Posts by Francis Boyle

Watch out for the GIGANTIC ALIEN JELLYFISH, warns space boffin

Things is

I've never seen an actual little green man in SF. (And I've seen and watched a lot.) Now Rutans on the other hand. (Even if what they did was less floating and more been dragged along by an invisible string.)

Total bankers: Twitter and LinkedIn's cynical API play

Re: FFS...

Exactly. Point of article:If you're a producer you rely on your suppliers - if the product they supply is not fungible you have a problem. So the Amazon thing is exactly not a relevant example.

CERN catches a glimpse of Higgs-like boson

Re: @Big Dumb Guy 555 -- -What???? ...But the US didn't

According to the episode of QI I watched last night the US has the solid support* of Palau on the Cuba thing so it's not like it's an international pariah or anything. . .

*At least until the aid money runs out and the way things are going it'll probably run out soon. Twenty years ago the US thought it had won the Cold War. Twenty years on it's becoming clear that it was just that the USSR lost it first.

Multimillion-pound hoard of 50BC GOLD PIECES found in Jersey

Re: i must have missed the IT angle

Interred Trove - theres always an IT angle.

Re: Surely any coin

Well obviously, since their were no Christians around at the time they used BCE instead.

Raspberry Pi to skipper microship across Atlantic

@NogginTheNog

Beware the Intel fanbois - they may not be many but they are keen.

Sheryl Sandberg finally adds woman's touch to Facebook board

Reg Fail

I hate to say it but this story crosses the line from good fun and harmless innuendo into outright sexism. It's the 21st century folks, the mere presence of women anywhere, no matter how attractive, should neither be a surprise nor cause of schoolboy sniggers.

Boffins program peripheral visions for ultra TV immersion

It

Might work with the end sequence of 2001. Otherwise, I can't see much use for it.

Larry Ellison buys island 1000x bigger than Branson's

Re: Meanwhile on Branson's island..

The thing about islands is that the bigger they get the less islandy they become. I mean I live on an island but since it's an entire continent you'd never know.

Dammit, I see where this is going. Ellison's ego won't be satisfied until he buys a

Australia.

Google in dock again over defamatory auto-complete

Well I changed my name to

Malcolm Peter Brian Telescope Adrian Umbrela Stand Jasper Wednesday (pops mouth twice) Stoatgobbler John Raw Vegetable (whinnying) Arthur Norman Michael (blows squeaker) Featherstone Smith (whistle) Northgot Edwards Harris (fires pistol, then 'whoop') Mason (chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff) Frampton Jones Fruitbat (squeaker) Gilbert (sings) 'We'll keep a welcome in the' (three shots) Williams If I Could Walk That Way Jenkin (squeaker) Tiger-drawers Pratt Thompson (sings) 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' Darcy Carter (horn) Pussycat (sings) 'Don't Sleep In The Subway' Barton Mainwaring (hoot, 'whoop') Smith.

But I misspelled 'umbrella' so I should be right.

Voyager ticks one box for interstellar arrival

Re: Vejur

Unfortunately this Voyager's fate involves a rather ugly bunch of Klingons.

Mr Sulu causes DDoS panic after posting link on Facebook

Girls like babies and Men like Trek

You're forgetting all that slash fiction I'm afraid.

Apple-Moto patent gripe almost thrown out the door

I prefer

the penis pump under the bench but whatever gets you off.

Twitter bird reborn to the sound of whalesong

Put it this way

It's transformer alter-ego is Batman not Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob. That has to be worth a few k.

Raspberry Pi safe and warm in TINY Lego fortress

As I well now. I still have a slightly melted 8x1x3 as a souvenir of my attempt to produce a working gun out of Lego and firecrackers*.

*It was a long time ago.

Flame gets suicide command

Re: Hacker

Yhe Internet? I thought by the twenty-second century they had replaced the Internet with a big mainframe with blinkenlights on an asteroid somewhere in deep space. It's progress, Jim, but not as we know it.

Rogue kebab provokes Carlisle post-pub car deathmatch

Also

ICT - Ill-advised Carlisle Transport. Don't worry I'll stop now - I blame DARPA anyway.

Re: Why?

Definitely IT - Ill-advised Transport.

HBO wants royal price for Iron Throne

Re: upgrade option

Too bad the Pythons have already made The Final Rip Off . A replica comfy chair for $30,000 would really be the ultimate ripoff.

Flexible Willow glass displays thin and curvy gadget future

Much as I hate that expression

there are times when it's appropriate.

Ten... bits of Jubilee tat tech

I have to agree

Geri Halliwell never made anything sexy. Some things should never be spoken of even in jest.

US secret spaceplane will come back to Earth sometime soon

How the hell do you defend against SPACE NAZIS

with that. For SPACE NAZIS you need SPACE SPITFIRES.

For symmetry

with the first post insert Skynet joke here.

Milky Way DOOMED to high-speed smash with Andromeda galaxy

"Earth's Milky Way"

I didn't realise preparations for the Galactic Empire were so far advanced.

iLuv Vibro Classic II

Re: Misleading name

Yes. I was thinking more "Highway to Heaven" than the other place.

Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

Volvos in Space

My new band name.

Man's car warns of AIR RAID OVER LONDON

Where is

the SPB secret testing bunker again?

The Register is rocking on Windows Phone 7

Re: At last

I suspect the explanation for the Big Dumb One involves some form of (possibly alien) brain parasite. Though more traditional types of zombiefication can't be ruled out.

Boffins develop nanoscale vacuum tube running at .46 THz

Not just van Vogt

That murmuring you can hear is a thousand golden age SF writers whispering "I told you so" from beyond the grave".

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

While I understand the reason for it swastika avoidance does irritate me. Blood Rayne, for example ,used a three-armed pseudo-swastika. If was as if in the game's weird alternative reality Hitler was Manx.

Russian satellite beams home 121-megapixel pics of Earth

Re: Cold War

The Russians never got Scotty into space so there's that.

Google warns against ISPs hard on web filth

Re: Who are we protecting here?

Education and awareness perhaps that sex is actually a mutually enjoyable activity to be conducted with a partner as well as, a fantasy object? FTFY.

Or do you propose to outlaw fantasy?

Well according to Google

Pornhub features "Free porn sex videos & pussy movies" so maybe yes.

Boffins cram binary data into living cells' DNA

That's what I got from it as well

Any sort of gene manipulation can be viewed as a process of encoding data. What they've done here is to make the write process more user friendly.

Apple design chief Jony Ive knighted - but not by the Queen

Re: Doubt it

Dammit, we need a zombie icon!

Report: SAP exec charged with $1,000 LEGO bar-code caper

Also "alot"

Let's not forget my favourite.

Review: Raspberry Pi

"First generation Atom netbooks"

Luxury! In my day we had to make do with Celerons.

SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully

Eggs

Mutant space spiders/trout/whatever - what's not to like.

<- I think that's a Fantastic Four comic in the pocket.

Brit knits jumper for NASA space chicken

Re: Space Chickens

Not just space chickens. Rubber Chickens from Beyonf the Stratosphere. Where's Ed Wood when you need him.

Resistance is futile? Memristor RAM now cheap as chips

Re: A ways to go? More like several continents away

WUWT? It's still in the laboratory. There's no reason to make it small until you need to make it small. That would just be making life difficult for yourself.

Txt-speak is a sign of humanity 4 U

Good point

I'd forgotten about the iTelegraph.

Watchdog tells Greenpeace to stop 'encouraging anti-social behaviour'

I really can't tell you

how terrified I would be at the sight of the word idiot painted on a chimmney.

Roman roads get the web maps treatment

Built the aqueducts

then privatised them. That was Romans wasn't it? My British history's a bit vague.

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

Re: abandon the imperial and metric...

For extra points I suggest using the Australian beer system(s). Makes el Reg units look positively sane.

'IT is no place for the little ladies', says Dell mouthpiece

Rolling pin?

Probably not a good idea to get your material from out of copyright books.

Only global poverty can save the planet, insists WWF - and the ESA!

Re: BTO

Bacon, tomato and onion? OK I get that CCS is probably carbon capture something but BTO genuinely has me flummoxed.

75,000 Raspberry Pi baked before August

On the other hand

there's those of us who have been waiting for the Arduino Leonardo (the real one, not a clone) since something like September so it pretty much balances out. Of course sales numbers are meaningless here. For example, no one really knows what percentage of Atmegas end up as de facto Arduinos. These aren't commercial projects folks. They aren't competing projects. I wish people (who should know better) would stop talking as if they were.

Japanese operator to test quake-proof floating phone-mast BLIMPS

I can't help feeling

that this is the aerial equivalent of "lets build a monorail".

Freecom Hard Drive Sq 2TB

"No flashing LED indicators"

And you call this a geek treat. Admittedly, on past form, the entire series should be renamed "treats for people who really like Apple products"*.

*I'll spare you the f-word.

Samsung sheds light on low-cost WinPho blower

Re: Oh look...

So its not pointless - just crap design.