Posts by theastrodragon

Friday fun fact: If Stegosauruses had space telescopes, they wouldn't have seen any rings around Saturn

The resulting motion of the probe suggested Saturn’s gravitational field was much higher than expected, and this field is affected by how fast its internal matter spins

Am I the only one who went 'huh?' at this?

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave me tea... pigs-in-blankets-flavoured tea

What's in a name?

Will we have to rename the lovely veggies once we leave the EU?

It actually will be Obama who decides whether to end US government oversight of the internet

The fact that Apple, Facebook and Google all want this is enough to make me say no.

Windows 10 Anniversary Update: This design needs a dictator

All this turd-polishing might be all fine and dandy, but it ignores my main issues with Win10

(1) It constantly spies on me, and its almost impossible to stop this (and if you do, they change things next update so its doing it again)

(2) It depends more and more on the cloud, which removes control from me and puts it somewhere dependent on external factors to work. And if they go wrong, it doesn't

(3) They keep trying to shove what THEY feel is a wonderful 'experience', like Cortana, down my throat, giving me no options to say 'sorry, don't want this particular feature'

Until these issues are resolved, you can polish it to your hearts content, I'm still not touching it.

Bill Gates cooks up poultry recipe for Africans' paltry existence

Presumably if you leave the chicken plugged in overnight it gets automatically upgraded to a Windows 10 chicken?

Another chance to win a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive

Don't panic, it's just the new Windows 10 spider.

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

"DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH."

Am I the only one to worry the LHC restarts in two weeks?

I'm sure its a co-incidence.

Just as long as it isn't a million-to-one coincidence...

Wheeee! BT preps for FIVE HUNDRED MEGABIT broadband trial

In Reg standards, how many cat pictures per second is that speed?

Rise of the (tiny) machines: US boffins make nanomotor breakthrough

Re: "...internal mechanical responses that no one has seen before..."

Or kicking them hard. While drinking beer.

Windows 8.1 to freeze out small business apps

The whole fiasco reminds me of one of those people in their car ignoring the road while following their GPS over a cliff...

UK sitting on top of at least 50 years of shale gas – report

Not seeing the problem here...

1-in-10 e-tomes 'are self-published'... most are 'rubbish' says book ed

90% of books are rubbish

The thing is , such a high proprtion of published books are rubbish - they are just edited, proof-read rubbish.

And yes, the large bulk of self-published books are terrible. But the big evil here is Amazon. Ever since they allowed books to be free, the vanity/bizzare/nutjob authors have deluged the free Kindle market with dire rubbish, totally dominating the market. Thank you SO much, Amazon.

At least you can look inside before buying, so you dont have too much excuse for not realising its rubbish.

And the fact is, that many of the better self-pubbed books have effectively been edited - they have been run through writers focus groups and similar. Granted, not as well as a GOOD professional editor would, but by no means badly.

Bogus gov online test tells people on dole they're just SO employable

Plenty of jobs

"El Reg took the test and deliberately chose the most negative answers. This should have painted a picture of a sociopathic layabout who is violently opposed to work, totally devoid of intellect and incapable of treating other people with anything but venomous contempt."

Of course you're employable. You sound like perfect material for a job as a Member of Parliament.

Judge drops TV ad-block block: So how will anyone pay for TV now?

Lost the plot

The advertisers have, for quite a long time, completely lost the plot on advertising because they seem to live in their own little world, disconnected from actual viewers.

The bulk of people probably dont mind a small amount of adverts per hour. They'd look at them. But what we get is nearly a third of our viewing time contaminated by adverts, many of which repeat during the same program, and are often spectacularly stupid or bad. And then they look at each other in confusion and wonder why we all want to marry out fast-forward button...

The hoarder's dilemma, or 'Why can't I throw anything away?'

Hoarding?? Never!!

Keeping old electronics isn't hoarding.

Its off-site backups. For very old sites...

Romans, Han Dynasty, kick-started climate change

Re: Mega-forcings of a few cooking fires.

Massive? By modern standards?

You greenies just hate the idea that it ISN'T our fault, don't you?

Go and look up the amount of forestation in Roman times relative to now (careful, this might need the use of numbers. Real ones, not the ones used by the warmista industry)

The only 'massive' deforestation wasnt caused by cooking fires, it was caused by goats.

Mega-forcings of a few cooking fires.

I don't suppose these retards have bothered to notice that forest fires (much larger forested areas in Roman times) would reduce human cooking fires to insignificance?? Or perhaps even consider that if these things happenned before any significant human impact it might NOT (gasp!) be caused by the poor little villagers burning wood (most of which would have gone up anyway in those natural fires, so even less impact...)

Of course not, lets just blame it all on the humans (again) and get the old begging bowl out for more grant money.

Ig Nobels 2012: Physics of ponytails, chimp arse-cognition and more

No Beer

Why did none of this years IgNobles include beer??

Microsoft bod dreams up 'Star Trek holodeck' games console

Been in use for years...

I fail to see how this is patentable - similar systems (using domes for projection) have been in use in the military for well over 20 years for training. The only difference seems to be to claim it will work in a living room (which, frankly, I will believe when I see it done and not before)

Yet another US-driven patent grab of existing techniques

Acer bigwig sees gloomy future for Ultrabooks in Europe

Its hardly surprising Ultrabooks aren't selling, as no-one in the marketing departments seems to have consulted anyone other than overpaid execs and themselves.

Thinner has caused the price to rise, forced horrible chicklet keyboards on everyone, lost valuable and needed connectors. For no apparant reason, they seem to have gone for a low-rez screen that my 8 year old laptop betters. And a widescreen format uselful only for watching movies - when did you last see someone on the train/bus/Starbucks watching a movie on their laptop???

What the real user wants is lighter weight (getting under 2kg makes a big difference in lugging around); thinness is pointless as its always shoved in the lappy bag anyway(and PLEAE offer a proper keyboard option!). Long battery life, true, 8hours (a days use) is a good target. Most users dont especially need gobs of processing power, so offer a slow down/lower power mode, everyones happy. Put a proper resolution screen on the beast so its actually of some use for real work. Stop with ripping people off for ssd drives. Now you may make the sales targets....however the marketing droids and their managers seem much happier to follow each other over the cliff like good little corporate lemmings

May 2012 was second warmest on record. The warmest? 2010

According to their data, there is a lovely medium sized red dot over the UK, indicating we had a warmer than average May.

Really? This is the May where I had to keep the heating on for the first time in..mm...very many years.

I'd love to know where the magic hot areas in the UK were - maybe on top of the Met Office roof next to the heating outlets...?

Now granted the UK is only a small part of the global picture - but if I can see the bit where I live is living in fantasy land, how much belief can I place in the rest of the data? Particularly in the data such as the arctic where they dont have any measuring stations anyway...

Report: UK falls behind as smart meters rolled out across Europe

Supported by muppets

If the government thinks these are wonderful, marvelous and will save unicorns then I am against them. History proves this to be the correct decision.

Windows 8: Sugar coating on Microsoft's hard-to-swallow tablet

Its an even-numbered Microsoft OS, did you really expect something other than a steaming pile of poo?

Asus Tegra 3, Android 4 tablet priced up for Brits

So £200 more just for a slightly faster version???

Someone in marketing has no idea, do they...

Eurozone crisis: We're all dooomed! Here's why

So enlighten us, what ARE the benefits of the single currency then???

Beeb measures Blighty in doormats

Who cares about doormats?

What a silly unit to use, even for the beeb.

They should have course used the much more popular uk area measurement, the beermat.

P10000: What HP wants to make instead of PCs, tablets

birdies

But will it play Angry Birds???