Posts by kryptonaut

Finns look to bring Phorm style stalker ads to UK radio streaming

What's the alternative to ads?

Yes, adverts are annoying because they are not the main reason most people listen to the radio (or consume any kind of media really). But few people want to pay subscriptions for stuff, so how should radio, TV, websites, etc. be funded? Levies on receiving equipment are not popular, and any central authority collecting payments and distributing it to broadcasters would inevitably be accused of unfair bias.

My opinion is that anyone can choose to offer a service with conditions attached, and if you don't like the conditions you just don't use the service. So commercial radio broadcasts adverts as well as regular content, and if you want to listen to it then you get ads, that's the deal. If you want to have a TV in the UK, you pay your licence fee, that's another deal. (It's the same with music - if someone owns copyright on an artwork and stipulates that you can get a copy of it in exchange for a certain fee then that's their right, no matter how annoying it may be or how tempting it may be to copy it without paying.)

Anyway, given that ads are not going to go away, surely the best thing is for each advert to bring in as much revenue as possible, so there will be a need for fewer of them. Making ads more relevant to consumers is one way to achieve that.

Targeting feels creepy but it needn't automatically be sinister, and it can have benefits for both sides. As a slightly geeky male I'd be happy to see more ads for gadgets and tech instead of makeup and hair-care products or kids toys, for example.

I feel some down-votes coming my way...

ROBOTS battle bunker-buster bank blast blaggers

How appropriate...

... that it should be investigated by inspector Bill Munnee

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

New Jersey?

"Hatterman and his colleagues, using 12 tons of hot-water drilling equipment, bored three holes more than 200m deep through the Fimbul Shelf, which spans an area roughly twice the size of New Jersey."

'Twice the size of New Jersey' means as much to me as 'the area of Clavius' would mean to anyone who isn't a selenographer. Please don't use comparisons like this in an article that's dealing with technical matters, it makes it look as though you unthinkingly paraphrased someone else's text. I know I can google for the value, but you're not doing yourself any favours using units like this if you're trying to give the appearance of a scientific and reasoned argument.

For anyone who needs/wants to know, twice the size of New Jersey is (according to Google) 45,216 square km.

Wind farms create local warming

Re: Basic errors?

When pushing the blades in one direction, the air experiences an equal and opposite force - as described by Newton's laws, which could be called basic physics. So the air downwind of a rotating turbine will itself be rotating, causing the stirring mentioned in the article. When generating power, the more resistance put up by the turbine (i.e. the harder the wind has to work to turn the blades) the more stirring there will be.

Crytek: Schemes to strike second-hand games biz 'awesome'

Resellability affects perceived value.

It seems to me that where there is a second-hand market for games then first-time buyers will be prepared to pay a higher price, in the knowledge that they'll get some back when they resell it.

If, after completing the game, players are going to be left with a fancy coaster, then I would think they'd be reluctant to pay so much in the first place.

Basically, the publishers already get their cut of the resell value (paid in advance too!), and if they prevent the second-hand market they'll have to drop their prices to compensate.

Smacks of short-sighted greed to me.

Himalayan glaciers actually gaining ice, space scans show

Reading around a bit...

I think perhaps Lewis has not quite given us the whole picture. This article ought to be titled 'Some Himalayan* glaciers might posibly be gaining a small amount of weight"

*Well, near enough anyway.

From the summary of the original scientific article:

"The globally averaged mass balance of glaciers and ice caps is negative. An anomalous gain of mass has been suggested for the Karakoram glaciers [...] Here, we calculate the regional mass balance of glaciers in the central Karakoram between 1999 and 2008, based on the difference between two digital elevation models. We find a highly heterogeneous spatial pattern of changes in glacier elevation [...] The regional mass balance is just positive at +0.11±0.22 m yr−1 water equivalent [...] Our measurements confirm an anomalous mass balance in the Karakoram region and indicate that the contribution of Karakoram glaciers to sea-level rise was −0.01 mm yr−1 for the period from 1999 to 2008, 0.05 mm yr−1 lower than suggested before."

Or, paraphrasing somewhat, "Ice in general is melting faster than it is forming. Of course it's not melting absolutely everywhere, and in a particular area of the Karakorum region some difficult measurements and calculations indicate that on average glaciers appear to be growing slightly. Although they could in fact be shrinking."

I'd recommend reading the BBC article for a more balanced viewpoint:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17701677

Russia and NASA plan to COLONISE the Moon

@ShelLuser

Not to worry, I think the man has already walked all over the woman.

Apple land-grabs fuel cells for mobiles

iPatents

Perhaps a parallel office should be set upto issue iMaginary iPatents for iMaginary iProducts.

It's ba-ack. Exploit revives slain browser history bug

Will this work in practice?

Surely once one website has tried to use this exploit, the cache will end up preloaded with the sites that were tested so the results will not be valid/reliable for subsequent trials?

Jarmageddon: Marmite spill sparks biohazard threat

Yeast extract?

Is there a rising sense of panic in the area?

San Diego Baywatch rules out exploding dead whale

Ow ow ow my sides hurt!

I can't believe I've never seen that video before. Utterly brilliant!

Euro fraud cops crush garlic tax evaders

Ban the stuff!

Garlic is evil and should be taxed into oblivion! I hate the way 99% of all 'convenience food' is laden with the stuff - enough to make your eyes water if you stand near the oven when cooking it, and all next day there's a foul taste in your mouth.

It didn't used to be like that, time was when we Brits would sneer at our continental cousins for stinking of the stuff, but now we're all at it. Tsk Tsk, what's the world coming to, I don't know.

</rant>

Celebrating the 55th anniversary of the hard disk

80MB

My first job after Uni involved writing software for the Northwest German Lotto. Normally we would develop in the UK, copy onto 8" floppies, and install at the customer's site. But we also had a big Winchester disk that lived in a kind of bell jar with several platters all stacked up, looking somewhat technical and mysterious to the uninformed.

It had 80MB written on the top of it in blocky letters, so the 8 looked very much like a 'B' - I dreaded taking it through customs...

Reg readers ponder LOHAN's substantial globes

Hydrogen balloons

In my more experimental days I used to fill party balloons with hydrogen, by reacting caustic soda (drain cleaner) with aluminium foil in a drinks bottle then fitting a balloon over the neck. Once the mix warmed up it would fill the balloon fairly quickly.

Of course hydrogen being somewhat flammable, the obvious next step was to ignite it at altitude - so I tied some string to a balloon, soaked the string in methylated spirit, lit it and released it. Only rose about 20 ft before it made a nice noise, and showered burning rubber over my parents' driveway :-)

US robot ornithopter spy-hummingbird in flight test triumph

The wires are what it lands on...

Ah yes - on closer inspection it seems you are right, there is some kind of springy wire tripod arrangement for it to land on. Neat!

Power supply

Looks very convincing, but I suspect it's powered externally - at 1:32 you can see something like a fine wire glinting in the sunlight. Still, impressive bit of kit and I'd be happy to get one for Christmas - although maybe if they have a chaffinch model it'd look less out of place round my way.

NASA to make MAJOR ALIENS REVELATION this week

Alien translation

I wanted to see how aliens might translate nicole's message so I simulated it by sending it through Google Translate and back, via Korean, Welsh and Albanian. Message reads:

"Hi im nicole. I am this when my ambition is to do, and I hit it show.i, West End stage, with a small television and theater, and also would not want to see the mind has nothing to do one day love kkokgwaneun or one of the main part of extra care and I love what I want to show the doctor. However, laters.Nicole X"

I think that makes more sense than the original.

Reg reader stitches PARIS right up

Thanks...

...Thanks to Team El-Reg for such an epic project, and for giving us all the smug feeling of having been in on it from the start when the rest of the media are only just now catching up with the awesomeness of flying a paper plane to space and back, and taking pictures to prove it!

...Thanks also for the appreciative comments regarding my (for it was me whodunnit) photographic stitch-up job. It was fascinating to see the panorama gradually coming together, and then trying to match it up with Google Earth's view.

Great to see the 'big' news outlets running with the story, anyway. Looking forward to LOHAN :-)

Scarlett Johansson unleashes voracious sexuality in steamy alien film

Excellent...

I really enjoyed the book - hope the film does it justice.

PARIS unveils impressive box

condensation

Also you might want to put some desiccant (and/or a heating element of some sort) between the UV filter and the camera, it'd be a shame if all you got was pictures of ice crystals forming on the inside of the window.