Posts by skellious

We're not making this up: Apple trademarks the SHOP

Re: Prior art ?

orange UK certainly used to do something quite similar

Mobes, web filth 'pornifying' our kids, warns top Labour MP

I thought this was missing something

But then I remembered that of course no girl has ever watched porn... so that could not possibly be worth mentioning at all...

Security audit finds dev outsourced his job to China to goof off at work

"bob" sure it wasn't "BOFH"? Oh wait, he wouldn't have been caught...

I applaud the man for his ingenuity but I also understand why the company didn't like the idea.

Light ties itself in knots - spontaneously

Utter rubberish!

They've just taken photos of rubber bands! Admit it! You had an office rubber band fight and snapped the results!

Dr No, Thunderball, Casino Royale? Vote now for the best Bond film

Why no Skyfall?

Skyfall should be an option here, that movie breaks the mould of the recent laissez-faire ones and really gets down to a gritty story with substance and drama, including many tips of the hat to bond fans of old.

Habbo Hotel to 'unmute' chat so users can show they love it

This site has been going down-hill ever since they removed hobbas

Hobba, for those not in the know, is Habbo's name for their player moderators. There moderators were invaluable members of the community and had the power to mute, kick and ban. In 2005 all hobbas were retired and the replacement paid moderator team is so much smaller that unlike the hobbas they cannot be everywhere at once. I was on this site many years ago and I saw hobbas daily, unlike after the ban where you were lucky if a call for help even got answered in person, rather than a generic reply message.

Txt-speak is a sign of humanity 4 U

As a recent member of this "yoof"...

I can honestly say that, 2 friends aside, I've never seen anyone I know use so-called "txt-spk" and tend to believe it to be largely an invention of the mass-media, started when an outraged telegraph editor got a text from his chavvy second-cousin.

Myself and the vast majority of my 200+ friends and acquaintances all use full, standard English when texting, using facebook, emailing or anywhere else. Why would we abbreviate? We can type fast enough on a phone to not need to do so. I, for example, can hit 40wpm without trying and 80 with effort (using a familiar predictive text dictionary on a standard T9 system). Why then is there so much "txt-spk" that adults are exposed to? My guess is that it is the older generation who cannot type fast enough on a phone to avoid using it. Certainly one of the two people who use it that I know is my mother and she definitely did not learn it from either myself nor my sister.

Now, it may well be that I have just gotten lucky but so far I have to conclude that 'reports of text speak have been greatly exaggerated.'

Pirate island attracts more than 100 startup tenants

Re: Waterworld

Unless I'm mistaken, this means from the lowest low-tide mark (sometimes slightly straightened out to prevent silly shapes.)

I love the idea of this sort of venture and I object to countries making sovereign claims over every damn bit of the world; there needs to be some room left for new settlements or some of the adventure is gone from life.

WTF is... scale-in?

Re: That's the first time...

That's enough navel-gazing for you!

Also, they got that picture from wikipedia (or it's an amazing coincidence) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navel

Music fans not welcome in RIAA-backed .music

What happened to El Reg's normal abbreviation?

El Reg normally refers to the "Recording Industry Ass. Of America." A very appropriate abbreviation, I think.

OS X Lion roars, coughs on appearance in App Store

Twits

Twits would have been not only a much better pun but also a less offensive word in an unexpected place. I don't feel it was necessary to use the word twats in this instance. Swearing CAN be funny, but not in this case.

Cellular network hijacking for fun and profit

Very interesting!

This story was extremely interesting, informative and well written. A star example of Reg Journalism. Thank you!

Quiet, astronomers at work

Gold Government?

That's what I read, anyway... Whatever happened to using Aus/Aussie?

Dam Busters dog dubbed 'Digger'

" over 9,000 visitors a year"

It's over 9,000!!!

But, to get on topic, SF is only taking the decision that makes business sense. If the name was not changed, so many groups in America would protest the film for no other reason, and many cinemas would not show it. Regardless of anything else, they've got to think of the wallet.

Traffic-light plague sweeps UK: Safety culture strangles Blighty

I for one welcome flashing amber lights

I'm a pedestrian, I used to drive but for the last few months, due to moving from countryside to city, I no longer do so. A lot of taxis in particular basically ignore red lights by creeping so far over the stop line as to make it pointless. if they could be encouraged to replicated this behaviour with blinking amber lights, stop would MEAN stop and the rest of the time they could keep moving and save their petrol. I also agree that any area where you can see all pedestrian crossings clearly would benefit from replacing crossing phases with pedestrian-priority phases. (clearly such could not be the case with blind corners)

Most of the time I just cross the road using the good old green cross code, and I've only been hit twice!

I shall watch the developments with interest.

Nokia DC-14 bike charger

My favourite part...

Also, this "Nokia-only" charger could be made compatible with other phones in about 2 minutes with some wire cutters and a junction box.

Big new wind turbines too close together, says top boffin

Stack them up?

Someone explain to me why you can't just have double-decker wind-farms. surely building a post is cheaper than buying double the land? (or will these have to be 750m tall posts?)

Choppers because we could use them as wind turbines! (or more likely they would fly into my 3/4 KM turbines.

Lawyer wants WikiLeaker kept off suicide watch

good lord...

I'd be suicidal after a day or two... as someone who wears glasses all the time and is effectively blind without them, and as a great lover of books, not being able to see and read would make me sick and ill all the time. (I know from experiance, I was 3 days without glasses due to them breaking while on holiday, and by the end of thosse 3 days I was at my lowest point for a long long time!)

There MUST be a better way than this. (and as for the knocking every 5 mins... water torture much?

National Identity Card holding chumps have buyer's remorse

Such a shame

While Mandatory ID cards were doomed to failure, voluntary ones, which you could take yourself off the database for at any time by handing your ID card in, would have been really useful. I likewise loath having to carry my passport all the time in Europe. I would have much prefered to have an ID card, but the stupipdity of all governments means they do this endless scrap the old government initiatives and waste more money doing so approach, which wont be resolved until we have true coalition government (all three major parties)

Facebook trains self to recognize your face

"this software is either going to be extremely accurate or extremely inaccurate"

whoah! Steady on there! This is high-level stuff you're getting into now! Something is either going to work or it isn't? How can you be sure? Shouldn't you hedge your bets a bit more?

Sorry, I'm being uncharacteristicly sarcastic here, but as a bit of a stick-in-the-mud phrases such as "it either will or it wont" tend to strike me as redundant.

i'll go sit in a corner now and think about what I just did...

Of course not

As with manual tagging, this will only allow you to tag people you are already friends with on facebook, and only if they have not opted-out.

Orwellian face-rec-tech shit-storm is avoided!

It will save a great deal of time, you can override it and maybe it will persuade people to stop tagging you in those stupid tag-cloud photos (BONUS!)

Apple patents glasses-free, multi-viewer 3D

As a wearer of glasses

It's the stupid paper / plastic designs that are the issue. Make them out of carbon fibre or a light-weight metal and you hardly notice them (in a future where everyone wears them for 3D and some for correction). But I agree. If you never wore glasses before, you will notice them. Perosnally, contact lenses are very annoying and I would opt for glasses systems being developed alongside them to give choice.

But even that is unecessary. What's WRONG with 2D tv? It's clearly very entertaining and the 2D element keeps it seperated from the reality of your living room. (horror movies would be a lot more scary if the zombie could reach out of the screen, but not everyone would like that...)

I don't feel 3D adds to the medium of TV.

but...

The point being made was that it used to be the case that 1) models were deposited - leaving a lovely historic record (I love the science museum!) and 2) patents used to be about SHARING technology in return for some ccontrol over how it was used, compared to now where they are used to block others from bothering to research that field.

Wikileaks: Berlusconi useless, Pope Catholic

we need more like this

This is the funniest thing to ever come out of government. More please! (and does it really do any harm to know the government are human too?)

Reg hacks crawl from London to Brighton

Stop making me homesick, dammit!

I recently moved from the crawley-brighton area to Scotland and seeing all the places I used to know and drive and walk through is making me miss it! Still, family to visit come christmas!

Oh, and the pint is becuase I miss Harveys. Readers from the Brighton / Lewes / Sussex area will understand what I am talking about...

Nominet forgets what the first .uk domain name was

My EHIC card...

says UK...

My driving licence...

says UK...

BOFH: Join the club

Excellant!

It just doesn't feel like friday without the BOFH. The increasing frequency of updates is very good, keep it up!

EU to lift flight ban on carry-on liquids

finally, some good news!

Someone I know is a pilot and finds it ironic that he is not allowed to take a 250ml bottle of shampoo on a flight with him but they will happily let him take several tons of aviation fuel! (which is of course absolutely safe and not at all likely to catch fire in the event he decides to make the plane take a nose-dive! [and im not sugesting he ever has any intention of doing this, but the point is that if he wanted to blow up a plane he's got an easier way to do it than a 250ml bottle of shampoo.])

So now at least when he flies in Europe he will not have this problem.

Robot teddy bears attack Alzheimer's

nice to see a new ROTM tag

Now you may all return to quaking in fear while waiting for the inevitable to happen.

Google robo cars drive selves on public streets

RoTM?

Surely, surely, this is an aticle that could have benifited by the Reg's lately disregarded but previously much hyped "RoTM" legend?

On the "at least 8 years" note, this is probably more for legal than technical reasons. The government will tollerate a big company like Google doing private testing since they know Google can pay for any damage it causes (and it seems to be the culture today that very little is "very bad" if you are able to pay off those who sue you for doing it.) However, Joe Bloggs in the street is not going to be able to afford to pay off the widow[er]s and orphans from a 12-car pile-up...

I have always been in favour of computerised cars, once the whole motorway/highway/A/other major roads network is computerised. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past because the computer can conduct country-wide load spreading to ensure everyone is taken via the most efficient route. Obviously B and C class roads in the countryside would remain manual-drive but city-centres and motorways, two of the places where many accidents occur, would be fully automated.

However, whether we will see this in our lifetime, or whether something will supercede it's development (like personal rapid transit pods or even the end of the world) remains to be seen.

Still, nice to know that in a recession google is still doing well...

Hundreds of Americans, bystanders injured playing video games

hang on a minute....

'"Children under the age of 10 should be supervised while video games are being played to prevent bystander injuries," says the doc.'

Except that if no one was supervising them, there would be no bystanders to injure...

Terry Pratchett computer sniper-scope deal inked

Pratchett angle necessary?

I love Pratchett's work, He's far and away my favourite author, but putting his name in the title gave me hope he had personally invented a miraculous sniper-scope.

Vodafone secures email-flashing barn door

there's no need to hide it all!

Why not just show, for example," joe.bl****@**********"? Sure, someone could still guess the rest of it ,but chances are they would guess wrong and then it's just back to spamming random email addresses.

World's first pedal-powered ornithopter takes flight in Canada

no, not metric!

Ok, so perhaps canadian readers (and probably most of the world) would prefer metric but some of us live in the time warp that is the United Kingdom where we really couldnt decide to either totally reject (like the americans) or totally adopt (like most of the world) the metric system, and instead picked the worst parts of both (presumably out of a hat of some kind) and cobbled them together before tea time.

hence... buying alcohol in pints, measuring distance in miles, people in ft and stone, consumption in MPG, milk by the pint (but marked as a rediculous amount of litres (2.272L or some such for 4 pints) and eggs by the dozen or half-dozen.

HOWEVER:

buying pertrol in litres, measuring buildings, construction materials and so on in metres, buying litre bottles of squash and so on. temperature in C though only half the country understands it (as compared to F which only the OTHER half of the country understands...)

What a messed up place!

Visa looks at NYC wave-pay trial, says 'I wanna be a part of it'

what does the Reg have against sea-life?

Every article on oyster and related payment systems seems to zero-in on the name. Yes, it's interesting they are all called aquatic names but why the obcession?

OED goes the way of all flesh paper

But the really important point is...

if we get rid of the OED, what will Countdown give away as a prize?

On a more general note; as a bibilophile, books are special and precious things which cannot be replaced by a DVD or any other current medium. Because I love reading so much, I recently looked in to e-readers so that I might not have to carry half a library around with me in a bag and still have a selection of reading mateiral for the train, reference material for work and so on. However, not one of the e-readers I saw met my needs. page turns on e-ink are frustraitingly slow and so distracting while LCD e-readers lack the battery power. I have books several-hundred years old, if we even made a solar-powered e-reader library, it would be unlikely to survive for many years before the components ran out. a book with a missing page can still be mostly read, but an e-reader with even a single missing component would cease to function. And if you read a good book, you can't lend it to a friend unless it's non-DRM and they also have an e-reader. (i know a service is developing a lending system but it's not the same). I will say one thing for e-readers though, they stop people writing in books or folding the corners, something I often worry about with the books I lend to people.

The Hitchhiker's Guide's "fast-wind index" may be useful [early idea of an e-book?] but it doesn't compare to the joy of flicking through a dictionary, discovering new words and confirming old ones. So, I hope the OED does publish the third edition on paper, even if it's at a higher cost.

British Airways sorry for 'landing on water' nonsense

umm

surely this is a copy of the Python's sketch of almost identical nature?

see link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJSey8HRUhU

by the sounds of it the python's ending was much better too!

Secret X-37B space plane lost by sat-spotters for 2 weeks

Gah! No!

I'm from England, but I hate the whole of the UK being called England as much as anyone else. I'm British, the Welsh and the Scots are British, the Irish are Irish, the Manx are Manx (Manx is NOT part of the UK!!)

And we are all European - but I bet you less than one person in ten here would admit to it! In the UK, "Europe" or "the continent" refers to everything EAST of the UK in most people's minds.

To weigh in on another matter, there are 7 continents;

North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, Australasia, Antarctica. (please note, AustralASia) This is important! (incorrect, but important because it's how it was taught to us!)

Going back to the origional subject; "a large bed" ... what size is this in standard REG UNITS??? the Reg needs to be consistant with their measurements or we will only get confused!

Google unleashes phone calls from Gmail

"Free calls in US and Canada"

I'm guessing the reason we never get this in Europe is because we operate caller pays all and not even Google will pay that much for calls?

Cops cuff armed white supremacist in banana costume

"awaiting a warrant to search the car"

What? You aren't allowed to just search a car in the US once you have arrested the driver?? (or even beforehand with reasonable suspicion.)

also, where is the IT angle?

BBC heralds next Doctor Who download game

bah

these are less "games" and more tedious interactive stories. The action is too simple and the narrative linier. I know the Beeb have to appeal to a wide audience but I'd love to see a Dr Who game with real bite. I'd pay good money for one of those!

BBC dumps Gulf oil spill on Middlesbrough

considoring so many BBC staff seem to read the Reg (and they have a sense of humour)

There's more than a passing chance that this might happen someday.

In fact, lets cut out the middle man and let the Register take over as director general. It would probably do a good job of getting rid of all the crap and comissioning more of what we want (including, mayhaps, a sucessful translation of the BOFH to the TV medium? - although this might destroy it, and I wouldnt even suggest it if Simon would write more often!)

in before "they already tried - Salmon Days." (hence "successful")

Apple ad-addled OS scheme resurfaces

Soon there will be nothing but ads...

Clearly it is a plan by extraterrestrials to get us so used to watching ads that we wont notice when they start brainwashing us... or maybe they already started? You'd have to be a bit spin-cycled to accept ads in your OS....

I love the ad-free BBC, and I love not having ads on my OS. If I choose to go to a website or buy a magazine, then I accept there are ads. I don't LIKE them but at least I have chosen to view them in return for the content. (revenue streams etc etc) this is why I don't run ad-blockers. But the day I willingly accept an OS with ads is the day I give up on life.

UK.gov may cut BBC licence fee in 2012

"free"

No, it's not free, but it is free of adverts, and I for one think having a network free of adverts is worth the £150 a year. Adverts ANNOY me, they never sell things to me and often stop me buying the product advertised, if i was going to before. They might be funny once or twice but seeing them 9999 times is a bit much...

Like a lot of online free games with ads I would love to see the other TV channels offer a way to eleminate ads. Unfortunately I dont see such a way possible at the moment other than broadcasting a scrambled channel with the same content but no ads (which would quickly get out of sync with the ad-supported channel and cost a lot to broadcast) or recording the programmes and automatically removing the ads, which is only an automised version of sky plus (cause how many poeple DONT fast forward through ads when they can? Even the networks know this, which is why the first and last ad [often called the programme's "sponsor"] is now the most expensive spot.)

Daily Mail promotes 'the new Betamax'

I agree

MD is our default choice of recording medium for all live events when we aren't using a HDD recorder.

Treasury pulls plug on Wiki-cutback site

See icon...

So much for a technologically sound future... Or maybe someone suggested cutting down on crowd sorcing of ideas for cutbacks and in their eagerness they jumped on the suggestion?

Apple greenlights browserless Firefox app for iPhone

"I dont get it"

not quite. Mozilla and other people make bookmark-syncing addons for firefox, and normally these share the bookmarks both ways, but the iPhone version is the equivilant of read-only mode. it can display synced bookmarks from elsewhere, but not make new ones. If you bookmark on the iPhone one presumes it is just a normal bookmark.

Four cuffed in Spain over political website vandalism

"Two members of the KO defacement crew are minors, but two are slightly older"

So what you are basically saying is four scriptkiddies overran several big name websites? Why the hell are we not hiring this lot to run the websites in the first place? Not only would it stop them messing with the sites but it would also stop OTHERS from doing so.

French website surrenders on Bastille Day

Language bias?

I am not yet fluent in french but from what I can make out, there would appear to be some discrepancy between the english and french error messages there... I know french is a "longer" language but i'm pretty sure it's not THAT much longer... What are they hiding?!

*insert predictable french jokes & burning cow here*

US Army trials Iron Man super-trooper exoskeleton

RoTM?

Is it just me of do I see a ressurection of El Reg's RoTM on the horizon?