Posts by Jedit

DEATH by VEGETABLES: Woman charged with killing boyf using carrots. And peas

"Had she attacked him with eggs, milk and flour, would she be on a charge for battery?"

I don't like that recipe. As they say in Italy: needs more-a salt.

(Yes, yes, that one was even worse.)

Limited edition Iron Man S6 sells for $91,000 thanks to ... serial number

"I just spent 45 minutes preparing what equated to meat and three veg."

If that's a euphemism for masturbation, you will be of great interest to medical science. Either they'll want to find out why you're not made as most men, or they'll want to find out how someone can type coherent sentences while being unable to count to two.

British banks consider emoji as password replacement

"the chances of anyone /else/ being able to decipher the password are greatly reduced"

I must be missing something here. Nobody I know writes down emojis, so surely anyone seeing four of them on a Post-It would immediately know it was a password?

In memoriam: Christopher Lee, Hammer's Count Dracula

"Probably saw and did things that were difficult to deal with."

Though he did famously tell Peter Jackson on the set of Lord of the Rings that "that's not how you stab someone".

One interesting fact is that Lee worked with Ian Fleming in the SOE. It's believed in some parts that Lee was part of the inspiration for James Bond: a man capable both of performing commando raids and moving in the upper echelons of society without looking out of place.

Sir Christopher Lee. Movie star, stabber of Nazis and heavy metal god. Ave atque vale.

Gonna RUB MYSELF against the WALL: Microsoft's Surface Hub 84" monster-slab

"Appreciate this is 80 odd inches but still."

Don't forget there's also a 55" version. Useful for the people who are interested in the Surface Wall but would prefer a device that will fit in their pocket.

(What? If you can spend $7000 on a tablet you must have extremely deep pockets.)

'Stolen' art found on nearby shelf. Police keep looking anyway

Re: Head in the Cloud storage?

All those Floyd puns and you couldn't come up with "up against The Wall"?

Voyager 2 'stopped' last week, and not just for maintenance

"Why is that guy not safe for Voyager?"

He probably wants to have sex with it.

Swordfish fatally stabs man after man stabs, fatally, swordfish

"I wonder if J R Hartley used to receive abuse and death threats?"

Nah. Dude may have fished, but he was fly.

Apple: Relax, fanbois! We never meant to read your heart rate during wild wrist action

" how does this relate to the article?"

Without that particular feature the wrist action of the title is unlikely to happen, no?

Regarding the above "fail at science" comment: it was an error made while typing in haste. Of course it is the Y chromosome that induces male characteristics. Still, it's a mistake anyone could make - X is the one with the extra leg, after all.

"Yup, it's a feature, not a bug ..."

The default template for the sensitive bit between your legs is the clitoris; it's the X chromosome that carries the "corrupted data" that modifies a clitoris into a penis. So technically, it's both a feature and a bug.

Long, sticky summer ahead: Win 10 will be with OEMs by 31 August

"In the name of all that's holy, DON'T TOUCH THAT ICON!"

Actually there's no reason not to. According to the blurb, Win10 will download automatically when it's released (3GB) but will not automatically install. So, you can grab your free OS in case MS close off downloads before SP1 is released.

Re: What happened to the talk about the "free" upgrades from 7 & 8?

Check your taskbar. I got a notification asking me to pre-register for free upgrade this morning.

Trial halted as Kartoon defence attorney arrested after warrant discovery

Re: "There’s going to be smarter lawyers out there, but no one’s going to work harder than I will."

Well, at least there's one small advantage to having a lawyer on amphetamines...

RAF Eurofighter gets a Battle of Britain makeover

"They'll be painting them purple and yellow before long"

I assume you mean the Hurricanes? UKIP will want to send the Eurofighters back where they came from.

Call girl gets six years for Googler's drug death

"I think the solution is giving the police more heavy weaponry."

I think the solution is letting coppers moonlight as sex workers. Then wealthy men won't have to worry about being fatally fixed by their companion for the weekend, because they'll have a police escort.

Manchester car park lock hack leads to horn-blare hoo-ha

"which you're legally allowed to use if you have an appropriate license"

Well, I'm sure car thieves will be reassured to know that they're not illegally jamming the locks.

LOHAN's final test flight set to honour PRATCHETT

"I hate to pick up on a typo"

It's not a typo, it's your lack of grammar. Pterry's popularity is not in the past tense. Sadly, the man himself is. The GNU is just the technical equivalent of a man not being truly dead so long as he is remembered.

Which reminds me of the old Rowan Atkinson piece:

"Gone, but not forgotten. It could be worse. You could be gone and forgotten. Worse still, you could be forgotten and NOT DEAD."

Microsoft celebrates 25 years' SOLITARY SELF-PLEASURE with GROUP SESSION

Multiplayer Solitaire?

Maybe it's a speed run?

Doom is BOOM! BOOM! BACK!

"A Demon, in Command Center's dark maze, with a Rocket Launcher!!!!"

Sorry, you lose - it was Colonel Mustard in the Command Centre with the BFG-9000.

(Which joke makes me wish for a moment that there was a Doom-themed Cluedo.)

"IDQDQ and IDKFA are easy to remember"

Evidently not, because it's IDDQD and you were replying to a post with it in.

Mad Max: Fury Road – two hours of nonstop, utterly insane fantasy action

"Stick your inner child back up your arse"

It's called Fury Road, not Tory Road.

Blocking pirate sites doesn't weaken pirates say Euroboffins

"... but if I write a song about my discovery ...."

It amazes me that scientists and engineers have not yet hit upon the wizard wheeze of setting their discoveries and inventions to music. Kleinfeld's Symphony No.1 (A Method For Destroying Melanoma Through Non-Aggressive Microwave Radiation Therapy) would be a big hit I'm sure.

CSI GALAXY: Cause of death = STRANGULATION

I guess you could call it...

... astroerotic asphyxiation.

<puts on sunglasses>

YEAAHHHHHH!!!!

Extreme community policing: West Virginia crook pepper-sprays HIMSELF mid-robbery

"maybe the driver or his family were being threatened so he felt he had no choice"

That must have been an interesting conversation.

"Drive! Or I'll spray myself in the face again!"

"No! No! I'll do it!"

Cylon is golden: Backstabbing bank holiday board games

"I'll stick to the pub - far better conversation there"

My group meets in the pub, so we get the best of both worlds - assuming we don't run into any idiots like you, that is.

I'm not really a fan of the games on this list. Game of Thrones strictly needs six, BSG takes way too long for what it is, Saboteur is plain dull and anyone who recommends Munchkin to anyone ought to be shot. My go-to list is:

Kemet - an area control game with all the viciousness of GOT in less than half the time, and it scales. Viticulture - a worker placement game about running a vineyard in Italy. Very smooth, easy for beginners to pick up despite having a fair few elements.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf - a social traitor game that plays in 15 minutes.

Hyperborea - a 4X game where you build an engine by buying cubes that let you perform different actions, angling towards three different victory conditions.

Hawking hologram comforts One Direction fans with Zayny parallel universe claim

1D is "One Direction"?

Good grief, I thought it was a self-referential joke and the band was called One Dimension.

DRM is NOT THE LAW, I AM THE LAW, says JUDGE DREDD

Re: "... and the sentence is DEATH".

Dredd has sentenced many people to death. Judge Death's line is specifically "The crime isss life.... the ssssentence isss DEATH!"

tl;dr - grexnix.

Got a big day planned in 15 billion years? You need this clock

"OK who's the sad little fucker down voting a harmless Terry Pratchett meme? "

It wasn't me, but it could be a reaction to overuse. In Pratchett fandom there's a long standing tradition at meets of making people kick 20p into the beer fund if they quote Monty Python for just this reason. And it's justified; I remember a long signing queue where of course the rule wasn't applied, and by the time we got to the front there had been an almost complete recitation of Life of Brian.

Dead Steve Jobs' wage-fixing pact in Silicon Valley was news to us, claim Apple directors

Jobs Vacant

For exactly how long can Apple blame Jobs for every shitty thing they do? Probably forever, I suppose - I'm told he believed in reincarnation. As soon as he popped his clogs Apple execs were likely out there looking for a child born at the same moment, like the Dalai Lama.

Perhaps we should get it all out of the way at once and hold a Cadaver Synod. Dig up Jobs's body, try him for everything all at once, cut off his swiping fingers and throw the rest in the river. Then we can all get on with our lives and actually blame the corporation for the reprehensible things it does.

It's official: David Brents are the weakest link in phishing attacks

"it's not users or management that is the biggest risk "

But you acknowledge that management aren't users, at least.

BLAM! Valve slams brakes on Steam flimflam with $5 spam scram plan

"So without a new valid credit card daily, no go."

Out of curiosity: is there anything preventing spammers linking the same stolen credit card to 100 accounts, triggering them all at once with $500 of purchases across the accounts, then engaging in a blitz?

Google wants Marvin the Paranoid Android's personality in the cloud

"Google's management face the same fate as Sirius Cybernetic Corporation"

Nah, they'll just be first out the door. Hopefully they will enjoy their trip through it.

Apple swears that NO FANBOI will queue for its new gumble

"An appointment to buy a watch! What are they like?"

I don't know. I missed my appointment because I didn't have a watch.

Samsung's bend blame blast: We DEMAND a Galaxy S6 Edge do-over

"Me and my pals Hitler, Stalin"

Stalin would not have been a fan of the iPhone, because it is not a phone for the proletariat. This is why he invaded Finland - to take over Nokia. Torquemada wouldn't have liked it either, as Steve Jobs was openly non-Christian and his devices must therefore be Satan's work..

Hitler would have loved it, though. It has a Blitz socket, the battery will last 1000 minutes (under regular use), and it even has restriction of user freedom and all software for it must be authorised for release by Das Apfelreich. Truly, the master phone for the master race!

"You mean the watch pocket?"

It hasn't been the watch pocket since the invention of the iPhone meant you didn't want to wear a watch any more - or, if you're not an Apple cultist, since the wristwatch rendered the pocket watch obsolete. So now it's the condom pocket. It's always been the right size to hold something you don't need if you have an iPhone, though.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Deep-fried cheesy Hungarian

"bacon is called the "duct tape of food" by many"

If your bacon is light on one side and dark on the other, you're cooking it wrong.

Microsoft update mayhem delays German basketball game, costs team dear

"PEBCAK"

A complete aside, but that really is an ugly acronym. I've always preferred PICNIC: "Problem In Chair, Not In [Code/Computer]". Not only does it sound nicer, you can easily slip it into conversation with the end user - usually a management type doing a corporate feasibility study for the Peter Principle - and damn them to their face. "My works laptop broke after I turned off the company firewall so I could visit my porn sites, can you fix it?" "No worries, it'll be a PICNIC".

Web geeks grant immortality to Sir Terry Pratchett – using smuggled web code

"Wasn't the hack implemented by the group calling themselves the Smoking GNU?"

it was, but the GNU code wasn't the hack. The group took its name from the code used to transmit the names of dead operators because they were inspired to form by the clacks company seemingly not caring about the operators any more.

(Thank you to the second person who upvoted my previous post, by the way - that was my 3000th upvote. :D)

"Why include the N?"

Because of context. In the books, the clacks is basically a semaphore-based version of the telegraph network and the cost of sending a message is based on how many towers it has to pass through. The amount of money each regional clacks office needs to earn to be worth running is reckonable by the number of messages that have passed through it. The N code is added to messages that are not to be logged, and hence not included in the financial calculations.

In short: adding the N means you don't care how much the message costs.

Big Data shocker: Over 6 million Americans have reached the age of 112

"A database full of errors, well I never !"

It is important in data collection to keep everything correctly filed. The US government are merely following proper data management procedures by putting all their mistakes in a single database.

Timeout, Time Lords: ICANN says there is only one kind of doctor

"You forgot the joke icon Sarah"

I thought she was talking about the supervillains.

RIP Sir Terry Pratchett: Discworld author finally gets to meet DEATH

"I heard rumours that Rhianna was going to take over the reins of Discworld."

They're not rumours. Pterry announced three years ago that he was leaving the reins to her. However, she doesn't feel that she could do his work justice in the form of novels and will be restricting herself to Discworld projects In other media: scripts for the Watch TV series and a Wee Free Men movie are in development.

(Given her background in computer games ... how about a Discworld MMO?)

Nothing says 'Taliban' quite like net neutrality, eh, EU Digi Commish?

"Given many of his statements the one thing we can be sure of it isn't Google"

I don't know - Google said "Don't be evil", but they never mentioned anything about "Don't be a fucking idiot".

And if Oettinger has been critical of Google, who's going to listen to him now?

Chappie: The AI tale that’s about heart, not intelligence

"You'll also get reprises of implausible psychopaths with SA accents."

Yep, Ninja was playing himself apparently.

I decided against watching this movie when Die Antwoord were cast. Ninja is a thug and Yolandi has no discernible talent other than flashing her bush on stage. Happily Blomkamp discovered what a twat Ninja is during the filming and wrote him out of the end of the movie. Still, we didn't need a Short Circuit remake.

Shove off, ugly folk, says site for people who love themselves

"I was going for two possible matches. I'm sure you'll get it eventually."

What's the difference between BeautifulPeople.com and EpilepticPeople.com?

One has members taking fits...

Boffins find Earth's earliest Homo in Ethiopian hilltop

"the dinosaur was holding a placard with “Ban the Bomb” written on it"

That's Terry Pratchett's early sci-fi novel Strata, if anyone's wondering.

"our dating methods are all wrong since nothing is older than 6,000 years."

I wish Young Earth Creationists used dating methods that were all wrong. If we could stop them dating they'd all die out.

Frontier promises it won't 'dumb down' Elite: Dangerous for Xbox

"Why there wasn't a 12 Years A Slave movie tie in for Elite is beyond me"

Probably it was due to the lack of spaceships in the antebellum American South. Which is just as well, really - given one Cobra MkIII the Confederacy might have won the war.

£280k Kickstarter camera trigger campaign crashes and burns

"or in the case of board games, you can end up getting it for down 30% of the price "

Just a note here: it's at least as common for KS board game backers to end up paying close to full price for their pledge, then watch everyone else pick up the game for 30% off RRP when it hits online retailers. That hasn't stopped me pledging for numerous board games, mind you, but let's not misrepresent the situation here.