Posts by allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

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

Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird - sexiest plane EVER.

Re: aerosexuals

Didn't know that, thank you El Reg! One of my friends is a planespotter and he works for Airbus at Hamburg Finkenwerder, so, once again thanks! ^-^

You wanted innovation? We gave you Clippy the Paperclip in your IM client

This article is a thing of truth and beauty.

Re: Survey

Ook!

Now Suzuki admits cheating

Re: Another car manufacturer cheated

The one car maker that didn't cheat emission tests? Why, Tesla!

Now, where are my 5 quid?

NASA's stadium-sized sandwich bag overflies Oz

Are the cats allright?

Magnetic memory boffins unveil six-state storage design

Re: My brain hurts

"It'll have to come out, then!"

"My brain? Out of my head?"

"Yes! All the ... bits of it!"

Electric Babel Fish swims into crowdfunding

Re: Seems misleading

When something seems to good to be true, it usually is.

Yep, BT headset links to phone, phone links to ??? For all we know, they pipe it into Google translator.

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

How?

According to the linked interview on Nextshark, it's "stem cell and peptide injections, lasers and nerve stimulation". Hmm. And what is the secret ingredient to make it work?

Colour me skeptical, this is a bit too Young Frankenstein for me.

BTW, in German, Quark is used as a derogatory term, unless you actually mean curd.

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

Slurpy McSlurpface?

US schoolkids deploy Earth-watching CubeSat

Re: A medal blessed by the Pope?

Which part of 'St Thomas More* Cathedral School' confuses you? I'd rather see kids learning that science, thinking for yourself and a religion-based code of ethics can be reconciled than breeding the next generation of science denying nutjobs. Especially in Virginia.

^{* who IMO was a bit of an ass, but that's neither here nor there}

Got $130,000 down the back of the sofa? Great. Grab an HP 3D printer

Re: Oh, I'm quite interested in what this might be...

Yes, but does it go 'ping' as well?

Iraq shuts down internet to prevent exam cheating. The country's entire internet

Re: Loss

You'd have to offset that against the boost in productivity from not being able to check FB every two minutes and things like that. Businesses not dependant on 'the cloud' would have an advantage though.

US power grid still fragile in the face of EMP threat: GAO

Somewhat surprising, given the extensive testing. In the early 1960ies there was an entire series of nuclear weapons tested in the upper atmosphere and even in space. Search for 'Rainbow Bombs' or the documentary 'Nukes in Space'.

Inside Electric Mountain: Britain's biggest rechargeable battery

Re: Thing explainer

Hmm... yes and no. Randall uses a relatively small set of simple words - but he doesn't dumb down whatever he is explaining. Which is not as easy to pull off as it seems.

Re: "What word does the man in the street understand?"

"If we shy away from using words because we fear people won't understand them we'll just reduce the number of words that people do understand. Worse than that, we'll reduce the number of ideas that people can hope to understand. Let's keep using the right words for the job and work on helping people to comprehend them."

Exactly. If you can spare the time, re-read 1984. IMO that's the main point Orwell wanted to make. Changing the language can change the ability to think. In 1984 the party works towards the point where no-one is able to say or even think anything dissenting from the party line - because there are no words to do so. As horrible as it is, the mass surveillance is trivial in comparison.

NASA 'Kilo-Kitty' Super Pressure Balloon goes aloft at last

And since when is 'Goodyear Blimp' an acceptable unit of volume on El Reg?

Exercise apps track you after you stop exercising

Re: Simple Answer

Don't buy useless crap that snoops on you in the first place.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tells Reg data loss 'minimal'

“The amount of data lost was minimized because this was a North American instance(na14) and the loss occurred in the middle of the night.”

Sure Marc, sure. Because computers don't work in the dark, everybody knows that. I mean it's not like some firms do business with other firms located in different timezones or have divisions there.

Is uBeam the new Theranos?

"Its article also unwittingly added weight to a growing criticism of both the tech press and the venture capitalist industry: self-justification. The very fact that VCs had put money into the company was itself prove that the technology must work, Techcrunch argued, despite being shown no evidence that the technology works."

Unicorns are real - the fairies that live at the bottom of my garden told me so.

UK.gov is about to fling your data at anyone who wants it. How? Why? Shut up, pleb

Re: Excellent idea! But I have one small change...

Just where do you think the money for their pension funds comes from?

Kobayashi Maru gets real: VR and AR in meatspace today

"How many million tris can you possibly need for a bunch of walls and pipes?!?"

A lot. Because it's not just walls and pipes.

Supernova bubble clocked at 19,000,000 km/h

19,000,000 km/h = 176.0433 % of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum.

Yep, that's pretty fast.

Ooh missus, get a grip on my notifications

Re: Fussy Excuse...

Hmm, like explaining those long hairs on the shirt with hotdesking...

Salesforce.com crash caused DATA LOSS

Looking at the excerpt from the company's Master Subscription Agreement - which god could possibly have an interest in smiting Salesforce's kit and why?

China signs tax data pact

Read that as data tax first. Guess I need another coffee. Anyway, a step in the right direction etc etc

Germans set to make schnitzel out of controversial Wi-Fi law

About bloody time.

But the Schnitzel reference is utter nonsense. In this sort of context a Hackfleisch reference would be much more fitting. The headline could read "Bundestag macht Hackfleisch aus der Störerhaftung".

A cracked window on the International Space Station? That's not good

Space glazing! Yes, always carry spares...

As to the debris: wouldn't the smaller bits be something the proposed anti meteor laser(s) could practise on?

Lie back and think of cybersecurity: IBM lets students loose on Watson

If Watson really has any intelligence, his first recommendations regarding cybersecurity will be to use an adblocker. And NoScript. And a cookie nuker. And to kill Flash.

Non-police orgs merrily accessed PNC without authority, says HMIC

Re: Also...

I can't help it, that always sounds like the title of a TV show to me.

BTW, what about Bureau 121?

Boffins flip the unflippable: Meet the latest storage extender contender

"Isn't there a XKCD cartoon about such things?"

"Yes."

Re: "it'll take years"

You'll be using a spintronic-based tablet powered by nano-carbon-tube batteries to watch the inflight movie on the space elevator...

Btw, I'm a bit confused. Isn't Moore's law about CPUs, not storage? Did I get this wrong?

Laser-zapping scientists will save the Earth from meteorite destruction

Re: Or an anti-matter beam!

Just don't cross the streams and everything will be just fine.

Re: Plans?

JeffyPoo, I don't quite get the finer points of the Plan Maturity Scale. Is it a scale of doability from the technical side, a scale of usefulness/sensibility, a scale of budgetability, or a combination?

Focussing purely on the technical side, FLW's Mile High Building is way past the 90-points-mark already.

Assuming statute mile (not nautical mile*), 1 mile = 1,609.3 metres.

Burj Khalifa (Dubai): 830 m

Currently under construction: Jeddah Tower, previously known as Kingdom Tower and Mile-High Tower. Jeddah Tower will be about 1,007 metres when finished. They changed the name because as Kingdom Tower it was initially planned to be 1.6 kilometres (1 mi) high, but the geology of the area proved unsuitable for a tower of that height.

Thing is, building tall is building expensive. While the structure itself scales pretty much linear, the cost doesn't. If vou venture into the Supertall/Megatall range, we are talking the sort of cash that would buy a nuclear carrier, including the planes (if they were availiable)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand: I notice that everyone from the original Star Wars gang is involved. So this is a also hedge to keep the funding coming, but at least it's for something useful and worthwhile this time.

^{* Basically the only acceptable non-metric unit. Because it's hard to be happy when you're not using the metric system.}

Google kneecaps payday loan ads

What is a picklock compared to a share?

What is robbing a bank compared to set up a bank?

- Bertolt Brecht, from The Threepenny Opera

Google open sources Thread in bid to win IoT standards war

Re: Ooooo...

Yep - CAB.

Computer Aided Burglary.

First successful Hyperloop test module hits 100mph in four seconds

I don't know about you lot, bit I'm having flashbacks to the 1990ies.

Unicorn adopts rainbow as logo

Being a well-known brand - and that includes people being able to identify your logo at a glance - is usually listed unter 'intangible assets' and can be worth quite a lot. So maybe not a good idea to change it.

Congress calls for change to NSA spying law

Re: Simple solution, move the NSA out of the States

Take it one step further - outsource everything! There are a lot of skilled, experienced organisations that could do the same work for a fraction of the current budget. Just think of all the money that could be saved an funnelled into badly needed tax cuts for the rich, because trickle down economy!

Kepler space telescope spots 1,284 new planets

Re: So we can start putting some numbers on the Drake equation.

Okay kid, you know you had it coming.

I for one welcome our new alien overlords etc etc

Ireland's international tech sector bumps up against language barrier

Latin? It once was the lingua franca all over Europe...

Google asks Unicode to look over 13 new emoji showing professional women

Re: Was this what Unicode was for?

"With all the combinations of emoji there'll be no codepoints left for characters."

I somehow get the feeling that this is how the Egyptian hieroglyphs got started.

Re: Prejudice

Unisex Unicode?

Facebook promises release of own 'modular routing platform'

Note to sub-editor: hand in picture chosen to accompany the article has the wrong finger extended. Please fix accordingly.

Valley VC Peter Thiel becomes an official Trump delegate

If only all that energy could be harvested and fed into the national grid.

Re: Sounds familiar

Only this guy is worse and more dangerous than any politician. He doesn't have to toe a party line. He doesn't have to defeat competition. He doesn't have to answer to anyone. He can't be impeached. All he has to do is wave his checkbook. And he has the kind of money to make things happen. With great power comes grat responsibility? Yeah. In comic books.

Re: Well.

Nah, Boris is grooming himself to become PM. So Britain can have it's own MiniTrump!

Cisco suggests network administration is fun and games

If they make it somehow BOFH-themed I might give it a try.

Dragon capsule bids adios to ISS

No, it isn't. They wouldn't go through the hassle of landig it if it was "a smeggin' garbage pod". They let those burn up in the atmosphere.