Posts by Jon Tocker

BMW gives away 5 Series and $850k

@ Rick

Where's the IT angle? It's an email claiming the recipient has won a prize. Google "Advanced Fee Scam".

It's a 419 variant, therefore an IT issue.

Cassini team spies moonlets in Saturn's A ring

Steve Browne

It's worse than that, mate, they're hoping to land in the USA but the rules for entry keep changing faster than they can comply .

At the moment they're trying to guess what the USA is likely to require in 12 years so they can start working on the proper documentation, DNA samples, compound-eye retina prints, scrapings of chitin, mandible prints, signed references from an acceptable deity etc

It's gonna take 'em at least 10 years to fill out all the declarations that they are not gay, socialist, communist, or wurblist and are not affliated with any of the 20 000 known potential terrorist threats listed (or likely to be listed) by US-gov.

Boeing, Ford in hydrogen engine fanfare

cynical bastards

W and John Stag

Why would Boeing want to make itself look good just because reportedly happy people are disembarking from a competitor's ultra-modern airliner? Boeing is all sweetness 'n' light, doncherknow?

Hehe.

Good on ya, guys.

A380 touches down and Boeing is leaping up and down yelling "It's All About Meeeeeee!" by trotting out what is effectively old tech with a slightly newer (but still old) spin and not (at the moment) particularly feasable due to problems with the production of hydrogen - and touting it as the Future of Aviation(tm).

Bollocks.

Boeing needs all the military support it can get because it's in grave danger of losing the commercial sector.

Jailed terror student 'hid' files in the wrong Windows folder

Philip and a few of you anonymous cowards

I believe the law is supposed to say "innocent until proven guilty."

As he was tried as a "terrorist" where is the proof that he attempted to put this information to use? Where are the bombs he built?

BTW, "attempted murder" entails a bit more than possessing a book called "how to kill someone", you actually have to have some means of despatching said person and then attempt (and fail) to kill them. You cannot be convicted of attempted murder just because you have a book on poisons or how to maintain a firearm. You can't be convicted of attempted murder just for possessing a firearm. Or a kitchen knife.

Where was Siddique's attempt? Where's the evidence that shows he was putting the knowledge into action?

Philip. We're going to seize your computer, scan all your files/browsing histories for anything remotely suspicious and jail you for 8 years - I'm sure we'll find some evidence of something dodgy on it.

Bear in mind, what constitutes "sedition" is very subjective. Sedition is what we say it is. I'm sure we could point to something about the contents of your hard drive that is less than perfectly squeeky-clean to prove you are a shady character who is undoubtedly an Al Qaeda sympathiser.

Under McCarthy's regime, being a homosexual was enough to get you arrested, detained indefinitely and interrogated by the House UnAmerican Activites Committee as a communist sympathiser or security risk.

I have: The Anarchist's Cookbook, Sun Tzu's Art of War,the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Malleus Malificarum, various Buddhist texts, copious chemistry texts that could be used in the manufacture of explosives and old sets of encyclopaedias that actually have the recipes for explosives.

By your logic I am guilty of being a terrorist. Obviously part of the Muslim-Mormon-Catholic-Buddhist terrorist cell.

If you have someone "acting suspiciously" under surveillance, you do not arrest him/her for what (s)he *might* do. You continue surveillance until said person is in possession of a bomb - and then you pounce.

You don';t have to pick your nose until they've blown someone up as the scaremongers on this thread have suggested is the "only possible alternative" to what has happened. But you can at least wait until they have done something more sinister than what 90% of the knowledge-mad geeks on this site have done.

Then you can point to physical evidence (the bomb) and say "this bugger's a terrorist".

You do not arrest and detain a person for 8 years because of what you *think* his motives are.

You guys might be happy now that presumption of innocence has been suspended, but wait until it's your door being knocked on (down?). You'd all be the first to whine that your rights - the same rights you're prepared to take away from anyone who is not you - have been violated.

I bet your cars can go faster than the legal speed limit. How about you lose your licences for eight years because you're obviously planning on speeding? All we have to do is find the links to a Formula One site on your web site to prove you intend on putting your car's full potential to use.

Face it, you're all murdering scum planning to cause carnage on the road through excessive speed - the "evidence" is all there.

A familiar "smell"

Witch Finders, Inquisitors, Hitler's Gestadt Polizei, McCarthy's House UnAmerican Activities Committee and now Bush's War On Terror that politicians's the World over can't wait to sign up for.

What the likes of Philip seem to forget is that, although what he did was suspicious, he did not actually carry out an "Act of Terror".

He did not blow anyone up. He did not kill or directly threaten anyone. There have been not terrorist attacks that could be shown to have used the internet bomb-making pages as a source of information, let alone that the "terrorists" followed the links off his pages to find said instructions.

Can they even prove that someone visited his website and felt terrified by the links?

Yet, somehow, possessing the information and making links justifies a heavier sentence than those given to people who have shown little enough regard for human life to drive while drunk and actually have killed people.

8 years for possessing "seditious material"? Fuck, how much for actually making use of said materials and blowing up a bus?

If they'd found stockpiles of home-made explosives and suspiciously large amounts of the raw materials to make more, I would be able to understand the severity of the sentence but 8 years for possessing information - even if they can prove conclusively that he is an Al Qaeda sympathiser and hates Westerners with a vengeance - is utter fucking bollocks. It stinks of the frothing hysteria of the witch finders and all the other paranoid misfits that followed them.

8 years for seditious materials, how much for possessing actual weapons or bombs (or having a few common household chemicals that *could* be made into bombs), how much for actually killing someone?

From judges who hold human life in such little regard that they give low sentences to drunken wastes-of-oxygen who kill people.

FFS, more people are killed by careless and/or drunk drivers than are killed by terrorism but the judges are prepared to condone and excuse such carnage - yet not condone the mere possession of "seditious material".

Great going, guys, Torquemada, Matthew Hopkins, Adolf Hitler, Senator McCarthy and now Bush and Frattini would be rightfully proud of your frothing-at-the-mouth zeal.

Heil Bush, Heil Frattini et al.

Flaming kamikaze squirrel torches car

Squirrels hate us

They have it in for humankind - as recorded by Daniel Meyer:

http://lifeisaroad.com/stories/2004/10/29/neighborhoodHazardorWhyTheCopsWontPatrolBriceStreet.html

Ninja squirrels and kamikaze squirrels - animal behaviour specialists have no idea why they have this fascination with Japanese fighting techniques, but the pattern is obvious and disturbing...

UK gov advisor proposes 'licence to smoke'

Yeah, wonderful

Because the 18-years age limit on buying smokes in our country and the necessity to produce ID to prove your age have completely stopped all the 12-17-year-olds from smoking.

And the prohibition of alcohol in the USA all those years ago stopped people drinking.

And the illegality of marijuana, methamphetamine, magic mushrooms, angel dust, opium derivatives and such throughout most of the World has stopped people from using drugs.

We could licence all the dangerous things at 200 quid per year and no one will be able to afford to do any optional life threatening things like smoking, drinking alcohol, sky-diving, driving a vehicle (spending too much on the licence to breathe, licence to drink water, licences to handle various electrical appliances used in the preparation of food and the dangerous utensils used to eat food, licence to eat stuff you might conceivably choke on and all sorts of other licences just to cover the necessities of basic survival in a dangerous world)

Then we'll become immortal.

Oops, don't forget a licence to risk your safety by working to afford all the fucking licences.

Beeb confirms Davison-Tennant Who hook-up

Jeez...

Peter Davison's looking *old*.

I'd've brought back McGann or McCoy - we don't know how old McGann's Doctor got before regeneration, McCoy was "nearing the end of his regeneration" and had aged considerably before he was shot and had to regenerate into McGann. Having slightly older actors is not going to matter.

Davison, however, is going to need some serious makeup to resemble the boyish features he had before he regenerated.

Another possibility is Eccleston as he won't have aged enough in the last couple of years to be noticeable.

A "Four Doctors" special with McCoy, McGann, Eccleston and Tennant (or a special with any 2 or 3 of them) is quite possible. Unless the BBC can pull another "Richard Hurndall" out of the mix and find someone who can do a creditable imitation of one of the earlier Doctors (and my vote would be a Jon Pertwee lookalike as I loved that incarnation of the Doctor)

Safe drinking guidelines 'plucked out of the air'

@ Dave

"PH angle? The correct amount to drink is where you get to the conclusion that there might be some point to her existence - then STOP"

I can't AFFORD enough alcohol to get me to the stage where I think there's a point to PH's existence!

So I guess I'm well within the safe zone.

Igor-style human, animal parts assembly on horizon

@ Luther Blissett

It was Mary Shelley who wrote "Frankenstein", not Bram Stoker (he wrote "Dracula") which you'd know if your library consisted of more than one book... or Book

And in accordance with unofficial regclub rules, the moment I submit this post, an earlier post by someone else saying the same thing will have passed through moderation and been approved...

Unimpressed Sheilas mock boy racers' todgers

3 Words to Matthew Smith:

ACH! Mein eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyes!

@ Michael Hitchins v.2.0

Actually, Michael, I'm a fair bit closer than the UK - I'm in NZ, but be that as it may...

"Now if you just want to have some fun, maybe practice slides or do whatever else it is you want to do on the street you cant (big shock, not everyones wants to race competitvely on the track, seriously... you claim they dont turn up, maybe they dont share the passion for prim and proper racing, they might want to have fun)."

So risking the lives of other people due to careless driving is "fun" - or it being "fun" mitigates the fact that it's bloody dangerous and they're risking the lives and limbs of other road users? (Notice I'm not carping on about speed as the speed they're doing is only one factor out of many dangerous driving issues).

They seem to want to "race competitively" on the streets where they can kill or injure pedestrians or other road users. If they aren't into "prim and proper racing" then they can stop *pretending* to be "kool-az racerz" and ride sensibly on a road they are supposed to share with other road users.

"Of course reading your post you might be complaining about the kids who cruise around playing doof doof and generally doing the stop start drive around in a group thing."

So you missed the references to drag racing in the streets, endangering other people's lives and pouring diesel on the roads.

My beef is with those cornering at excessive speed, drifting, pouring lubricants on busy intersections, doing burnouts, "do'nuts", hand brake slides, drifts and other things that endanger the lives of other road users. Large amounts of alcohol and drugs also factor into it, as do illegally (and dangerously) modified cars.

So, we have drunk, stoned yoofs hooning around the local roundabout - on which they have poured diesel - in unwarranted cars with chopped suspension springs. In other words: dangerous retarded wastes of oxygen.

My beef is with wankers ripping up the handbrake in front of me, sliding sideways into a side street and then spinning themselves around to erupt out of the street again. Admittedly, I'm an experienced rider and was in no danger - but others are not as experienced as I am. Others who are likely to have hit the car as it skidded across the lane and around the corner, or been hit *by* it is it came flying out again.

Funnily enough, those retards in the car didn't check with me first to ensure I had sufficient riding skills to cope with their behaviour before ripping up the hand brake.

Go on, defend the dickheads all you like, write off dangerous driving as "just a bit of fun" - then try and explain it to the family and friends of those who're killed or seriously injured by these dicks or as a consequence of encountering diesel halfway around a corner.

As to: "So the average hoon boy racer needs to have some spare cash and a club thats well organised over here to get on the track."

Cry me a river. "Practising costs money" boo hoo. News flash: Things cost money. Welcome to the *twentieth* century. Maybe one day you can join us in the 21st.

Perhaps if more of these wannabes were prepared to pay track fees and join clubs, there would be the facilities for them - it's not the responsibility of the local councils to shell out taxpayer money for a pack of drunk and drugged layabouts to have an ego-wank. You want the facilities to have fun? Support the sodding clubs with time and money. Can't be arsed or bling and other ego wanks more important? STFU.

The wankers over here seem to find enough cash have late-model hairdresser cars and put shit-loads of chrome and neon in/on them, so I'd say money is not the issue. They seem to have enough money to throw away on "bling" and buying trash-can-sized exhausts (which they promptly fuck by drilling holes in 'em because "it soundz mean, eh.")

Perhaps if they paid more money on club/track fees than having a wank-fest?

Strangely, a lot of the guys 'n' gals I ride with manage to pay track fees *and* maintain performance machines. Me, I muck around off-road on a relatively low maintenance (therefore comparatively low performance) bike. Others I know spend a fortune rebuilding high performance Moto-X bikes after every event - I'm nowhere in that league, financially, but I still have my fun without risking the lives of random unsuspecting members of the public. I also have to pay fees to go on the enduro tracks and replace bits of my bike that I damage.

Those who ride bikes as stupidly and recklessly as the boi racers are called "squids" - and they're a pack of fuckwits, too.

In the words of my mate, Jake (Yamaha Vmax): "I won't ride with him. He's a fucking squid and I don't ride with squids!"

@ Er... By Anonymous Coward

(Posted Wednesday 17th October 2007 09:05 GMT)

Quoting me: "some bloke on a GSXR1000 or other high performance bike quietly showing the local shielas that he has no need "prove" anything."

Anon: Hence the high performance bike, obviously.

-------------------------

Yes, it's an absolute crotch rocket and goes like a demon... On the track, where he rides it on track days.

Hence having no need to show off to a pack of losers on a public street despite the fact he has both the machine and the riding skills to leave the tosspots in the dust. (Hell, the bloke on the 250 has the skills and machine to leave the wankers in the dust).

Me, I opted for a small, light 225cc enduro bike so I can have fun mucking about off-road on the weekends (I can pick it up easily when I drop it on the trail). It's a matter of "horses for courses" - the GSXR1000 is great for some track events, the CBR250R is great for others and my XT is great for what I like to do.

My XT's quite capable of exceeding the speed limit, especially in town, and its power-to-weight ratio is such that it could leave the boi-racers' hairdresser cars in the dust, but I choose not to do either of those things.

I have respect for myself, my family, my bike and the rights of others on the road.

My uncle drives in rallies, my father used to race midget class racers and over the years I've known a number of people involved in drag racing and speedway - and they don't seek to "prove" their abilities on public streets and roads.

That's left for the wannabes with no respect, no skills and poofy cars.

@ Michael Hitchins

"Maybe they could spend the money on providing more facilities to do it off the streets rather than bitch about the drivers who do it the only places they can."

Bollocks.

The streets are not the "only places" they can do it.

Around here there are plenty of proper tracks that open up to all comers - speedway, drags, motorcycle speedway and motocross - all within 4 hour's sane rational drive, most a lot closer.

Funnily enough, none of the wankers I've seen in the blinged-out hairdresser cars ever turn up to the car tracks and try their "mad skillz" out on a proper circuit - same as none of the squids turn up at the bike tracks.

They know full well down inside that they are all talk and no "walk" and that their pimped-out pus-buckets and their driving "skills" wouldn't cut it in the real deal. So instead they hoon around the city risking the lives of anyone else on the road.

As I said, I know those who really do race, for whom it is a passion - and they turn up to the race meets. They practise and they learn from the more experienced riders/drivers. The boi-racers are nowhere in that league. Fuck, they don't know what way the peak of a hat is supposed to point or how to pull their trousers up, much less anything about competitive driving.

They "drag each other off" at the lights in town because there's no way they have the vehicle or skills to come close to the average standing quarter times at Meremere drag strip They "race through the streets" because they don't have to have the skills to control a vehicle at the sort of speeds expected at a proper speedway event.

We invest billions of dollars into having a speedway track in every suburb and have them open to the public 24/7 - the wankers still wouldn't show.

If they had what it took, they'd already be doing it and they wouldn't be wasting their time with the other losers pouring diesel on corners.

Totally support those adverts

Once again, the Aussies succeed in getting the message across while our adverts fail to do so.

Group of fellow bikers and I used to meet up on Te Rapa Straight (renowned boi racer hangout) of a Friday night and watch the posturing and posing and attrocious driving of the loons. We'd ride our bikes sensibly and sedately - despite the fact that most of our machines, including the 250cc ones, would leave those blinged-out wankmobiles in the dust if we were so inclined - park up and yak about motorbikes and watch the small-tackle brigade trying to Tokyo-Drift themselves around the nearby busy roundabout.

Worst thing was: the little retards used to spill diesel on the roundabout to assist in drifting (because their driving skills aren't even up to putting a car INTO a drift, let alone controlling it when in one.)

Lots of fun when you have some soft-cock blatting up and down the road in an illegally-lowered Subaru with a trash can where the exhaust pipe is supposed to be and some bloke on a GSXR1000 or other high performance bike quietly showing the local shielas that he has no need "prove" anything.

One of our semi-regular attendees actually has his racing numbers on his bike as he loves to attain the fastest speeds he can - and, after unbolting the things likely to cause problems on the track, he does so any time he can get to a track event. Afterwards he bolts all the road-kit back on his bike and rides home responsibly. His bike is one of the aforementioned 250s that could leave any overly noisy Subaru or similar "hair-dresser's car" far behind should he choose to do so (it's called "power-to-weight ratio" and that's a high-performance engine in that leetle motorcycle frame) but where's the challenge in beating a poxy blinged-out cage driven by some inexperienced retard when you routinely compete with far faster vehicles ridden by people who know what they're doing?

Riding/driving at speed's fine - when done under the appropriate controlled conditions of an approved track. The wankers endangering lives on the road with their reckless behaviour are useless wannabes who would never survive on a race track. Those who can and do survive on the track tend to drive more responsibly on the road - not always, but most the time.

As with the "squid" variety of motorcyclist: it's the talentless wankers that feel the Need 2 Speed, those of us who know what we're doing and actually can ride/drive at speed don't feel the need to do so on the open road.

Teen accused of hacking emergency 911 system

assault with an assault weapon by proxy

An excellent charge. I wish our police prosecutors could be as inventive here in NZ.

The little wanker nearly got a family shot, he deserves to have the book thrown at him.

Anon Coward #4: "It does beg the question of whether the police normally considered to have committed an offence of 'assault with an assault weapon' after such a raid."

Erm, no. At a guess, the police are permitted to make such a raid with such weapons given reasonable grounds. If, however, I threatened you with an assault weapon in California, I'd be liable to get an "assault with an assault weapon" charge. If I convince someone else to do it for me and I get caught, that's where the "by proxy" would come in.

David Neil: If they ever do release him from prison, it won't take long for him to get ready to leave - his shit would be well and truly packed far in advance...

Tom: "911 Emergency (usually life threatining). Expect someone at your door (ready to bash it in if necessary) very soon."

Here in NZ it's 111 and if you're lucky the cops will call a taxi for you.

Bubbly billygoat-bursting boffinry brouhaha at MoD

@ My Coat

"The French humane solution: they ask us for our results with the goats!"

Sounds about right - fair exchange for data given to the Brits and the US from the A-bomb tests the French were conducting in the Pacific while the US and the Brits had signed treaties saying they wouldn't test A-bombs...

Good bit of mutual back-scratching "we will geeve you ze notes from La Bombe, you tell us all about ze tortured goats..."

ALF???

As in those fruit-loop eco-terrorists that assault people and commit acts of vandalism?

Fuck, I'd suggest using those whackos for scientific experiments but regrettably they do not approximate humankind closely enough for the data to be useful.

Pack of mung-bean-eating, dope-smoking freaks who'd happily burn a dozen humans to death inside a lab in order to save one animal. Rabid animals have more intelligence than those bastards.

I am 100% opposed to spritzing all sorts of cosmetic shit into or onto animals in the interests of "beauty" - fuck, safe cosmetics, hair products and beauty products have been known for thousands of years (and they managed to find out that white arsenic was a dangerous foundation and hair treatment without resorting to animal testing) so there's no need.

Animal experimentation to save human lives, however, does have its place - provided it is done intelligently. As pointed out in the article, fucking around with experimental mixes of gas and different pressures in the hope that you might save more people should not be done when you're trying to save the lives of everyone aboard a research sub.

FFS, as a race we eat animals, use their skins for the manufacture of clothes and other goods and fertilise our fields with their dried blood and bone. We have the moral obligation to be as humane in our use of animals as is possible, but when push comes to shove we're trying to survive as a race and we're not talking about killing species on the verge of extinction.

We're talking about animals that can be readily bred in the interests of improving our chances of survival. In the case of goats, animals that we've long domesticated (last few thousand years or so) to sustain our species as food and a source of milk, wool and occasionally leather,

If a few goats, or rats, die now to help ensure that my adventurous son does not die of the bends some stage in the future, or my daughter doesn't die of some dreadful disease, then so be it. There's not a hell of a lot of difference between that and the many cows, chickens, sheep - and probably goats and deer as well - that are going to die in the service of feeding them up to that point.

Boeing trumpets 'relevant battlefield laser' raygun

Thanks

Andy Worth, for pointing out the only reason they are persisting with the research. It's definitely Waaaaay Coool to say "we have ray guns" - despite the fact they're slower to bring into play than a muzzle-loading rifle.

Steve Taylor, for a practical use for the damned things.

North American cities go green under LED street lights

sounds like some people are being stiffed

We've been having incandescent bulbs in traffic lights gradually replaced (all new installs are LED, older units are being replaced on both an as-needed and a scheduled basis.)

The LED lights are visible over better distances and the colour is sharper (especially when the green or red coating in the lens of the incandescent ones starts to age),and seem to be lasting quite well - some of the earlier units have been around for ages and are still running fine.

Could be those who're experiencing problems are encountering ones made to the cheapest possible specs by really shitty manufacturers.

We've got a newish intersection near an old one (they rerouted a few roads a while ago) and when both sets of lights are green during daylight hours I can see the more distant LED lamp more clearly than the old and faded incandescent on - both in amount of illumination (at night the LED is even more obviously brighter than the incandescent) and clarity of colour (vibrant green vs greenish tinge).

The incandescents seem to lack the light output (even with half the colour filter faded away) to be clearly visible during the day while the LEDs are very noticeable.

Pennsylvania woman in legal doo-doo for lav profanities

Just bloody lucky, I guess...

... that there weren't any off-duty Scranton coppers lurking around near my house a few years back when I walked out the door (on my way to work, on my birthday) to be greeted by the sight of a lake of shit all over my lawn from a backed-up sewerage line.

I'd probably still be in jail or paying off the fine at $10 a week...

Where's the "wipes forehead in relief" icon?

AI egghead: Human-robot humping, marriage by 2050

@ Spiny Norman

"At least when the in-laws come round you can switch them off."

When it comes time for there to be "Mail-Order Robo-bride" agencies, you're going to make a killing in the advertising business.

Bloody Hell

Someone's been reading too much Isaac Asimov!

Despite the popularity of Real Dolls etc, I think human-robot intermarriage is not particulatly likely . As has been pointed out, in order for "marriage" to have any meaning, both parties have to be equal, which means the robots would have to have true intelligence and be accorded the same basic rights as a living being.

And if that were the case - that the robots were true AIs and deemed to be a lifeform in their own right - what is the guarantee that they will find humans "attractive" enough to marry?

Seriously. You could build the robot to be a veritable Adonis or Venus (with the arms this time) so that the average media-brainwashed human is filled with lust and desires to bonk it senseless. You could fit it with appropriate parts to make bonking possible. You could eventually endow the robot with intellect enough to stimulate the mind of the most picky lover (and qualify it as an intelligent life form deserving of "human rights" including the right to marry whomever it pleases). I presume that if you've got AI licked, you've got emotion sorted as well - otherwise it would not truly be a life form - so this hypothetical future robot would "feel" happy, sad, angry, scared (and that mish-mash of all the above that we call "love")

But where's the guarantee it is going to find a *human being* sexually attractive or emotionally/mentally stimulating?

In Asimov's "Robots of Dawn", one robot was bonking a chick because she was lonely and the old First Law kicked in so he fucked her to prevent the "harm" of loneliness and rejection. Of course, his big fulfillment was the joy of obeying the first law.

Talk about the ultimate "sympathy fuck".

So, if we want to marry robots in the future we're going to have to subsume the free will of an intelligent creature using something like the three laws - of course, once we do that, it is no longer a living creature but merely a better grade of vibrator or Real Doll and all the work that went into creating artificial intelligence goes down the toilet.

I mean, come on, robots do not procreate or evolve by themselves. They have no genetic code to mix-n-match to determine their appearance. We're talking about machines built by humans FOR humans, designed to look attractive to humans, have components designed to mimic those that give pleasure to humans (robots certainly don't need them, they don't procreate sexually) and presumably are wired to give the robot some form of pleasure so that it will desire to use those components in the service of humankind and then the robots would have to be "socially conditioned" (programmed) to find humans attractive (just as we are conditioned to view aspects of other humans as attractive - but that's natural for us) - we're talking a machine deliberately created to be a sex toy for a human being, irrespective of how much you dress it up with intelligence.

Free will? Not if its "education" revolved around conditioning it to be excited by humans.

What practical use is genitalia to a robot? For us: procreation, waste disposal and pleasure. For a robot? Giving pleasure to a human. Gee, nice to know the robot has a choice and is a free and intelligent creature, not just something built to satisfy the whims of humankind.

Unless the robot can turn around and say "Fuck off, I'd rather sit in the corner and stimulate this bit of tackle you gave me all by myself or stick it in another robot than fuck one of you ugly stupid humans" it is not going to pass any meaningful test of intelligence and free will. And if it does pass that test, then I can foresee robots bonking and "marrying" their own kind rather than humans.

Oh, and Lloyd Wilson: Calm down. The tone of the article is completely disparaging of the ideas promoted by the boffins and the repetition of that quote in the by-line highlights the stupidity of the concept rather than denigrates other races or homosexuals.

It is there to highlight how fucking out of touch the "egghead" is. You know that it is different from inter-racial marriage, I know it, Mr Page knows it. The one who doesn't seem to grasp the simple reality is the egg-head who made the pronouncement.

Pentagon in orbital solar power plan for world peace

Needless worry...

Looking at some of the paranoid "the US would use it as a weapon since they would have total domination of space " posts, I don't think the posters have to worry - they've probably already got the all the protection they need in the form of their tinfoil hats.

OK, I know it was 2 pages long which is probably a test of the attention span of the average conspeercy theorist but did the bits about global co-operation (you know, that thing that built the ISS), attenuation and diffuseness of the beam over GEOsynch distances etc somehow manage to fall into the hollow space between their ears?

Frankly, I think wind farms, hydroelectric dams and large coal-fired power plants look frigging ugly and the hydro dams and wind farms take up shitloads of space that could be better used for other purposes. Wind power and tidal power are not reliable and have to have some means of backup for when they are not at peak output.

A power station or 5 outside the atmosphere would solve a lot of problems and the reusable rocket technology required to build it would probably drop the cost of space travel to the point that "space tourism" (hell, that'd be a power station I'd be interested in visiting) to LEO and GEO might be affordable.

Where do we sign up

SBSP has been one of my favourite ideas for solving the energy issues ever since I read about it in Jerry Pournelle's "One Step Further Out" (OK, it'd seen it vaguely mooted before but Mr Pournelle's assessment went into the logistics somewhat better than "we could bung something up in space and get the power to Earth somehow").

I'm all for it. And I'm also for using geothermal power sources as well.

Wind farms are hideously ugly and I agree with zen's point about the impact wind farms are likely to have on our ecology - same argument applies to tidal power generation, too. Quite familiar (living as I do in The Waikato Region of New Zealand's North Island) with the impact that both hydroelectric and coal power have on the environment.

The really good thing about SBSP is the spin-off technology. The space program has so far had an enormous spin-off effect on technology and our way of life. Gearing to a renewable/sustainable space program with reusable lifting bodies etc etc and the logistics of building and maintaining geostationary power stations are going to create even more spin-off technologies.

Swearing at work 'good for business'

@ Whodafuckingthunkit?

Feeling better?

Theraputic catharsis

That's what it is.

At a place I used to work, one of the receptionists was always unfailingly bright, cheerful and polite on the telephone when people rang in, no matter how abusive, ignorant or just plain stupid they were (or the person who rang immediately to them was). I've seen her deal with an especially difficult customer, hang up and then the phone rings, instant smile, cheerful voice "Good morning welcome to..." The model professional receptionist.

At tea breaks and lunch time however, she would come down to the smoking area, light a cigarette and it'd be "fucking stupid fucking cunt this morning..." She'd wax lyrically and obscenely for a few minutes and she'd be all refreshed, restored and set for another session on the phone putting up with and being exceptionally polite to fucking morons.

Good on her - at least the anger and frustration was coming out in safety amongst workmates who'd understand and not directed at clients, visitors or senior members of staff. She'd get through an entire session of reception duty (8:30-10, 10:15-12, 1-3 and 3:15-5) knowing that she would be able to go somewhere, have a coffee and a cigarette and "unload" later on.

If you can't vent in safety afterwards, a few crappy calls/encounters/tasks can foul up your handling of the next poor bugger that calls/arrives.

Met used 'dum-dum' ammo on de Menezes

What a storm this has unleashed

Some great posts here and some utter bollocks.

I always love when people who have never fired a firearm at a moving target start wittering on about shooting legs and arms.

I'll say this only once: WHAT YOU SEE IN THE MOVIES IS NOT REAL.

In real life, when dealing with a moving target and you're hyped up on adrenalin, fancy Hollywood shoot the gun from the hand, take out the legs crap is not practical - you have an extremely small chance of getting lucky and a high probability of missing.

So you generally go for the "Centre of Mass" - the torso - even head shots are tricky as the head is generally smaller than the torso (unless your name is Jeremy Clarkson, and there's nothing larger than your head).

Cannot speak for police forces in Nederland or England, but here in New Zealand and (I gather, from reading Massad Ayoob's law enforcement articles) in the USA, police are instructed to shoot to STOP, not "shoot to kill" or "shoot to disable/maim/wound".

That is to say: shoot the Centre of Mass and keep shooting until the person stops.

This may kill the person or it may just wound them to the point they no longer pose a threat.

As it is distinctly possible that the person will die, "shoot to stop" must not be resorted to unless the situation is such that "lethal force" is justified - a clear threat to the lives of the officers or members of the public.

In the heat of a firefight (not "cold blood" as one plonker above has suggested) when the target is moving and the officer is hyped up on adrenalin, the Centre of Mass is the easiest and most effective target. Even if the person is not killed outright, the trauma from the projectile entering the body is likely to "take the fight out of them" unless said target is hopped up on drugs ("Angel Dust" and methamphetamine being two that spring to mind).

Only once have I seen footage of a person being successfully targetted in a limb - and the situation was very unusual. The person in question was publically threatening suicide and had a pistol in his hand. Police officers were attempting to calm him down and get him to surrender the weapon but it wasn't going well. He threatened the cops and threatened to shoot himself.

A police sniper - fully trained, far above average marksman - was called in and moved into position to shoot the pistol out of the man's hand. In this case, the man was in an open area but sitting on a chair whilst engaging in his dialogue with the police. This made him a fairly static target (except for occasionally brandishing the weapon or shifting in the chair. The sniper had to get in as close as he possibly could without revealing his location to the man or the police officers (who were not informed lest their behaviour tip off the suicidal man that something was up.)

After an age of getting into position and taking careful aim, ensuring the man wasn't moving and the police were out of the firing area, the sniper eventually fired a shot that took the pistol from the man's hand - much to his (the man's) and the attending officers' surprise.

In an interview later, the sniper told of how difficult the shot was - despite being an extremely good shot, having had time to get into the best possible position and taking leisurely aim at a static target.

But then you get all these wankers who have probably never fired a pistol or a rifle in their lives (or if they have, they've only ever shot at well-lit static pieces of paper at a nice friendly range) warbling on about shooting limbs because, after all, any decent wild west hero riding at speed on a horse can shoot, with a Colt .45 "Peacemaker" at 20 yards, a rope snaking across the gallows frame and sever it, so a huge human arm or leg should be no problem, eh.

As to rightness and wrongness of this particular shooting (and others where an innocent is gunned down), that is a matter for the enquiry to determine if the actions of the police were the best possible considering the information and visible evidence THEY had at the time.

If the cops acted in the best possible way going by what they were informed or had observed at the time, then it's a regrettable accident - and far more "forgivable" than a so-called "accident" wherein some drunken moron ploughs into a carload of people and kills someone. If the cops did not act, according to the enquiry, in the most appropriate manner based on the info/evidence to hand, then they're for the "high jump" and should rightfully be disciplined for it.

It's all well and good having 20-20 hindsight and saying, "but he didn't have a bomb and we can see by looking at the CCTV footage that he obviously didn't have one" but the questions have to be: how much of the evidence/info available to you now was available AT THE TIME to the cops at the scene? How much information was transmitted to them, at what time and by whom? Did they act appropriately given the perceived level of threat and the evidence they were acting on?

People are fallible, even cops. Evidence can be misinterpreted, important stuff can be missed in an emergent situation where every second counts, new data can be incorrectly interpreted based on assumptions arising from previous inaccurate or incomplete data. Innocents can be wounded or lose their lives.

What is the solution? Sit back and say "I won't do anything because he could be completely innocent...whoops fuck, he just blew up a group of school kids."

Those who don't have to make rapid on-the-fly life-or-death decisions in the defense of themselves or others have no right to judge those who do. You're not cops, you weren't there, you weren't privy to the information they had at the time and you weren't in a situation where you had to make a snap decision about a matter where the lives of numerous civilians might be at stake - so STFU.

No. I'm not a cop, and I would not presume to tell one how to do his/her job - nor would I take kindly to a cop telling me how to do mine. We each have our own areas of training and make our own decisions - good or bad in hindsight - based on what we have to hand at the time. And if we don't do it well, we suffer the consequences.

Rebranding earthquake shakes seismic tech outfit

@ lglethal

I'm well aware of bogans - we have them here (including a sub-genus called "Westie" up in West JAFAville, I mean, Auckland).

The term I used was "bogon" - quite distinctly different, as noted in the New Hackers' Dictionary: http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html

Did anyone else...

...feel their eyes glazing over and their attention start to wander within the first two lines of the explanation for the rebranding?

Holy crap! Somewhere between "I/O Now" and "I/O Next" I could feel myself losing the will to live.

I think El Reg should post a content advisory when quoting more than three words from a Marketroid. This is a IT-focused site, after all and we should have at least some warning that the content of an article is likely to trip our bogometers so hard that the needle wraps around the stop pin.

I suggest a BQ (Bogon Quotient or Bogosity Quotient) rating from 1 (safe for geeks to read) to 10 (get a bucket and mop and stock up on industrial-strength disinfectant) for any article containing ejecta from the foul orifaces of marketroids.

Japanese diggers unearth dino skull

supermeerkat

Bloody hell, I must have a great sarcasm detector (possibly because I'm the most sarcastic SOB I know) as I knew his(?) tongue was in his cheek the moment I read the post but so many other people seem to have got their feathers a mite ruffled.

Way to go, supermeerkat, you've successfully revealed who didn't get enough coffee this morning and didn't get laid last night.

Where's a napkin-for-wiping-froth-off-people's-chins icon when you need it?

Preterite peter-out: How the end beginned

melted/molten

Eeek!

Molten is an ADJECTIVE, melted is a conjugated VERB.

I melted the steel and poured the molten steel into a mold. "Molten" lava is a descriptive state of the lava - hot and liquid rather than cold and solid.

The steel has BEEN melted, it IS molten.

Wilm, "melted lava" is wrong - blame those bloody illerate cooks and their "pour the melted chocolate..." for fucking up the language.

Fairly realistic flying car offered for 2009 delivery

De plane

Jas: The Terrafugia machine is for PILOTS. Trained pilots, not the average munter who drives a badly maintained car attrociously.

If the person has managed to get a pilot's licence the likelihood of a stupid crash is diminished (not removed, private and commercial pilots do crash occasionally, but diminished). Trained pilots crash a lot less frequently and tend to be far more responsible than the average moron who was taught to drive by mummy or daddy and replicates their attrocious driving in addition to his/her own contributions to the science of being an idiot behind the wheel...

The NASA PAV is touted as a fully automated syem for end users which means the dickheaded drivers are merely chauferred passengers and the autopilot is doing everything, so Nate need not worry.

The thing that fills me with dread about the PAV (which is more likely to get off the ground than anything Moller has dreamed up) is that the average dickhead that can't be trusted to fly a plane is also not likely to keep the aircraft properly maintained so we'll have dangerously unairworthy machines taking to the sky - I don't care how good the GPS-guided autopilot is, there would be nothing it could do when the engine fails or the rust in structural components causes it to come apart in mid air...

Terminator will be back in 2009

Arnie taught me a lot...

for a start, I've learned that when Terminator models start getting past their prime and have to be replaced by newer models, they actually age like real humans as well - living skin outer camouflage begins to wrinkle and get pouchy, mechanical muscles turn to flab and internal components shift around...

If Skynet could get them to fart, belch and blob out on the couch stuffing their faces with junk food, watching pay-per-view and scratching their nuts we'd never suspect it was really a lethal killing machine.

Sheesh, we'd be fucked then.

Nissan builds twirly-cab sideways electric pod-car

Hmmmm

"...should you be fleeing from the law and encounter a roadblock - to do any of those tricky handbrake turns, either. Just stop, spin and drive away."

Looking at the traverse speed of that podule, I'd say it'd be best to stick with the handbrake turns and J-turns.

I'm not a trained police marksman or combat-hardened soldier but I could easily shoot the driver 10 times in the time it would take to rotate the podule 180 degrees.

With a bolt action.

And stopping to change mags.

Paris Hilton angle? This is just the sort of stupid shit she'd want as a status symbol and to get her name in the papers again.

"Paris Hilton was again arrested for drunk driving when she was found driving her Nissan sideways through crowded Hollywood streets."

'cept she'd probably want the next model - the "Vino" - because beer is not posh enough for her...

Currency launched to cover the cosmos

FAH!

Only currencies I'll accept are Earth Alliance credits or Centauri ducats!

Honestly, we haven't even got a burgeouning space tourism industry and some total dicks are already saying "and here's the currency the whole world will use in space."

Bollocks! When we do get motels, casinos and B&Bs on the LEO satelites/moon/Mars/asteroid belt t'll wind up like everywhere else - electronic transactions on your (RFID chipped) VISA/MasterCard/Diner's Club,

What currency is accepted is determined by those performing the transaction, not by some bunch of Earth-bound ninnies making a decision on behalf of everyone.

Which means if the Mare Imbrium B&B or the Olympus Mons Hilton are prepared to accept Euro, US dollars, Flanian Pobble-beads and ducats (Centauri or otherwise) as well as VISA, then that's what currencies are going to be used.

Pilot sacked for footie star on flightdeck shocker

John A Blackley

So you're in a smallish plane completely occupied by friends and colleagues, no strangers at all that might be terrorists waiting to yell "Durka Durka Jihad Muhammad" and crash the plane.

One of your friends is scared of flying and the pilot decides that a good way to lessen that fear is to remove some of the mystery of what goes on behind the cockpit door (and perhaps allow said person to see they're not pissed and stoned and "playing chicken" with mountainsides for fun).

This is wrong by you because of the risk that one of your friends may cause the plane to crash.

If that's the level of trust you have in your mates, I'd hate to be one.

Remember, this was not a large airliner filled with a random mix of unrelated people who did not know one another. It was a smaller flight with people all known to each other.

While I might be concerned if the pilot let some random passenger I didn't know have a poke around the cockpit, I'd certainly have no problem if I was on a charter flight with, say, members of a club to which I belonged and I had met them all through the course of the club and the pilot let one of them up into the cockpit.

OK, not strictly true. I'd have a problem - likely to be a tad jealous unless I got to have a nosey 'round the cockpit, too.

MIT touts new mind-to-machine algorithm

Laurie:

amanfrommars *IS* a brain directly wired to a machine - how else to you explain "his" posts (especially the above)?

I think they need to do something with the chemical balance in the nutrient feed, though...

I'm watching mind-to-machine control very closely, as well as advances in prothetetic limbs and means of powering them.

No particular reason - I don't need a prosthetic at the moment and certainly hope I never do, but I've long been fascinated with that sort of technology.

Konstantinos:

It's not too sci-fi. They've made great advances in predicting body movements using electrodes/sensors in/around the brain and used them to control mechanical arms - using both humans and monkeys as operators.

While full feedback is a little way away at present and there would be logistical problems to overcome in controlling, say, a motor vehicle, there are enough positive steps to suggest that proper prosthetic limbs (that are easy to control and mimic the full range of human movement) are not too far away.

After that, direct "thought control" of machines (via a skull cap with a sensor array, or direct implants for the more adventurous) by translating detectable neural activity into impulses to control a machine (using some sort of algorithm akin to what MIT is developing) should be a logical step.

I doubt the machine would translate "I want to get closer to those legs" into driving at the woman, but if steering were to take its targeting from where you are looking it would have a similar result - pretty much as already happens when driving a car or riding a bike... Where you look, you go!

I doubt thought *control* of a vehicle would be a matter of thinking "I want to go to the shop and BAM, your car/bike/truck takes you there. It is more likely that you'd *will* the vehicle to move as if it were part of your body - perhaps by visualising that you are walking then running or maybe even (sticking with current conditioning) pushing your foot down/twisting your wrist and then guiding it around obstacles by visualising the appropriate body movements to steer it.

Thinking "drive to the shops" and the vehicle complying is the territory of robotic vehicles and therefore completely different to "controlling" - speaking/inputting your destination and sitting back for the ride cf driving the vehicle yourself.

UK start-up tackles PIN fraud with patterns

25x25x25x25

Some have missed it:

There is very little penalty in having a "pattern" of pressing the same key 4 times as the repetitions in the grid will befuddle things:

It is a simple matter with a 5x5 grid (25 positions) to use all 10 digits at least twice, three times for some:

ABCDE

1 14562

2 40823

3 03978

4 61957

5 14729

Assume your pattern is 4x the D1 key - on this iteration of the grid: "6"

You hit 6 4 times. How is the shoulder surfer to know if your 4 6's correspond to D1 or A4 (the other "6" in the grid)?

If you are seen to hit "2" 4 times, this could mean E1, D2 or D5 - assuming the shoulder surfer has memorised all instances of "2" on the grid during the short time it is displayed.

UK police can now force you to reveal decryption keys

Government insanity

I suppose it's only a matter of time before the Labour/National/NZ First government of this country follows suit and brings in a similar law, whereupon I'm going to need a lot more disk space so I can encrypt every data file on my hard drive and steganographically embed most of them in various pictures.

Also switch to16-char quadruple complexity quasirandom password for login (looks random unless you know whay it's based on - you have to supply the passwords/encryption keys, it doesn't say you have to tell them what song/poem acts as a mnemonic for said password/key...)

Let them have hours of fun decrypting gigs of totally innocuous crap looking for hidden messages - like the random blocks of "Fuck the spooks, fuck the government" embedded in the middle of large, randomly chosen, files.

They could have a nice treasure hunt - armed with a dozen keys and my lengthy login password, they can go hunting to discover which pictures/mp3s/videos contain the master lists that list the other keys and the files they apply to...

Bugger 'em.

When they remove "innocent until proven guilty", it becomes the moral obligation of every citizen to make it difficult for them.

Everyone currently in the USA and the UK is welcome to use the following as part of their email signature:

"Bomb, Jihad, White House, Downing Street, Death to Infidels. Bomb"

Terror police lock down Soho to smoke out 9lbs of chillis

Dangerous Substances

Chillis are bloody lethal! The chef should be locked up for flooding the neighbourhood with noxious chilli fumes.

In seriousness: Good on the cops for responding. Obviouly someone would have noted the acrid stence and phoned in the threat. Cops were duty bound to check it out in case it was a real threat. As has already been said: "Better safe than sorry."

I say this from the point of view of a man who has eaten his dinner while sitting on the footpath within twenty metres of his front gate because armed police closed off the street (in the short period between me arriving at the fish and chip shop and my order being ready) and would not let me and my flatmates back into the area until they were satisfied it was safe.

Seems some total wanker had been heard to shout at his wife "I'll fucking shoot you, you bitch". The neighbour phoned it in and the cops turned out and cordonned off the area. Turned out the wanker didn't even have a firearm and was just mouthing off.

For my part, I don't mind eating dinner al fresco in the interests of the safety of others. If the cops handn't turned out and the threat had been real, at least one life would have been lost.

NASA mulls strap-on astronaut carrier

Anonymous Vulture is right

Those suits look like a brilliant idea, each one is a mini-airlock that has a practical function. They can be entered and detached simultaneously without the space and weight of a two-person airlock (big enough for 2 people IN SPACESUITS, that is) or the inconvenience and delays of cycling a smaller, one-person airlock, twice.

Someone put a bit of thought into that one.

Mobile spying service leaked sensitive details to the masses

Mike

Quite agree. Problem is, the paranoid eavesdroppers are not the ones getting screwed here, it's the poor sods who're being spied on by snooping spouses (spice?), employers, parents etc who're having their private texts and call histories accessed by random strangers.

Bad enough being a big enough prick to snoop on someone else's phone without getting it done in such a way the whole world can snoop.

Great conversation:

"Hey, we've found a vuln in your system."

"Impossible, it can't be done."

"What about this evidence?"

""

Tidal power plans pit greens against greens

Greens!

"WE WANT TIDAL POWER! But don't stick it anywhere that will impact on the environment..."

What a pack of morons.

Like our clean green hydro power - I'm old enough to remember the protests at damming the Clutha River for a hydro power station. It's less polluting than Huntly's coal-fired plant but it does flood an entire river valley.

There's no such thing as a truly "green" power supply. Wind mills - I've seen a wind farm, they take up a lot of space and don't look very scenic. Photovoltaic - you've got to mine the minerals to make the cells. And so on.

The average greeny lives in some kind of lala-land where tidal power can be harnessed continuously using small, unobtrusive generators that won't impact upon the local environment and somehow converting the energy to electricity (read "robbing the waves of energy") is not going to have a spill-over effect.

Too much recreational herb, I suspect.

BOFH: You think you know a guy...

Most hysterically funny BOFH episode in ages.

And I was expecting the comments to be filled with rabid fanbois ranting at the besmirching of their beloved iToys. Instead, it's been mainly a nostalgia trip induced by the references to the Archimedes and a mere token effort by the fanbois, one of whom thinks Vista is a version of Linux.

So if we're going to have a nostalgia trip:

At college I learned Pascal programming on an old Apple IIe, taught myself BASIC programming on a Sinclair ZX80 and (later) a ZX81 (only machines I could afford on my budget - would have killed for a Commodore 64 and committed genocide for an Archimedes or better). First "IBM-compatible" was a Sanyo MBC-555 (ok, partially compatible) running PC-DOS and I progressed to IBM-clones.

FBI redefines length of century

Suggested Promotional Tagline:

FBI: 100 years of cross-dressing

Sysadmin admits planting 'logic bomb' in drug firm database

laird cummings...

is quite right. Irrespective of whether it worked or not, his INTENT was to sabotage the patient records of a drug company.

As safety with drug dosages relies on accurate data on allergies, doses etc, he was deliberately risking the lives of a large number of people on that database with his stupid plan.

If he'd run about firing a pistol at random in a shopping centre he would be just as likely to kill or seriously fuck up a random stranger as he was by putting a virus in the system as deaths and severe reactions are likely to have occurred in the time between the virus "going off" and the data being properly restored.

Screw the money, he was dicing with people's lives and deserves to be punished accordingly.

No one died? See Simpson's point: bungling an attempted crime does not alter the fact that you attempted the crime - in this case, indiscriminate murder.

If I ruled the World, there would be a global crime called "Undirected Murder" - deliberate murder of some random person rather than the slaying of a specific target (or targets).

Terrorist bombers, drunk drivers and dicks like that sysadmin would be facing charges of that crime (or attempting that crime).

Welcome indeed to the billionaire toyshop

LehiNephi and corestore have got it right

LehiNephi: Ever since watching the animated kids show "Sea Lab 2020" years ago I've wanted an underwater base/home with moon pool, mini sub, personal underwater sleds etc. Wouldn't have to be mobile, just hard to reach, anchored to the sea-bottom in International Waters. Why there? So I could just shoot any paparazzi that invade my SOVEREIGN territory.

Have a private island within submarine distance...

Corestore's suggestion of the personal hypersonic jet is great as well. Have an airstrip suitable for one of those on the private island and be only a few hour's flight from anywhere in the world. You could visit a number of large, Earth-bound gin palaces in one day, no matter where in the World they are.

People are biggest threat to IT security

@ all the "this is not news" posts

Come ON, be fair, this is Deloitte we're talking about! They routinely charge an obscene amount of money to do f**k all work before announcing the f**king obvious like it's some kind of Divine Inspiration.

When they're not doing that, they spend their time (that your company is paying through the nose for) coming up with "security measures" to inflict upon your staff/clients so your IT dept is kept busy unlocking accounts and resetting passwords because some staffer/client forgot the impossibly-long-for-anyone-not-in-IT password they had been force to adopt thanks to Deloitte's "audit".

Thanks to those dicks our help desk team spends most of its day unlocking accounts due to the "three wrong passwords in 24 hours = permanent lock-out, have to get IT to unlock" policy insisted upon by Deloitte - apparently "3 wrong in half an hour = lock for 15 minutes" wasn't stringent enough.

And many of our staff are unused to computers so the triple-complexity passwords insisted on by Deloitte are hard for them to remember - resulting in frequent lockouts and password changes.

I'm now pushing for 32 character, quadruple-complexity, passwords that change daily in conjuction with three biometrics (retina, fingerprint and DNA sample) and a token (RFID card) - not for the computers, but for the doors to keep those bastards from Deloitte out of the building!

Peruvian 'meteorite' strike provokes noxious gas attack

@ Daniel

"Could the gas be the "Black Smoke" ???"

Precisely what I was inferring at the beginning :-) (Happy Birthday, smiley)