Posts by 21st Century Peon

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Re: Should have tested the wave forms.

They needed a pirate, because it was an arrr!-dware problem.

(Where, as they say, my Paul & Storm fans at?)

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: Just wait until February 7, 2036...

And after that, the Y10K event of 31 Dec 9999, when we change to 5-digit years.

South Korea opens the door for robots to roam among pedestrians

Re: Sudden Impact

Agreed. For people who can't picture the numbers of it:

I'm middle-aged, tall, and not very fit. I weigh about 90kg, and if I run (I try not to, it's undignified), I top out at about 15 km/h.

If I run into someone at my top speed, they're going flying, and probably getting at least mildly hurt. (And I'm nowhere near the top percentiles of weight or speed.)

Currently, your average delivery robot is about 25kg. One that can get up to a bot+freight weight of 500kg will be significantly larger (unless it exclusively delivers gold bullion) than the ones we see around now, so let's double that to 50kg.

A robot, carrying 5 of me, going as fast as I can run, does not belong on the pavement.

CSI: Amazon.com coming soon to a screen near you

Will they come after themselves?

...for Amazon's own-brand knockoffs of the products that other companies sell through them?

1) Small Company X invents a widget.

2) Bezos' Bazaar is pretty much the only game in town, so Small Company X has no choice but to sell their widget on the Marketplace.

3) Jeff's flying monkeys spot a successful new product, and make their own nigh-identical (but juuuuuuuust different enough that suing would be a long, drawn-out process, and too expensive for Company X) version.

4) The "Amazon Essentials Widget" shows up first in every search on Amazon, by some incredible coincidence, and Small Company X is properly screwed.

From Brit telly presenter Eamonn Holmes to burning 5G towers in the Netherlands: Stupid week turns into stupid fortnight for radio standard

Misinterpreted?

"I want to clarify some comments that some of you may have misinterpreted from me yesterday"

Nobody misinterpreted you, Eamonn. You were very clear in your attempt to become an Irish Glenn Beck.

'Occult' text from Buffy The Vampire Slayer ep actually just story about new bus lane in Dublin

Re: pro-Buffy flame war.

Well, if there's a more appropriate show to raise from the dead...

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

Re: How do the vultures find time to make these changes

Or conversely, Tester Beating.

Space, the final Trump-tier: America to beam up $8bn for Space Force

Re: Inner Space?

It was a *great* movie. It's got Quaid buck-naked in the street, some none-more-Eighties nightclub stuff from Meg Ryan, a perfectly cast Martin Short turned up to 11, The Cowboy, and a Sam Cooke-heavy soundtrack. Not to mention beating "Predator" to the Best Visual Effects Oscar (though reasonable minds may differ on that call, it definitely deserved the nomination).

Dear God, what more do people /want/?

Stop us if you've heard this one: Ex-Googler sues web giant claiming terrible treatment. This time, sex harassment

Re:Nobody sues poor companies for harassment

Poor companies don't have massively profitable workers whose interpersonal shittiness is carefully ignored because of those massive profits.

Classy Oregon diners tipped waitress with 'crystal meth' – cops

"[...] comprising a small torch, batteries and other items."

That's not a meth lab, that's my kitchen drawer. Either the police are keeping the good stuff a surprise for the trial, or they didn't find anything worth a damn and this is a poor attempt to sex it up for the press.

Rude web trolls should NOT be jailed, warns prosecution chief

In the words of Simon Phoenix...

"You can't take away people's right to be assholes."

Coulson arrested

I think they spoofed the phone number

...so that the voicemail system thought it was the victim's own phone calling.

Ofcom maps state of UK broadband

Fermanagh, the slowest-piped region in the country, has 95% "superfast availability"

...but nearly a third of its households have connections slower than 2Mb/s.

Cookstown has 98% "superfast availability", but the second-slowest average speed in the country, with slow connections to over one-third of homes.

In fact, Northern Ireland in general has very low speeds, with high-speed available to pretty much anyone who asks for it.

Clearly, either due to expense or disinterest, no-one's signing up for superfast connections round that way.