Posts by Mark Johnson

Bill Gates loses richest man crown

@Martin Owens

Woah! Wind your flag in komrade Owens!

Confidential Home Office data turns up in laptop on eBay

Tabloid crap

This is tabloid journalism, Lewis. It's a blatant attempt to criticise the government, even though they've done nothing wrong in this instance. I expect better from The Register.

Sun will swallow Earth: Official

This may not be big news to us...

...but this is a question of life and death for vampires!

Want to snoop on your neighbors? Come and work in Wisconsin

Want to snoop on your neighbors? Come and work in Wisconsin

Not much use to me. If I have to move to Wisconsin, I'll have different neighbours.

Judge accuses hacks of hacking cannibal ruling

Her own fault??!

I'm sure we're all aware that email is insecure, but do you seriously believe that journalists were packet-sniffing her office's LAN? Maybe they broke into AT&T and sniffed it in transit? Maybe they hacked into Hotmail and stole it from there.

Or maybe, just maybe, it got leaked by an insider.

Cruise.co.uk stumps £560k to add 's' to domain

Easy money!

I'm off to buy theregisters.co.uk. Yours for a cool million.

All blue-eyed people share one common ancestor

I for one...

...welcome our new blue-eyed overlords.

Brighton professor bans Google

So if the Internet has been lying to me...

...what the hell is my philtrum really called?

Bjork lays into NZ snapper

Mad

That girl's mental. No wonder's Goldie's got no teeth left.

Drivers on the phone face the slammer

@Nigel Whitfield

I believe the correct plural is 'Lexi'.

Boffins report lightning on Venus, our non-identical twin

@Spleen @A Coward

You're both wrong.

"It is now becoming clear why the climate on Venus is so different to Earth" should read "It is now becoming clear why the climate on Venus is so different to the climate on Earth".

The first sentence isn't grammatically wrong, it just doesn't make a great deal of sense in the context. Maybe Anonymous Coward, if that is your real name, you should ask for a dictionary for Christmas and look up 'grammar' and compare it to the entry for 'sense of a quote in the context of a news article'.

Spleen, I'm not sure WTF you're wittering on about, but you might want to revisit your spelling of aeroplanes.

I think we can all agree that I've now settled the debate.

Balls blames parents, computers for English literacy slide

How times have changed...

It's such a shame. Many years ago when I was young, my older brothers would rush upstairs to their bedroom straight after school to get a quick fix of their favourite book before tea. Not good for the eyes though; it sent them blind after a few years.

Wii grasses up cheating wife

@Paul Murray

I quite agree. My wife and I have triplets, but I've always had my doubts about little Vladimir.

Oz motorist reacts rather testily to small todger slur

Such a shame...

...that he had to resort to throwing a bottle, when he could have silenced the lady simply by whipping his cock out.

Unimpressed Sheilas mock boy racers' todgers

Double standards

I'm sure if they made an advert where they took the piss out of women with small tits there would be outcry. In my experience, boy racers come in all shapes and sizes, but they usually have fat girlfirends.

For the record, I don't generally speed and I have a massive cock.

Swearing at work 'good for business'

I know this works...

My mother used to frequently swear at work, and she always prided herself on never being stressed. Then again, she did work as a porn actress at the time.

AI egghead: Human-robot humping, marriage by 2050

@Graham & Lloyd

The point he's making is that people's attitudes to marriage change over time. I think it's perfectly fair to say that a change in acceptance to inter-racial and same-sex marriages can be compared to a change in acceptance to any other form of marriage.

If you want to take this further and suggest that ethnic minorities and homosexuals are being classed as being subhuman by being compared to robots then that's your lookout. Just because you're reading between the lines, it doesn't mean he's writing between them.

For the record, I think the guys's talking bollocks. But he should still be entitled to try and form a valid argument without being accused of homophobia and racism.

Canadian prof develops drunk-driving sim

@Chris Adams

I don't see how the context in which the game is pitched will necessarily affect the influence it will have on people. Anyway, I'm not going to pretend that I know how exactly how much games influence people - I'm not a psychologist and almost certainly never will be. I'll hazard a guess that makes two of us.

I was just found it interesting that the general reaction on this site to people's calls to ban violent video games was pretty strong. However, keep the question the same but change the context slightly and the reaction is very different.

This seems familiar...

We asked 100 Reg readers if playing a drink-driving simulator would make people more likely to drink and drive. Our survey said: Yes, chavs are far too impressionable!

We asked 100 Reg readers if playing violent video games make people violent in real life. Our survey said: Don't be silly, child violence is society's fault!

Hmmmmmm...

Racist Reg hacks slammed for 'vitriolic hatred'

You've got to question...

why he was so drawn to read the article in the first place.

Mobile-mast danger is all in your head

@You failed to fire the gun

My point is simply that just because danger isn't perceptible doesn't mean it is not there. I believe certain elements of the press have used this research to suppprt the belief that phone masts are necessarily safe.

But, of course, I'm sure that's flawed for so many complex and specialised reasons that I could never possibly understand.

I ran a similar test with Russian Roulette

I took a group of people and gave them a gun in which I either had or hadn't placed a live round.

When I told members of the group that the gun contained a live round, they were much more wary of it and believed it to be more dangerous.

When neither the instructor nor the participant knew if the gun contained a live round, the results showed no link between the percieved danger factor and the presence of a live round.

From this I concluded that guns containing live rounds are not dangerous.

Spot the deliberate mistake...