Posts by tojb

Apple loses iPhone patent lawsuit

We are paying for marketroids, legal, finance: everything except the product

Has anyone done a serious analysis of how much e.g. microsoft, apple actually spend on producing their software/hardware vs:

- filing/contesting perverse patents like these ones

- advertising

- astroturfing

- leveraged buyouts of firms that used to do something useful

- tax dodging

- blah whatever those dudes in suits are supposed to be doing

I mean seriously, I could have re-skinned debian and ordered a crate of dell laptops painted white from some chinese factory in like, a week..... (cf psystar)

Boffins spot 7 ALIEN WORLDS right in our galactic backyard

Silicone lifeforms anyone?

Or for that matter, life with ammonia serving as the pervasive solvent. Or, for that matter, any amount of other weird sh*t that no-one has yet proved impossible.

Spock: "We've never seen anything like this before captain"

Jim:"You mean apart from the weird energy-being last episode"

Spock:"Well, apart from that one we've never seen anything like this before"

Jim:"And what about three weeks ago?"

Spock:"That one was different"

Einstein almost tagged dark energy in the early 1920s

no probs with magnets as far as I know

...magnetism is a correction to the electrostatic force, caused by relative motion of the charges. Because charges are moving, there is a Lorentz contraction and the local charge density appears to change, relative to stationary charges. Thus, a force. That explanation always seemed rather neat and final to me, pelase speak up if you have a problem with it.

Nine sentenced in Chinese kidney-for-iPad scheme

Re: Legal age to vote used to be 18

Off topic, but that is precisely why Salmond wants it at 16 for the Scots Independence Referendum. Next time you buy something deep-fried and unidentifiable from an Edinburgh Chippy, better eat it quick before someone tells you what it is!

Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox

Re: robots

The African miners you are referring to weren't just baton-charged. They were shot. On full auto. Dozens of them are dead now. Have some respect.

'There may come a day when Hobbits promote slot machines ...'

Longbottom Leaf in Colorado, Calif, etc?

Warner bros have missed a zeitgeisty (marketing/getting sued) opportunity with that one.

Automatic Facebook couple pages: Nauseating sign of desperation

Contempt for users = destined to fail

Remember when google was one of many competing search engines, but the only one with a clean no-hassle start page that did what it said on the tin and nothing else? Remember how they did quite well out of that? Now does anyone remember altavista? AOL? Thought so. Facebook, your days are numbered.

Steady Antarctic ice growth 'limits confidence in climate predictions'

Sooner or later

We're going to run out of fossil fuels sooner or later, so why not start doing the best we can to de-carbon and green-up the technology tree as of now? All this toing and froing is just daft, the question is not do we have to move off coal & oil, the question is how.

Google upgrades Gmail interface, now less 'drafty'

Re: UI tweaks... still no fix for basic bugs

Here's a post on google's forum: it seems this person is using XP, I am using ubuntu .... so at the user end, the combo chrome+gmail is definitely what is at fault. If it works for you then hoorah.... but I'm not the only one it fails for.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/JblYJUnk98Y

This isn't the place for an in-depth discussion of a puzzlingly non-fixed intermittent bug in gmail - but thanks anyway for the downvote based on a failed half-arsed attempt to replicate a bug in what must be one of the planet's most sprawling distributed software entities...

UI tweaks... still no fix for basic bugs

Can't make an attachment running gmail in chrome.... its been like that for months. No problem in firefox. Someone at google HQ must be using chrome browser + gmail FFS!

Google: the new microsoft

Fujitsu assigns team of women to design PC for women

Petticoat 5

Obligatory link to the petticoat 5, the first computer by and for women:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/lookaroundyou/programmes/computers/gallery1.shtml

Can't find a youtube link.... perhaps the vid was taken down due to a highly ironic accusation of sexism?

CPS grovels after leaking IDs of hundreds arrested during student riots

Is no-one surprised that they kept all this info? Some kid gets thrown in the back of a van and interrogated in shifts for 24hrs, then released again because he did nothing wrong, and the cops have his name (+ dabs, +DNA?) on record forever? (terminator becos no robocop icon)

Nokia Lumia 800

"Digital Slime Trail" .... thanks for that

If this phone imports all of your contact info, from everywhere, then uses it to aggregate all social interactions to the device.... does that mean that Microsoft will start spamming all your friends in your name (and everyone else you've ever emailed) just like FB did when I accidentally let it get hold of my gmail addresses?

Gadget Shop kingpin cuffed in nightclub 'toilet sex' incident

Further evidence that society has lost all decency

Wouldn't it have been more polite of the police to cough a few times and wait until the various parties involved/not involved had straightened up their clothing, wiped their noses and come out to discuss whatever the problem might have been?

These people are supposed to be public servants, yet they throw their weight around like monkeys in blue wooly suits.

Playboy sneaks NAKED LADIES onto iPad

\"I only get it for the fiction\"

Fahrenheit 451 was published as a 3-parter in playboy, back in 1954. Intermediate between the initial short-story form and the final full-length novel.

Worth 60 bucks? Nearly.

Ballerina canned for flashing her assets

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

@TVTimeWatser , PeterCoffin:

Delete the trailing ellipsis from the url.... you weiners