Posts by Unep Eurobats

Q: Is it wrong to dress as a crusader for an England match?

Fair enough

And when England meet Middle Eastern teams we can look forward to opposition fans dressed as Saladin.

Firefox 48 beta brings 'largest change ever' thanks to 'Electrolysis'

Always seem to come back to FF

I flirt with other browsers but always return to tha 'Fox. (Tho I have a soft spot for Vivaldi.)

Plus have you noticed if you turn the logo upside-down it looks like the teenage Donald Trump's hairstyle.

Mars One puts 100 Red Planet corpses colonists through fresh tests

Exactly. For compelling reality TV you want conflict. For a smooth-running mission to Mars - not so much.

'Day 347: Nijntje has barricaded herself inside the airlock and is refusing to come out until Pieter puts his space pants back on.'

Brexit: UK gov would probably lay out tax plans in post-'leave' vote emergency budget

Re: equivalent terms

This is the crucial thing. Other EU countries that have been prevented by EU law from putting tariffs on UK exports will be able to do so and if they think it will protect their domestic producers then they will. Sunderland-built Nissans will become more expensive for French and Germans to buy: Renault, Peugeot and BMW will be very pleased about that. Sunderland's Nissan workers less so.

But the flip side of this is the opportunity for the UK, freed from the EU's sclerotic bureaucracy, to negotiate our own deals with non-EU countries and sell those Nissans to Brazil, Morocco etc.

The first scenario is definite. The second - well, I have no idea.

Capitalize 'Internet'? AP says no – Vint Cerf says yes

Lower case

Always.

(Hint: getting it wrong won't be the worst grammatical mistake most of you are making.)

Re: words such as parliament and queen

'The queen opened parliament' is exactly the same, in this context, as 'The man slipped on the steps'. There are lots of queens and there's nothing special about the queen apart from the fact that she's ours, gawd bless 'er.

Smartwatches: I hate to say ‘I told you so’. But I told you so.

Re: Watch navigation by re-purposing the hands

"It's either quarter to nine or I need to turn left."

Sweden decides Julian Assange™ 'remains detained in absentia'

Re: Escape tunnels

I see that kind of thing on building sites all the time. It's like a long chain of big yellow plastic buckets. Quite fun if the angle isn't too close to the vertical.

One ad-free day: Three UK to block adverts across network in June

“The current ad model is broken"

Translation: "Carriers don't make any money from the current ad model."

Cynical? Moi?

ISS 'nauts to inflate pump-up space podule

Re: cant remember what atm

A space cash machine? What do they need that for?

The ‘Vaping Crackdown’ starts today. This is what you need to know

So the bar is now much higher for e-cig makers

It's like banning hard hats on building sites until you can prove they don't cause scalp disease.

Airbus to build plane that's even uglier than the A380

A380 ugly?

Heresy to aerosexuals, I'm sure, but they're all just big tubes with wings, right? On the ground the A380s are clearly much bigger, but in the air they're fairly indistinguishable from any large passenger plane that isn't a 747.

They are significantly quieter than some, though. And the more capacious they get the less need there is for a third runway at Heathrow. (Disclaimer: blatant NIMBY.)

Electric Babel Fish swims into crowdfunding

Re: Have to

That passage is comic genius and I know it by heart.

Would we want to regenerate brains of patients who are clinically dead?

Re: ick, ethicists

"Can you imagine how long the transplant list would become"

If and when we actually crack this, a new kidney will be child's play.

Google asks the public to name the forthcoming Android N operating system

Re: Nanaimo Bar

Not only have I eaten a Nanaimo bar, I was actually in Nanaimo at the time. This could deservedly extend the reputation of both confection and place. As for orthographic difficulties - well, remember when no one could spell Hermione?

Want a Brexit? Promise you'll sort out UK universities' £1bn research cash loss

Re: The answer is...

Actually the problem is that the putative "money saved by not propping up Eurocrats" has already been fancifully earmarked by the Brexiteers for saving the NHS, strengthening the UK's borders, extricating ourselves from the laws imposed by Brussels, helping the farmers facing destitution by the removal of European agricultural subsidies, negotiating trade deals with the rest of the world and many other wishes.

5% of drivers want Nigel Farage to be their in-car robo butler

Wot no Kathy Klugston?

That is all.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise hiring temps to cover for redundancies - sources

In some weird alternative accountants' universe

this all makes perfect sense.

Skygazers: Brace yourselves for a kick in the Aquarids

3-5 am wherever you are

Presumably 'cos this is when it's darkest? Forecast is cloudy for the 6th here in sarf-west Lunnun. Will the 4th/5th be any good? Yikes, that's tonight.

* Get up early

* Clock meteorite loveliness

* Go for bike ride

* Big breakfast

* Catnap at work all day

Sounds like a plan.

We will end misleading broadband adverts, thunders ASA...

Misleading broadband adverts

'£12e3 line rent'

This would mislead me too. Is that an exponential in there?

Advertised broadband figures are completely meaningless. You might as well use the speed limit of a city-centre street as a guide to what the average speed will be at any given time.

UK.gov wasted £20m telling you to 'be safe online, mmkay'

Posters on the underground

I saw some of those. Things like a picture of a bunch of keys hanging outside a front door and the strapline 'you wouldn't do this at home so don't do it online' or some such.

It was OK. Not too alarmist, not too technical. We like to think we're not the target market but anyone is vulnerable to the right piece of social engineering.

Larry Ellison's Brit consortium in 'advanced talks' to buy Aston Villa

But Villa are definitely going down, so they'll be cheap. There'll be two more bargains to be had, but it's not certain which. I'd like to see Larry snap up the Black Cats.

Are bearded blokes more sexist?

"may — or may not"

Reminds me of the philosophers Vroomfondel and Majikthise talking to Deep Thought in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Woz says wearables – even Apple Watch – aren't 'compelling'

“an expense that bought me a few extra nice ties in my life”

FTFY

Belgian boffins breed 'digital canaries' to test your random numbers

But can you trust a canary

not to tweet?

Music's value gap? Follow the money trail back to Google

Let's see if I've got this straight

If I take a music file and distribute it via some file-sharing mechanism, I'm a pirate and SOPA will take me down.

If I use that file as the soundtrack to footage of me dancing round my bedroom and upload the whole thing to YouTube, that's UGC and perfectly legit (insofar as you can describe my dancing as such).

Vaizey: Legal right to internet access, sure. But I'm NOT gonna die on the 10Mbps hill

"by which measure?"

Exactly: the rating of the connection is a theoretical maximum and often bears no relation to the speeds achieved in practice.

A USO would be like trying to get everyone to work quicker by insisting that all cars had to have a maximum speed of 200 mph (OK, not a good analogy because of speed limits but leaving that aside you know what I mean).

Russian boffins want to nuke asteroids

Nukes in SPAAAAACE

You are all like totally overanalysing this.

Ames boffins mix metals to boost electron velocity

I c what u did there

But never mind that - when can I buy this tech in an obscenely expensive hi-fi connector?

Huawei's P9 flagship: There's a lot to Leica

Mi5 is not a misprint

Dude u can puts (sic) afterwards to clear that it not an other El Reg keyboard snafu.

More punz on Leica plz.

There's oil in that thar … Chinese space probe?

Be afraid. Be very afraid

...when the offspring of the space-irradiated mice and the mutated fruit fly/rat hybrid discover how to weaponise the pressurised oil.

I certainly won't be travelling to Inner Mongolia any time soon.

Britain is sending a huge nuclear waste shipment to America. Why?

Thanks for filling in that gap. Otherwise I thought it was a very good and balanced article on a complex and contentious topic.

Sounds like we can bury our nuclear waste properly or continue to bury our heads in the sand. Let's hope we're finally going to stop doing the latter.

Feature-rich Vivaldi rolls out, offering power users a choice

Been using it for a while

In tandem with Firefox. I like it, but I don't see a lot of difference between them, nor Chrome from my occasional experiences. Maybe I'm just not enough of a power user.

Flying Finns arm octocopter with chainsaw

Crew

Do Playmobil do a Leatherface?

Joking aside, that thing is scary.

When Steve Jobs was away, Apple's designers snuck out a penis-shaped remote control

Penis-shaped?

I think that's stretching it a little bit.

The Register to publish Mindful Sysadmin adult colouring book

It should so totally happen

Please do it.

Military intelligence, AI style: MoD cosies up to Massive Analytic

Massive Analytic

Just what you need in the event of a Massive Attack.

Anyone else got the chorus of 'Protection' running through their heads?

(Blue Lines ->)

Oz uni in right royal 'indigenous' lingo rumpus

They could always

change their flag.

Pebble axes quarter of its workers after fitness pivot

A shame for those staff affected

But I'm still unconvinced by current offerings in wearable tech even though I like the idea.

I track my activities with my phone and would like to extend this monitoring to biometrics but don't want to spend lots on a separate device. Also I'm not confident about the accuracy of wrist-mounted sensors for measuring heartbeat during exercise.

I'd like a cheap, easily attachable chest sensor that'll pair with my phone but that doesn't seem to be anyone's focus right now.

Tracy Emin dons funeral shroud, marries stone

I love it when the amateur art critics come out to play

No update on the Versailles vagina for a while...

Okay IT pros, change happens. But here's your Reg guide to staying in control

Scope creep

Tell me about it...

The most insidious way this happens is when the client's idea of what they've asked for gradually changes without them realising it. Because we're all supposed to be agile now the requirements can be as vague as they like. They don't know what they want, all they know is that whatever we deliver isn't it.

Mighty Soyuz stands proud at Baikonur

Re: Middle Naut

I thought the glum expression was because he was the only one who knew they were going to have to dock manually ... with him at the controls.

Big data boffins crunch GPS traces, find altruistic route planning is good for everyone

Quickest isn't always best

I'd opt to take more time if it meant a smoother journey: less stopping and starting, fewer junctions and traffic lights - and no speed bumps. Speed bumps are the work of Satan.

US chap sharpens paradigm-busting scissors

Invented by the Romans?

That'll be Julius Scissor.

Uncle Sam's boffins stumble upon battery storage holy grail

BEEEEEEST

Acronym of the weeeeeeek, for sure.

Re: "some holy grails in batteries"

While we're being pedantic, I think you can only have one holy grail.

Elon Musk is not the messiah, and "that's not the holy grail, it's just a very fancy cup".

BBC telly tax drops onto telly-free households. Cough up, iPlayer fans

How will the Murdoch press spin this?

"Now Auntie makes you pay to watch TV on your computer! It's an outrage! Almost like a ... a ... paywall?"

Beep, beep – it's our 2016 buzzword detector. We see you, 'complexity'

Complexity? Huh

Far too old-skool. I give you ... complexification.

Spanish cops discover illegally parked flying car

Ah, but have they

declared SORN?

(Statutory on-roof notification.)

Security real talk time: So what exactly do we mean by 'backdoor'?

"a little clunky"

If you're going for precision rather than elegance it's hard to avoid a little clunkiness. I think the definition was deliberately legalistic.

He in the icon (being the party of the third part, notwithstanding) agrees with me completely, categorically and in totality, m'lud -->