Posts by Phil O'Sophical

America mounts attempt to top the Register's world record spaceflight

Maybe a bit late now

But did no-one think of giving Felix Baumgartner a paper plane to chuck out just before his own exit?

Samsung ships two smartphones for every one Apple sells

Re: And...

Depends on whether you want transport, or a status symbol.

Boeing recipe turns cooking oil into jet fuel

Re: gas guzzling planes.

A full 747-400 manages about 90 passenger miles per gallon. I wish my card did that well

Re: I'm not done yet

To Fry, To Serve?

Re: quite a nice breakthrough, if it, eh, breaks through

Hmm, that produces visions of passengers toasting marshmallows in the jet exhaust

Australian volcano starts to blow

Re: why does this island have a web page

Time to grab f.aq while you can

US patent office prepares to kill off Apple's bounce-back patent

Re: Banning...

> Treat what you would once have patented as a trade secret

It was precisely because that didn't work that the patent system was created.

Re: @Phil This should never have been a problem

> why shouldn't the defendant be able to question the validity of a patent?

Oh, I don't dispute that a defendant should be able to question the validity of the patent, I just don't think that the court should _automatically_ start by reconsidering if the patent is valid, which is what the original poster seemed to be suggesting. That will just make the lawyers richer. A patent infringement case need not hinge on whether the patent is valid.

Re: This should never have been a problem

> the assumption that a patent is valid

It's not an assumption. If the patent office granted the patent then the patent is, by definition valid. If a court can't trust the validity of a patent, and feels it;'s necessary to re-examine it before passing judgement based on it, then the patent office is broken (which it is, we know).

The solution here isn't to change the system, it's to fix the patent office.

BBC pulls plug Ceefax ahead of analogue TV's end tonight

Re: I built a decoder for this

Ah, that prompted me to dig out my old copies of "Television" magazine. They published a series of construction articles (9 monthly installments, starting April 1977) finishing with a decoder that fed the TV via a UHF modulator. By January 1980 they were describing how to add the new standalone TI Teletext module to their colour TV kit!

Always wanted to build the TTL one, but I was a poor student back then...

Windows 8 versions will confuse the punters, say OEMs

Re: Consumer confusion is what they are relying on..

"But this can't be Windows, there's no keyboard. Just look at it, it's running ipad. I still don't understand why my apps don't work, though. Maybe I need to turn off the antivirus firewall port?"

Amazon's Virginia cloud data center knocked out – again

Cloud == resilient, no?

No.

cloud == cheap.

cheap != resilient

As always, you get what you pay for, and naïve users always shop on price.

It's a perfectly beautiful day in Ashburn, in the high 60s and sunny

And you expect a cloud to survive that?

Naughty Siri breaks law by listing Chinese escorts

escorts are one thing

What happens if you ask "Siri, where would I find a hitman?"

Young Frenchwoman desperate for fat pipe tumbles out of window

Re: The other first

Not only do we number from zero, *we* know that the one after the 12th floor isn't the 14th...

Curiosity scoops up SHINY BITS from the RED SANDS of MARS!

Re: Opal

An Opel would be even more interesting. Is Elvis's Cadillac still on the moon?

Craig, Connery or ... Dalton? Vote now for the ultimate James Bond

Re: Moore

Moore will always be, and only be, Simon Templar. The Saint as Bond? Just doesn't work for me.

Education Secretary Gove: Tim Berners-Lee 'created the INTERNET'

Re: Ha ha ha

Obviously a page layout problem, it should have been in the "Government Procurement" section just above.

New Oz road rules forbid touching mobes

Re: The number of times

> so engrossed they don't even hear the horns going off in the background

A better trick is when they are second in line at the red light. Honk behind them while the light is still red, odds are they will drive into the back of the car in front before they've even looked up to see if the road is clear.

Virgin Media's blighted SuperHub NOW comes with extra squeal (oink)

Re: Typical Americanism

Can't argue with that :)

Re: Typical Americanism

Be glad they said "impacting", if an American had tried to be standard they'd probably have said "effecting" which is far, far worse than (ab)using "impacting".

Facebook finally has some non-sales employees in the UK

Re: London isn't expensive.

Nice try, Boris.

Theresa May gets a smile out of Gary McKinnon at last

Re: Human rights act

> in the UK, we have privileges and not rights.

I'd say that rights are actually the other side of the coin to duties, and that looking at things only as rights is a selfish attitude. For example, one could say that a disabled person has the _right_ to ease of access to a public building. Fair enough, but what that means is that those of us who are fortunate enough not to be disabled have a _duty_ to provide that ease of access.

JFK put it better at his inaguration: "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.". Might sound twee now, but he was right.

Asperger's Syndrome

> Ahsan had the same diagnosis as McKinnon – Asperger's Syndrome

Asperger's is not binary "sick or well", like all forms of autism it has a range of severity. I know three people who have it in varying degrees, one of whom requires some help in certain social, situations. I can think of at least two other friends who show some of the signs but I'm not medically qualified to say if they are sufferers, if so it is very mild. You certainly can't take a diagnosis of "(s)he has Asperger's" and use it to make a simple yes/no decision on whether they are fit to face a trial.

Free WiFi in London Tube stations extended until end of 2012

extending free access to the service ... until the end of 2012.

Hmm. Virgin Group trying to avoid any negative press with the travelling public until they get the West Coast mainline franchise nailed back down?

And the latest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is ... the EU?

Re: the acrimony between Walloon and French in Belgium

> You might want to study cultural tensions in that part of the world again. I live there.

Oops, my apologies. I meant to write Walloon and Flemish, and I realise that's an over-generalization anyway, sorry. I'm sure I don't understand all the complexities of that situation, but the fact that there *is* a situation is the point I wanted to make.

Cheers

Re: How does $1.2m between 500m people

It doesn't, and the article didn't say that it did. It said 0.15 *pence*, or £0.0015.

$1.2m/500m = $0.0024, which is £0.00145 at current rates. Close enough.

Re: Seriously though...

> it has basically made European wars unthinkable.

You really believe that?

Humans are tribal animals. The EU tells us that it's wrong to think of ourselves as French/German/British, "us" versus "them", and we must all be "europeans". The result has been a huge increase in local tribalism, look at the rise in Basque/Catalan/Breton nationalism, the increasingly virulent rhetoric of Salmond and the SNP, the acrimony between Walloon and French in Belgium, etc. Worse, it is all supported by the EU with grant money. Far from creating a peaceful unified state (which will never happen) they are encouraging a fragmented, balkanized Europe of parochial, bigoted minnows.

If it does stop world wars, it will only be because the belligerents will all be too tiny to raise more than an ironic "thank God I don't live there" laugh at their "troubles" among the uninvolved. Not that it will help the people involved, of course. Ask the N. Irish.

If I were into conspiracy theories I could even suggest that it was deliberate, "divide and conquer" by the European powers that be. That's probably unlikely, since they couldn't get organized enough to find their well-padded european arses with both hands.

The Nobel Peace committee have made themselves a laughing stock. Again.

'Hypersensitive' Wi-Fi hater loses case against fiendish DEVICES

Re: Think of the Children!

> Actually it wasn't the Local oscillator it was 15,625khz from the EHT oscillator they looked for. These was considerably easier to detect.

No, it wasn't. That would be very hard to detect, since such an ELF signal would not travel far, and it would be well-nigh impossible to get a directional fix on it. Harmonics of that frequency might be detectable, but they would be very weak. Put a long-wave radio beside a TV and you'll hear them, but they fade with only a few metres distance. You may be thinking of the US "TEMPEST" experiments, where they looked for the RF generated at video frequencies, to try and decode on-screen text.

The tuner LO signal is stronger, and since it was carried back up the co-ax to the aerial it was easier to pick up. It's also far easier to do direction-finding on a signal at VHF and UHF.

Re: Think of the Children!

> Reduce the income tax personal allowance by sufficient to generate the same income.

I really don't want to start a TV licence flamewar, but if we stick to discussing how to collect the money rather than whether it should be done, I do have one reservation about using general taxation.

At the moment, the amount of the license comes from a separate parliamentary discussion. There is little opportunity for the government of the day to send a not-so-subtle hint to the BBC to say "hey guys, we'd really like to give you an increase, but that program on corruption you're planning, well, know what I mean?". Parliament as a whole (not just the government) gets to decide, and MPs can vote according to their consciences.

Make it a line item in the budget, such as a personal allowance, and the situation changes. The budget vote tends to get whipped along party lines, and few MPs are going to vote down the whole budget (which could be seen a confidence measure) just because they're uncomfortable with an increase/decrease in the TV charge.

IMO it would give government too much control over the public TV stations.

Re: me too

> do i got a case?

Maybe. Is she good looking? "Your phone makes my radio chatter" is at least more original than "do you come here often"

> pulsed magnetic field can be used to destroy biological organisms

No wonder iPhone batteries catch fire if they're running at those sort of power levels!

And as far as opera singers smashing glasses go, yes it's possible, but only with a LOT of power. Just hitting the right frequency isn't enough.

Re: Think of the Children!

The principle behind TV detector vans (picking up local oscillator radiation that leaks out via the aerial) is perfectly valid, and detection by such means is entirely possible. How many of the vans were "real", as opposed to "dummy" (like speed cameras) is another matter.

Fujitsu beams URLs to mobes through your TV

Re: Isn't this the same way the BBC 'beamed' data to the BBC micro

The BBC system was a blinking dot on the screen, very visible. If I understand this article the idea is that the viewer isn't aware of the extra data beings ent.

> linking programme adverts to the recording function of a PVR

What, like the Sky green button "Press green button to add this series to the planner" ? It's been there there for ages.

Ukraine navy to deploy DOLPHINS WITH GUNS ON THEIR HEADS

Dolphin teams?

Are they just trying to one-up the American SEALs?

Sky support dubs Germany 'Hitler's country'

Re: You'll fit right in

> Why piss them off?

Too true. I was waiting in Denver baggage reclaim when I heard myself being paged. I went to the designated agent, and with a smile and my best "resigned, but light-hearted" tone said "I'll bet you're going to tell me my baggage missed the connection?" It wasn't his fault that Heathrow had screwed up, and he was visibly so pleased that I wasn't going to be bolshie that I got twice the number of AmEx vouchers that the more difficult passengers did.

Foxconn: THESE child workers were NOT making Apple products

Re: Long "working" hours, unhealthy conditions, disgusting dorms

Or student halls.

13-inch 'Retina Display' MacBook Pro to uncloak next Tuesday?

Epoch making?

My God, the Mayans knew the MacBook was coming!

British car parks start reading number plates

> charges must be a genuine pre-estimate of loss, or actual damages caused by trespass

This is an interesting one. If there were still spaces in the car park available to other customers, you could argue that your presence there cost them nothing, since they lost no business.

Vote NOW for the vilest Bond villain

Re: well

Agreed. The others were obviously villanous, but Klebb was definitely the most unpleasant.

Swiss photographer sues Apple for pilfering her eyeball

Re: an oversight

Otherwise known as "we're Apple. We don't care, we probably don't need to" ?

Take away bad drivers' mobile phones, they still crash their cars

Or maybe the good drivers *know* that using a phone will distract them, so they don't do it, and hence don't have accidents?

You'd need to do a full study, with control groups of good drivers with phones, and bad drivers without, to get meaningful results.

MYSTERIOUS GREEN GLOW seen on iPhone 5s

Re: You don't want light to leak out

If you let the green leak out, won't you be left with purple? Imagine if that got into the camera. Oh, hang on...

That horrendous iPhone empurplement - you're holding it wrong

Re: Am I reading it wrong?

> "The eyebrows and lashes are ever so slightly less well defined"

Wel, shit. When I'm grabbing a quick snapshot with the camera in my phone thing, it is sooooo important to get the subject's eyebrows well defined.

Pretentious twats. I'll bet they rave about $1000 gold-plated SD cards for that extra image quality as well.

Iran X.25 terrorists actually BANKERS

Re: XOT

Strictly speaking XOT is X.25 over TCP, not just over IP. For completeness, RFC 877 (obsoleted by RFC 1356) describes how to run IP over X.25. You can build some interesting stacks...

"a security researcher rather than a hacker"

There's a difference?

Massive strike at Foxconn's iPhone 5 factory

detail work at sub-millimeter accuracy

Isn't that what factory robots were invented for?

Astroboffins to search for mega-massive alien power plants

Re: If we are no alone

No way. They won't be able to slurp us all, some of us will live to see the bigger universe.

LOHAN plugs into some hot LiPo treatment

Re: SI Units

Sounds good, if they can get the video back to Earth...

Purpose of RFID finally discovered: It's for pairing up socks!

Re: I'll take the bait!

0x32 shades, surely?