that any constituency's views are 99.5% aligned with the party that the returned MP supports.

And they complain that they are not paid enough. All the job entails is saying 'Yes, Prime Minister'.