Posts by M Neligan

Ireland handed another $100m by Silicon Valley for startups' handout

interVENing

Ten serious sci-fi films for the sentient fan

Hard & Soft

My Top 20 Scifi (not in order):

1. Bladerunner

2. 2001 A Space Odyssey

3. Planet of The Apes (1968)

4. The Time Machine (1960)

5. War of the Worlds (1953)

6. Forbidden Planet

7. Quatermass and the Pit

8. Aliens

9. Terminator 2

10. Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country

11. Total Recall

12. Twelve Monkeys

13. The Omega Man

14. Independence Day

15. Tron

16. Metropolis

17. Galaxy Quest

18. Brazil

19. Flight of the Navigator

20. The Incredible Shrinking Man

Proxime accesserunt:

Invasion of the Body-snatchers

Demon Seed

Seconds

Westworld

Stargate

AI

Dune

Return of the Jedi

Predator

etc.

Irish civil rights group takes aim at iPad launch

Shane lives!

Sadly, it appears that many Reg readers are too busy concentrating on their work to cast an eye at the calendar - or do they need to see flying penguins to be reminded of the date? And to some of the less courteous among them, I would like to issue a cordial invitation to bestow an osculatory salutation upon my Hibernian fundament.

Google boss worries about the future of reading

Prof. Bell

I read Professor Bell's article (cited above) until he started to rhapsodise about "forgotten treasures tucked amid the pages". University staff have to justify their comfortable positions. Reading a PDF is not so very different from reading a book, in my experience. Books have survived the onslaught of television and they will continue alongside the various types of ireader. Maybe this is not always a good thing: I'm not sure that time wasted on CSI New York (or Silent Witness) is better spent on the works, for example, of Stieg Larsson. (I once visited Reading Reading Centre.)

Avatar kills Taiwanese man

What's not to like?

Yesterday I saw the eARTh exhibition at the Royal Academy, had a pint of Timothy Taylor and a double-decker sandwich at the Coal Hole and watched Avatar at the Imax. I found none of them life-threatening, but Avarar was the best.

'God help our smartphones,' vicar prays

medieval?

"a medieval ceremony of the Church of England" : it is commonly held that the Reformation came just after the Middle Ages.

Catholic priests, scientists head to Rome to ponder alien life

@zogg

"The Vatican is a museum of the darker side of human history."

I've seen St Peter's and the Sistine Chapel: awesome. Why don't you go to Switzerland and look at the cuckoo-clocks?

And when/where did the Vatican attack Darwin?

Atheists smite online God poll

Old news?

Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus.

Corrupti sunt, et abominabiles facti sunt in iniquitatibus;

non est qui faciat bonum.

Church altar smites devout Catholic

@NT1

What the fuck's going on? A Reg commentard who is NOT a geeky, self-centred, supercilious, infantile, simplistic moron? Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold etc.

Beer drinking model to get caned in Malaysia

@ C Rogers

The Reg still the best place to find eggcorns.

Thanks for "free reign".

Brit diplomats' mission to expose Scientology's 'diploma mill'

@Geoff Mackenzie

How about this for a Linux promotional slogan:

"Too much time on you hands? Why not give Linux a go?"

Wikipedia's Gallery guy hung up to dry?

@ David Webb

"There is also not perpetual copyright, the images that the NPG display have their own copyright shelf life, life of author +70 years, so eventually the images will become public domain and then anyone can host them without question of copyright."

Yippee - can't wait to get my hands on those thousands of portraits of all those famous dead people. Not long now - unless they take some more snaps...

Pirate Bay sells out to Swedish software firm for $7.7m

Not dead?

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, PB - it tolls for thee.

Greece grounds Google's Street View fleet

@Qneiform

The Lord Cthulhu is displeased: he does not have a nose to blow. Check your insurance policy is valid NOW.

Google sued for 'stealing' Android name

Alternative name?

Dick? ("Do Androids Dream").

Sage struggles in subdued market

Bore da!

@"welsh"

Excellent scrap - thanks. We could play a game deciding what words one could/could not substitute for "welsh" in the comment. Personally, were I a Taff (some of my best friends are Welsh), I would strongly object to the lower-case "w". Apart from the you-will-fry-in-hell N- and P- words, you would not get away with "Jewish" or "dyke" or "Paddy" but "Christian", "British/Brit" and "French/Frog" would (probably) pass unnoticed. Words are weird.

And he probably doesn't mean it about the toys.

BBC pumps 60 quid a head into Gaelic

@..>title<..

That wasn't a sheep - that was my wife.

The Vatican tempts the YouTube generation

Fallible?

Error while looking up definition

No definitions found for 'wooley'

woolly

22 Moby Thesaurus words for "woolly":

bristly, bushy, cirrose, downy, feathery, fleecy, flocculent,

flossy, fluffy, furry, fuzzy, hairy, hirsute, hispid, lanate,

matted, pilose, pubescent, shagged, shaggy, unshorn, whiskered

Error while looking up definition

No definitions found for 'infalable'

infallible

79 Moby Thesaurus words for "infallible":

absolute, acceptable, agreeable, beyond all praise, certain,

chaste, close, constant, correct, defectless, delicate, dependable,

direct, effective, efficacious, efficient, even, exact, express,

faithful, faultless, fine, flawless, foolproof, handy, helpful,

ideal, immaculate, impeccable, indefectible, indefective,

inerrable, inerrant, irreproachable, just right, mathematical,

micrometrically precise, microscopic, nice, oracular, peerless,

perfect, pinpoint, precise, pure, refined, reliable, religious,

religiously exact, rigid, rigorous, satisfactory, satisfying,

scientific, scientifically exact, secure, severe, sinless,

spotless, square, stainless, strict, subtle, sure, surefire,

taintless, unadulterated, unblemished, uncontaminated,

undeceivable, undeviating, unerring, unfailing, unfaultable,

unmistaken, unmixed, unspotted, untainted, useful

Vikings' bleeding-edge tech came from Afghanistan

@xjy

Some would say that Romulus Augustus was the last Roman Emperor (deposed 476) in the West: isn't that a bit early for Vikings (or at least the sort of Norse who didn't do that well at Clontarf)?

Webcast quango: One-third of UK teachers are creationists

@Bload

Thanks, Bload. As an agnostic, I admit I have occasionally wondered where all this stuff came from - and why. So that was it! It came from two fundamentalist fermions having a split-up. Whew, that's that then. Still, can't help wondering why they bothered. I guess they couldn't have stayed together for the sake of the kids. Just thinking of the whole affair drains me of all my dark energy.

Michael Crichton dead at 66

I enjoyed

Andromeda Strain, Westworld, Jurassic Park, 13th Warrior (be quiet, Omar). Thanks, Michael.

US teen admits to 'Anonymous' DDoS attack on Scientology

@Fuzzy

Damn agnostics - sitting on circular fences and hedging like mad. I hope they give you back your goat.

UK.gov and UK.biz pour £60m into IT skills gap

@davenewman

"144,000/yr" ? That's the number of JWs that (they think) will go to Heaven. Coincidence? I think not. Now where did I leave that pamphlet?

Stick health warnings on gays, says Stock Exchange chaplain

@Steve Roper

It must take some nerve to swim against the usual bile-tide. You have my (craven) respect.

It's Time that Google forgot

Thanks

for such a lively debate, boys. And, er, don't you have any work to get on with? I know I do - and I'm retired.

Today is not Hadron Collider Day

@Simon Ward

Simon Ward, PhD in combustion processes says: "if you do manage to destroy the entire universe then I for one won't miss it much".

Scientists - what's not to love?

COBOL thwarts California's Governator

@A W Rateliff

I agree that Cobol has its attractions: close to natural language, no recursion etc. (thank you, Jim Inglis, Birkbeck '91) but I really want to add part of your comment to my collection of English "howlers": "It is a robust and sturdy language, point obvious by the shear (sic) number of applications which still run today". Thanks.

Pirate Bay evades Italian blockade

Earliest copywrite infringement?

http://netmedia.co.uk/history/week-11/

English Channel defeats one-armed Frenchman

wannabe Canutes

This page doesn't seem to lack "wannabe Canutes", if you drop a couple of letters. (And he was actually also called Cnut and even Knut.)

RM boss says school's out forever

I remember RM

The Inner London Education Authority (RIP) supported RM when most educational authorities used Acorn (BBC and, later, Archimedes). Macs were for those who had money to burn. I had a C64. The Nimbus used the Intel 80186 chip, which was, I heard, intended as a maths co-processor. The Nimbus had superior graphics to most (all?) fully IBM-compatible PCs at the time. Using an emulator, it could run many DOS and (early) Windows programs like Turbo Pascal, Quattro and Aldus Pagemaker.

Some schools stopped buying from RM because their prices were high (£40 for a mouse) but the firm survived despite competition from dozens of cheaper suppliers. This was probably because they provided schools with systems that were easy to administer, though expensive. Meanwhile, it has not been a pretty sight to watch Commodore, Acorn, Evesham, Escom, etc. go to the wall.

More recently, they had the contract for the aborted Government plan to test all Year 9 pupils online in IT (or ICT, as they call it). This was scheduled to happen this year but proved an expensive shot-in-the-foot.

@ Steve Rochford: I have a feeling you remember all this better than I.

Becta asks EC to probe Microsoft school deals

Re Ms Access

If there is anyone out there who feels they can, without using Ms Access, successfully teach the A2 Edexcel ICT unit that is assessed by means of a ten-hour practical exam based on developing a database application, I would like to hear from them.

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe

Physicists

Robert Oppenheimer:

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed... A few people cried... Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form, and says, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

(July 16, 1945)

El Reg decimates English language

@PJ Isserlis

Thanks for an excellent posting; wish I could put it so well.

Re "language Nazis": can it be so very wrong to use piano wire on those who use "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested"?

Heathrow 777 crash: 'No anomalies in the major aircraft systems'

correction

Make that "aviation history".

Software

Current issue of Private Eye raises issues about the "132,000 lines of software code, unprecedented in software history".

I think I had a scarf as well.

Critics split over DDoS attacks on Scientology

@oldfogey

I used to read - and enjoy - SF by James Blish and Frd Pohl. Not L. Ron's rubbish, though.

Dutch gov blows open standards raspberry at Microsoft

M$ Office Rules!

When I was an IT teacher (recently retired) I found that M$ Office was required by A-level exam. boards. For example, students might be asked to customise Word menus, create macros or use VBA in Excel, or use related tables, forms and menus in Access. I don't think Open Office would have been up to it. Also, Media Studies (and perhaps IT) need to edit video using some fairly user-friendly software like Pinnacle Studio (some prefer to go Apple). Those requirements would make an open-source solution unfeasible, I think, in such situations.

Shocked Shatner shunted from Star Trek XI

TOS

TOS retains its power; Voyager tried to emulate it - and it had Seven of Nine! Picard and Data could not save NG from it's verbosity and touchy-feeliness.

After TOS, I'd rate the original Outer Limits, Lexx and Red Dwarf.

Shatner inhabits Mt Olympus. His enemies will be crushed and put to flight like the cattle they are.

Fundy dunderheads make monkey of monkey man

@ PT

Isn't The Scorpion King in the frame for that one?

@ matthew smith

The Barbarians as promoters of science and free-thinking humanism - now why didn't I see that before?

@matthew smith

"Well, maybe it's because Christianity is widely considered to be responsible for the Dark Ages in the first place."

Barbarian invasions, old boy, leading to fall of Rome - didn't help?

Religious hatred a crime from October, but exemptions are wide

@michael

Well, Mike, whatever you believe/don't believe in seems to have influenced you into being a really nice person...

Movie pirate forced to ditch Linux

Re Copyright for dummies

In the paragraph re Leo and Mike: would it not be stupid to pay a large sum for a work of art and not obtain the right to make copies? The analogy with a film would be where you buy the actual film and all rights to it.

I think nearly everyone knows that when you buy a DVD, you are just getting some kind of licence to view it - and even that is restricted to private viewing (in one part of the world!). Despite this, I have noticed some advertisements telling us: "Own it now on DVD".

Use of the words "steal" and "theft" is inappropriate here because they normally describe an action that deprives an owner of his property, not just a copy of it.

US law appears to favour money-makers: the length of time after which copyright for books expires was lenghtened in the US - so you can find works in Australa's Project Gutenberg that would be "theft" in the US.

Teachers vote to ban internet

Logic?

Sensing some hostility here: time to move on?

Not a contradiction: they voted against the Governments's proposal - not one of their own. Comprehension level: 2?

Most school networks have Youtube, Myspace etc. etc. filtered out.

Wifi and scrambled brains? Hm, judging by these comments...