Posts by Mark

Employee sacked for texting in sick

Lost Voice?

How do you phone in if you've lost your voice as part of your illness? Surely there has to be some non verbal method....

coat -> door -> taxi

Drive for superfast broadband switches up a gear

You know it must be nearly friday...

because I just thought I read that acronym as BEER. :(

I do have 2 sensible point though.

1) "BT should not have an unfair advantage in retail markets in order to persuade it to upgrade its network,". You have to give BT (or whoever else) some kind of incentive because if you don't you know they won't make the choice to invest themselves. If BT did go ahead and build a brand spanking new network you know that the regulators would tell them they have to let everyone else use it and exactly how much they would be allowed to charge for said use.

I mean look at the post office and the debacle over allowing competition. The competitors don't compete in the entire market but can pick and choose the profitable sectors to enter whilst Royal Mail must still provide everything. Bang - there goes profitable business mail collections subsidising deliveries in rural areas, which has led us to the point where the posties are the ones delivering junk mail!!!

So you have 2 choices - tell BT either you invest and then charge anybody and everybody what the market will bear for access and the govt won't intervene or the government will support the investment but will then have an input in to what you are allowed to charge and will require certain targets to be met.

But hey - this is government and we'll probably just end up with BT paying and the government screwing them over...

2) If they are going to ban journalists for attending surely you could just attend as a private citizen? I mean I would like to see them try to justify why a taxpayer isn't allowed to see this process in action...

Mayor Ken buys hydrogen buses for London

@Fraser

Much as the idea of electric trolley buses sounds great, they have them here in Geneva and yet they still use a lot of diesel buses as well.

Apart from the fact that they need the wires on each and every route you want to use them on, they still have to have a second engine as a backup if the power fails or if the route is changed due to roadworks etc... The wiring is ugly and intrusive, you either have to put posts up to attach the wires to or drill holes in all the buildings along the sides of the road. Changing the route of a bus becomes an major exercise in itself because the new wiring takes a quite fair amount of time to set up.

On top of that maintenance of the wiring isn't without its own costs, the wires wear out, need re-tensioning and other maintenance, and don't think for a moment that pure electric vehicles have much zero maintenance costs. I'm sure these extra costs are more than equivalent to the money saved by not having to maintain the diesel engines.

Even if they are the same price or less you still need to have a source of green electricity, the buses in Geneva are powered by hydroelectricity, There are no comparable sources of green power near London.

Racist Reg ignores Nigerian helicopter pioneer

Surely...

we should use Unidentified Vulture rather than Anonymous Coward?

Mystery Israeli satellite telly disruption blamed on UN

@amanfrommars

Could we get some of that noise cancelling malarkey on El Reg to remove the noise from amanfrommars's comments? Then we could see if we can make them make some sort of sense?

So, what's the first rule of Reg Club?

The Second and Third Rules of Reg Club

Thou shalt not use those expressions invented by insane PR and Advertising persons to promote their new "trendy" product in any post to El Reg.Examples include Lappy, mobe and many others...

Thou shalt use the correct Reg units in all communications related to El Reg.

Chemical-weapons hysteria causes cholera

100,000 or 65,535?

Did they do this calculation with Excel 2007? Are we in fact seeing only 65,535 tons of the stuff and the rest is missing?

Racist Reg hacks slammed for 'vitriolic hatred'

Erm... Font?

I thought I should point out to those Welsh speakers amongst you who are whining about the apparently incorrect Welsh at the end of the article and correcting it that he has actually got it right! He used a capital i for the first letter and given the font ElReg uses it merely **looks** like an L.

So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum?

What about time?

Surely you have missed a trick what with forgetting the other major unit...

Time

The standard short time should be NJS or New York Second which I believe has been defined as the time between the traffic light going green and the car behind you honking its horn!

For longer time periods we have the SBUT or standard boot up time - which given the amount of crap on the machine I have to use at the office is about 5 minutes!

For even longer times we could begin to use distances given we have already defined lengths and speeds! how about time measured in SSxBrontosauri ... heh