Posts by aawelj

NASA's first all-woman spacewalk outside ISS cancelled – due to lack of spacesuits that fit

Re: Basic Logistics

Apparently, under constant microgravity, the lady in question has grown 2 inches taller. This does make it harder to choose a size in advance.

Airplane HACK PANIC! Hold on, it's surely a STORM in a TEACUP

Re: Err minor detail

Since the "he" in question was a spokesman for Boeing Commercial, as specified in the article, you wouldn't really expect him to mention the competition directly, would you? Although it is a nice bit of damning by omission.

DRONE ALONE: US Navy secretary gives up on manned fighters

Have we been here before?

"Defence Minister Duncan Sandys stated in the 1957 Defence White Paper that the era of manned combat was at an end and ballistic missiles were the weapons of the future" - Wikipedia.

Well, that turned out to be a bit premature, but maybe this time?

Sex is great in books, lousy in apps, says Apple

Guidelines on sexual content

Well, that's pretty explicit....

BuzzGasm: 9 Incredible Things You Never Knew About PLIERS!

Re: Aha! But that's clearly two words! *claims internet pendant award*

Aha! I put down the little known English word "epicaricacy" meaning "Rejoicing at or derivation of pleasure from the misfortunes of others."( http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/epicaricacy ) and take the pedantry award myself!

TWO THIRDS of Retina iPad mini shoppers will weep this holiday season

Re: Re : 64–bit?

Doh - present OR future

Re: Re : 64–bit?

As an armchair economist of long standing, I would point out that if a company is sitting on a huge pile of cash, that is because it has performed well (or indeed, very well) in the past. This, in itself, is no guide to the present of future performance of the company.

Paris because she knows a lot about huge piles of cash.

Extreme ultraviolet litho: Extremely late and can't even save Moore's Law

How many Rhode Islands to a Wales?

Brits are world's most wired drivers, says fleet tracker CEO

100lb is a bit weedy for a gorilla, surely?

Paris, because she loves the wildlife and the icon has a question mark.

IT bloke denies trying to shag sheep outside football ground

Re: Shiver me timbers

Aye, me hearty, and ye may lay to that! Unless they play suspended in mid air? Several hundred feet up, from the look of it?

Boris Johnson floats idea of 'London visa' to attract tech talent

Er, he was talking about visas - not technology. And the word visa is derived from one of those dead languages..... and if I had the brains to do a Classics degree at Oxford, I'd have jumped at the chance. If only it was just rote-learning and all the other stuff about actually speaking and applying the language didn't come into it....

But it's only wafer thin: Skinniest keyboard EVER is designed by Camby biz

Re: If they make it cheap enough

I think you'll find that quite a few people have noticed (and then bought) the Asus Transformer Pad series of tablets. Admittedly not as popular as Apple or Samsung but I think they are the third best-selling range of Tablets out there.

WikiLeaks: Manning guilty verdict sets 'dangerous precedent'

Re: Presumed guilty then

Why the thumbs down for this? It seems to me to be an accurate assessment.

Snowden dodges US agents in Moscow, skips out on flight

Re: It's just a matter of time

I would describe myself as a techie and frankly, I don't give a damn about what the NSA and GCHQ were up to. For me, the real question is, knowing what the NSA and GCHQ were set up for, i.e. to monitor communications in order to intercept information on potential threats both eyternal and internal (at least, this is what I have always thought they were meant to be doing), why is anybody surprised that they are in fact doing it? What did people think they were doing?

I've always assumed that any form of communication I have used is subject to monitoring. I have also assumed that, given the volume of traffic that has to be monitored, any such monitoring cannot be very efficient without either enormous resources or some way of homing in on the rogue elements (which is where MI5, SIS, CIA, FBI etc come in).

Maybe I'm paranoid, maybe I'm naive to think this is technically possible (although I would argue that as time passes it is increasingly possible to monitor all communication), but should I really be shocked that agencies set up to monitor potential threats might have to monitor everybody in order to find those threats?

Things that cost the same as coffee with Tim Cook - and are way more fun

Re: Or...

You're right. Either they mean 3 cups a day or, since it say it is 248,980 "extra" cups of coffee, perhaps you have to drink a couple of tankers' worth of coffee during the meeting.

Mobile tech destroys the case for the HS2 £multi-beellion train set

I'm afraid that isn't necessarily always the case. I live in Germany and frequently travel to the Netherlands, Belgium and France. More and more motorways are being upgraded to 3 lanes because two lane motorways simply can't cope with the sheer number of lorries.

Road rage caused by one lorry overtaking (or to be more honest, inching it's way past) another is a rising problem.

Meh because I don't really care. But obviously I care enough to post. Hmm. Maybe I should get my coat....

British bookworms deem Amazon 'evil'

Re: What sort of cretin buys a Amazon Swindle anyway?

I am that "cretin". I have an old Kindle that, given the amount I read, has paid for itself several times over in terms of the money saved over buying paper books.

However, given your insightful comments, I can see that in fact my Kindle must in fact be defective in some way, since I have never had any problems downloading material from non- Amazon sources. Yes, I have to download them to a PC first and then swap them to the Kindle, but that's not a lot of effort. A quick Google (who, by the way, provide for all my internet search needs - I must just love those walled gardens!) suggests that EPUB books can be converted so as to be readable on a Kindle in several ways.

Thank you for pointing this out. I wonder if Amazon will give me a refund? Or are they just too evil?

Google cofounder Brin sighted in Tesla batmobile

I think El Reg has got things backwards - this is obviously Paris' new runabout. But where is the Brin angle?

US insurer punts 'bestiality' to wide-eyed kiddies, gasp 'mums'

Re: That app wouldn't work

Must be a voice activated app. Although if the pig has worked out how to drive a car and pick up young women, dealing with screen capacitance should be a doddle for it. I'm pretty sure I read that the South Koreans use little pork sausages on their mobile screens in winter when they are wearing gloves, so a pig would have that built in!

North Korean citizens told: Socialist haircuts are a thing... go get some

Re: What about Beards

Beards are obviously not properly Socialist - odd, given Karl Mark and Lenin were both averse to razors.