* Posts by JulianB

111 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2011

'First' 3D-printed rifle's barrel splits after single shot

JulianB

And another parallel with the porn-search-filtering nonsense: even if we accept that one shouldn't view porn or make functioning firearms, there are valid reasons to search on "dodgy" terms, and valid reasons to print something that looks a bit like a gun. Novelty cigarette lighters, umbrella handles, water pistols...

ISTM that any benefit is outweighed by the inconvenience of false positives.

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

JulianB
Joke

Re: Better get busy

...and the RSPB website. Full of tits and shags.

Weird interview questions

JulianB

Perhaps not weird as such...

"So, what makes you think you can actually do this job?"

Not my most succesful interview!

Unprofessional job adverts

JulianB

Computer operator

"Should preferably have experience of operating a computer."

And that was about it.

ARTICLES without comment boxes - Climate, CO2, Anything authored by L. Page...

JulianB
Joke

Re: re 'There is no scientific consensus' on sea-level rise, say scientists

There is no scientific consensus on gravity - it's just that the earth sucks.

Internet evildoers stitch together vile ransomware-survey scam chimaera

JulianB

Re: @Jess

I don't think "strain blocking" means anything. I parse the sentence as "this strain of ransomware blocks..."

Is it a BIRD? Is it a plane? Right first time – and she's in SPANDEX

JulianB
FAIL

presumably

he had to, as he'd superglued the original to himself...

Apple builds flagship store on top of PLAGUE HOSPITAL

JulianB

Re: Plague ....

Not sure, but I seem to remember an incident where building work opened a plague pit that was coincidentally next to somewhere that had been an ice house for centuries*, and there were serious concerns about frozen bacilli having survived.

*That part seems implausible now I come to repeat it...

Tickle my balls, stroke my button and blow the fluff from my crack

JulianB

This might be apocryphal

if not downright untrue, but when I was first taught Lotus SmartSuite, the tutor swore that he'd just done a class where all the students turned their mice over and tried to move the ball around with their fingers. This was apparently their second-ever training session: the first had used a trackball.

UK.gov finally admits it will MISS superfast broadband target

JulianB
Thumb Up

Re: I hereby declare...

"anyone else get annoyed by the dumbing down..."

Yup. Don't tell me it's superfast (and no doubt ultrafast, hyperfast and various other meaningless terms in future): tell me how fast it is. And preferably without using the phrase "up to".

AXE-WAVING BIKER GANG SMASHES into swanky Apple UK store

JulianB
Headmaster

Re: Correction

Further pedantry alert:

"a motor" not "an motor"

Girls, beer and C++: How to choose the right Comp-Sci degree for you

JulianB

Re: Tedium.

Perhaps it's just prejudice, but the word "Studies" in the title of a degree or other academic course makes it seem less worthwhile to me.

Life on Mars means subsisting on grim diet of turd-garden spinach

JulianB

Re: Desire for a brand new combine harvester

Indeed. "I've got a brand new combine harvester" seems to imply that I've got one, not that I want one.

Thousands rally behind teen girl cuffed, expelled in harmless 'explosion'

JulianB
Happy

Re: Values

Check out the photo of the home in the Sky News link. Somehow, it just fits the story perfectly.

Just what the world needs: Android in the rice cooker

JulianB
FAIL

"Lets users search for recipes on their Android phones and then transmit them to the cooker"

And then what? The rice cooker reads the recipe, assembles the ingredients, skins, chops and browns the chicken, peels, slices and adds the onion... (depending on the recipe, obviously)?

How can it do anything more complex than "Boil the rice currently inside you, using the water also currently inside you."?

Brits admit to using mobile phones during sex - and not in a good way

JulianB
Gimp

Re: I'll admit I'm not as experienced as I'd like to be

"Unless you're a fanboi..." Suddenly it all makes sense. I had read the article as implying you're using a phone while having sex with another human being

40,000 sign petition to oust Rep. Paul 'pit of hell' Broun

JulianB
Flame

Re: Earth is 9,000 years old...

But didn't creation occur in 4004 BC according to literalists? It's AD 2012 now. That's only a touch over 6000 yrs. Where have the other three millennia come from?

Burn the heretic!

'It is absolute b*ll*cks that contractors aren't committed'

JulianB
FAIL

99% of contractors say they do a good job

Who'd have thunk it?

And presumably permanent staff wouldn't similarly blow their own trumpets?

Rolling robot avatar trumps telecommuting

JulianB
FAIL

Not convinced

Firstly, I'm not convinced that having this thing wandering around the office talking to my colleagues while I'm at home is any better than me phoning or instant-messaging them. But let's accept that it is.

What then if a colleague in the office while I'm at home wants to talk to me? Do they have to find my bot? Presumably they'll bypasss it and call me direct anyway.

Part of my reason for working at home is that I have colleagues in various offices in at least five countries (as, of course, do those colleagues). So we each need a bot in each office. Unless we all decide to work from home and have one central physical office somewhere in a cheap part of the globe entirely staffed by bots and bot-maintenance technicians.

Space shuttle to slip surly bonds of Earth one last time over California

JulianB
FAIL

"site"?

You'd hope the California Science Center knew the difference between "sight" and "site".

Dutch unleash intelligent robot bins: No ID, no rubbish

JulianB
WTF?

Reducing truck mile?

" [The bins] use their embedded phone to call up a truck over Vodafone's GPRS network when they're full, reducing the distance trucks have to drive."

I find it hard to believe in this reduction. Say I fill my bin on Monday, so they send out a truck to empty it. My next-door neighbour fills his on Tuesday, so they send out a truck to empty it. Next-door-but one fills his on Wednesday...

Assuming random bin-filling, they have to send a truck down every street every day, instead of once a week.

Ok, maybe we don't each fill a bin per week, but in a street of any reasonable size, there'll be at least one trip needed per day.

I can only assume they don't in fact empty bins on demand as soon as they are full, perhaps they come once a week and empty only those bins known to be already full, but the saving there would be marginal.

Vulture Central logo pops up in prehistoric France

JulianB

Ancestors?

Don't worry, even French courts will give little credence to anyone claiming to be an ancestor of the Paleolithic artist. Unless they can demonstrate that they're really, really old.

Deadly domino effect of extinction proved by boffins

JulianB
FAIL

"In the tanks that only held one kind of wasp, the second went extinct within a few generations"

That makes no sense at all.

I follow the thrust of the argument: that if one predator goes extinct, its prey thrives, outcompetes another prey species, second prey species either goes extinct or is at least severely reduced in numbers, predator that preys on now extinct prey species goes extinct.

But I don't think the predator that wasn't in the tank in the first place would take "a few generations" to disappear.

Google may face grilling by MPs over 'immoral' tax avoidance

JulianB

The government makes the rules; the companies obey them(1). The rules effectively say "If you're based in the UK, you pay this much. If you're a subsidiary of an Irish company you pay that much. You choose.". Up to the MPs to get the rules right rather than whinge about it.

(1) OK, some don't, but that's a different issue.

Expert: BA doesn't need permission to google your face

JulianB
FAIL

Good luck with that

Searching Google Images for my name (even using quotes to avoid hits on only my first or last name and including only those that show a person) gives well into double figures. Especially if you include the ones with several people in one picture. Is a member of staff expected to memorise all of those and associate them with my name just in case any are actually me? One is, as it happens. but were I not in a particular voluntary role, that wouldn't be published.

Ebuyer on the naughty step for fondleslab promo cock-up

JulianB

Re: Depends on the claim

Indeed, and tying in with the DFS comment above, such places usually have a discreet notice saying something like "Higher price charged at our Loughborough store between 31/5/2012 and 14/6/2012".

Crooks sell skint fanbois potatoes instead of iPhones

JulianB
Holmes

Cat out of the bag?

@Steve Evans - you might be thinking of buying "a pig in a poke".

a pig in a poke

something that is bought or accepted without knowing its value or seeing it first.

[with reference to the formerly common trick of selling a cat concealed in a bag to someone who was expecting a pig] - OED

Anyway, if one of my friends or colleagues offered to sell me a laptop, I'd want to see it, and see it working. How stupid would I have to be to to buy it unseen, off a stranger? And I guess this is racist of me, but somehow a stranger with a foreign accent is even more suspicious.

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

JulianB

Re: Mix and Match

That's a *furlong* long and a chain wide, I think.

Keep out of the Olympics' way, earn a haircut from TfL app

JulianB

Re: Re:Route sucks?

I read it that way too: "Re:Route sucks in [terms of] travel recommendations..."

Intelligence a genetic mistake

JulianB

Re: Didn't take long did it?

Presumably asdf had a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that the article appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and felt no need to read further. It's probably worth pointing out that "Christian Science", in this sense, is well outside anything that could be considered mainstream Christianity.

Botnet army flicks 'off' switch at UK crime agency website

JulianB

Re: Do tell again...

And how many does it take to fill:

a) an Olympic sized swimming pool

b) Wales?

Indiana cops arrest violent 6-year-old

JulianB

Re: I suppose it's a bit late to suggest...

"When a police officer ... is capable of calming down the "unruly" subject..."

I don't know the law in Indiana, but it might be as simple as a police officer being allowed to use reasonable force to restrain an offender, but the school teachers not.

Uni plagiarism site buckles under crush of last-minute essays

JulianB

Re: Retaining essays

Isn't it a condition of using Turnitin that you contribute to its database?

JulianB

Re: The problem here is....

It is theoretically possible, yes, but very unlikely, that the same ideas would be expressed in exactly the same words, sometimes including misuse of words or grammatical mistakes. It would then be up to the student(s) to convince their examiners that it was convergence. I know of one recent example where a Nigerian student was unable to account for why his thesis was almost identical to that of a Taiwanese student (even down to apparently having got his data from Taiwanese institutions while resident in Nigeria). He failed to so convince his examiners.

Gaia scientist Lovelock: 'I was wrong and alarmist on climate'

JulianB
Flame

Re: He's obviously a heretic of some sort

>>Not like it's environmentally friendly to burn them at stakes, is it, now?

I's ok; it's carbon neutral unless you douse them in petrol (and as long as the stake is from a sustainable source)

Twitter poses patent non-aggression treaty to unblock industry

JulianB

So if I'm understanding this correctly, the patent owner is effectively saying "feel free to use the idea I've patented, but you can't patent it yourself and charge me to use it". Is that right?

In which case isn't it simpler to publish the idea, thus establishing "prior art", without patenting it?

Laptop computers are crap

JulianB

Re: What bugs the crap out of me

Is the "nothing greater than 1080" problem because everything now has a wide-screen format? For a given diagonal size, I'd rather have the taller screen shape - at least until it reaches the equivalent of A4 vertical

Lucy in 3.4 million-year-old cross-species cave tryst

JulianB

"hominin"?

That's a new one on me, and the OED. Likewise "homonin" in the article summary. Is this an accepted term in the field, or just a typo for "hominid"?

Social networks breeding spatial junk

JulianB
Facepalm

Re: sounds like they are bloody lazy

Not sure the name of the "Mom's kitchen" chain is relevant, or cafes called "The Cafe". Presumably there's as much bad data from users in "Tescos", "Starbucks", and any other business name. I'd have thought the biggest prolem would be places like "home", "school", "the bus".

BBC labels child 'recovering alcoholic' in tech slip-up

JulianB

Granada

not Grenada (the one in Spain, that is)

Child abuse files stolen from council worker in PUB - £100k fine

JulianB
Stop

Re: What a nice neighbour

I don't think it said the neighbour reported it to the police. If I received personal confidential mail meant for my neighbour, I'd just pass it on (I wouldn't know what it was anyway). If I found my confidential info had been passed to them, I might well make life difficult for whoever did it.

JulianB
Pint

Quite

My first thought on reading this "another set of sensitive info lost in pub" story. Why is anybody taking anything like this into a pub in the first place? Presumably it's a matter of stopping off for a quick drink on the way home rather than going out for the evening carrying your work with you. No harm in that in itself, but if the employee is so desperate for alcohol that it overrides common sense, he shouldn't be employed in a responsible job.

Work from home, find a new hobby, buy a fountain - UK.gov

JulianB

Works for me

2 days/wk at home. Trouble is there is some pressure to be seen in the office so that the building looks full, else they might sell it off and make me commute further on the days I do go in.

French court fines Google $65k over search suggestion

JulianB

Autocomplete?

May be showing my ignorance, but if you start typing "Lyonnaise de Garantie", at what point would an autocomplete function think you meant to type "escroc"?

China Telecom piggybacks EE to create UK network

JulianB

...and can English speakers not speak English across a CT network?

Humans, insects set to OBLITERATE frankincense supply

JulianB

...or even 1097

UK.gov imposes broadband deadline for councils

JulianB
Happy

Unless they go on to tell you that it "turbocharges the Internet"...

Headmaster freezes schoolkids for Gaia

JulianB

Another small point

"lots more energy is used to convert the wood into charcoal,"

No, the wood itself is partially burned, using that energy to turn it into charcoal. Admittedly a match or other source of flame is used to light it in the first place, but that's not "lots" more energy.

NASA confirms first Earth candidate in habitable zone

JulianB

Why bother with planets?

If we had the technology to build ships to travel 600 light years, which would take considerably longer than 600 years, and these ships could support a viable population over many generations, it seems to me the ship is itself a permanent "new Earth" colony, and an actual planet is superfluous.