Posts by Martin H Watson

Comrade! If you dare f$%^ing swear on the internet, WE'LL SHOOT

I'm totally fed up with swearing ...

I'm sick of reading posts that start OMG or WTF or dude or Jeez. While I accept that it does the service of giving me an advance warning that the subsequent content will be semi-literate, I can still live without it.

Bank details - PAH! Phishers want your Facebook password

Has John Leydon left...

...the Sex Pistols then? I bet I'm the 12th to ask today.

World's 'smallest' mobe unveiled in Japan

The terrible word 'phablet'

‘Phablet’ surely must be one of the worst literary contrivances of all time, supposedly meaning a tablet-sized phone. Surely 'Tablerone' is far better. I relish the thought of seeing idiots on trains and buses putting a Tablerone in their ear.

White House 'wants Feds to draw up cyber-defences' for power plants

Die Hard 4.0

All you need is a roll-up keyboard that plugs into whatever you want to hack. Oh, and Bruce Willis aka John McLaine.

NZ bloke gets eel stuck up jacksie

Hold on a mo...

...you don't get sprigs of asparagus, they're tips...

a decent sprig of asparagus

I was expecting it to be an electric eel at the very least. A decent sprig of asparagus???

Airline leaves customer on hold for 15 hours

they can call you back

I think after 5 minuets of being on hold to any company, a message should kick in offering you the chance to leave your details so that they can call you back.

O2 dropped the ball in Olympic cycle race Twitter fiasco

While standing on Box Hill...

...just what did people have to send messages about anyway? Most of them seemed to have painted them on the road the night before.

Anyway, I'm still aiming to be the last man standing without a mobile phone.

BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel

When I worked for a subsidiary of BT...

...they had a server called Big Balls.

Blighty laid bare as historic aerial snaps archive goes online

In a hundred years time...

...our descendants will be waiting keenly for the release of 2012 StretView images, only to find that they were all scrapped for data protection reasons. Please don't let that happen.

Japan still in love with the fax

and bring back TELEX next

I USED TO LOVE SENDING TELEXES. I COULD TYPE IN CAPITALS AND NOBODY TOLD ME TO STOP SHOUTING.

New London Bus API arrived at approximately ... 15.00

ROUTINELY??

London buses are tracked by GPS, so shelters routinely have three-line screens ??? ROUTINELY?? They are the excception rather than standard and they are being removed. I don't have a fone-dle, I want bus stop displays.

Google Maps adds aircraft, tricycles and skiers to cover all bases

I'm wondering...

I'd be happy just knowing why Google maps thinks the New King's Road, Chelsea is 'A308 motorway'.

Britain has 10 million twits, tweets Twitter

I don’t use Twitter

I don’t use Twitter as I find it impossible to summarise my complex sophisticated thoughts into meaningful sentences of less than 140 charac

Moon at annual perigee this weekend

What's that in English money?

356,953 km ??? I remember whenit was always about 240,000 miles.

New satellite will blow your socks off - and spot them from spaaaace

On Google earth I can see a 12" wide ladder on next door's roof. Iknow it's aerial rather than from space, but the old standard was 'we can see a dinner plate from space.'

Barclaycard slaps pay-by-bonk plasters on mobes

But I don't have a phone...

...so where should I stick it? I'm 54, worked in IT all my life, love gadgets but hate mobile phones witha vengance. I have no plans to buy one.

Plastic that SELF-REPAIRS using light unleashed by prof

Already available

You can buy self-healing cutting boards in most art and carft shops. They are so clever.

High school student expelled for dropping F-bomb in tweet

Full analysis of the word

Sorry I can't post full details, but somewhere on the net there is a file called something like FWORD.mpg which is a full and serious analysis. It's very funny, if you find it.

Yorks cops bust Bradford guinea pig farm

And along those lines...

are you saying you'd make shooting people legal to boost the undertaking business? What a daft idea.

...and why do you want to analyse a spectre...?

You said "I have no idea when an erratic driver is stoned (do you have some kind of portable gas chromatograph or sensitive spectral analyer or something?) but I can damn well see when the feckers are on the phone."

Footie fans in 'cunthorpe Utd' calendar shocker

Did you mean to...

...type 'cunthrope'? (sic)

Called 999 recently? They've got your number

CRB checks

Total nonsense. I've reported many crimes and I amd CRB-cleared.

It would be utterly bizarre if the police didn't keep permanent records of 999 calls.

London's tube demands faster-than-NFC ticketing

There are still plenty...

...of people, me included, who don't use mobile phones.

Famous 'Silhouette' Flash illusion unravelled

With the London Eye...

...when I travel in to London each day, I 'amuse' my self by letting my brain wonder which side of it I am lookg at. You can fool yourself into seeing the other side of it.

Dutch police arrest 16-year-old WikiLeaks avenger

Because...

...they don't tart about like we seem to have to, They just do it. Good too.

Exposed: leaked body scans published online

So it says...

"... images from the scanners are 'automatically deleted from the system after it is cleared by the remotely located security officer"

So this infers that if someone successfully smuggles 'something' through, we'll have no record of how they did it. Great.

Co-op cashier's breasts overcharged for fruit and veg

Did the prices go...

...t!ts up?

Boffins mount campaign against France's official kilogramme

What I've never known is...

...why we pronounce Cen'timetre, Mill'imetre, but some folk say kilom-etre.

Top 10 Kindle books outsell dead-tree versions 2-1

Has anyone looked at the other end...

...and seen that there are several ebooks costing over £3000 (yes, £3000) each.

Tesco's iPhone app gets barcode reader

The worst thing...

...are the gormless goons (usually male) wandering into people doing thjeir shopping. Let's have an app that gioves Boadicea-knives on shopping trolley wheels.

Amazon shrinks books with Kindle Singles

Short(er) stories will help...

...keep down the weight of your Kindle...

ICO warns coalition on benefits snooping plan

Any thing that gets up...

...Swami Chakrabarti's nose has got to be good.

Czechs toast Bud-beating beer win

Even better thab Budwar is...

...unfiltered, unpasteurised Budwar. We found it in a bar in Prague. It was incredible. The landlord even took us down into the cellar to explain it all to us.

Turkish pranksters load Facebook Translate with swears

I remember years ago...

...rolling out DOS 3.3 to dozens of users after changing "Bad Command or Filename" to "Bed Commode or Filename". Nobody ever noticed.

Google Maps boss to Germans: 'We don't want to invade you'

StreetView indicates development of nations

Like reviewing how early in a country's history it experiences civil war, one day we will look back at the reaction to StreetView around the world. The more go-ahead nations will object less. It seems like a national 'growing pain', that all countries seem destined to go through.

LG publishes bendy 19in e-newspaper

But can you...

...swat flies with it?

Web swoons as Jackson dies

Elvis will stop...

...the internet too, when he dies.

Mines the one with a pocket full of Sun 45 rpms.

'Breathalyser for the hands' fights hospital superbugs

Can we see these...

...built in to mice and keyboards?

Boffins: Ordinary lightbulbs can be made efficient, cheaply

When we can't afford the gas bill...

...we love a nice family evening sitting around the warmth of a good old-fashioned light bulb. Sadly we've only got one left.

Ron Howard accuses Pope of scuppering Dan Brown movie

Angels & DEmons is...

...quite possibly the second best novel I've ever read. Truly unputdownable, and it made me want to visit everywhere mentioned in the book.

(The best ever novel? 'The Sett' by Sir Ranulph Fiennes . In a novel about ruthlessness and revenge, our hero takes on Yardies, the IRA, badger baiters, the CIA and the President of Pakistan, to name a few. )

Leaving PCs on costing UK business millions

It may be green but...

...£17 per year is peanuts compared to the sitting around idle waiying for a PC to boot time.

Is there anyway I can leave mine on when not in use, working on a massively distributed 'how to get computers to boot faster' project?

Mine's the one left on the peg seemingly not used.

Emotional arguments do not make Street View illegal

A very clever publicity campaign.

'Scores' of images is less than a drop in the ocean. This is marvellous technology, and will allow many, many people to do their jobs from a desk without unnecessary travel. A few in the US complained last year and they were all thrown out. It's progress and it's here to stay. Live with it, enjoy it. have fun with it.

Oh, and anyone who leaves valuable objects on display in their windows is stupid.

Privacy campaigner vows legal challenge to Google Street View

If a house is blacked out....

...at the request of the householder, let's all go and take a photograph of it and put it on a website.

Man turns finger into storage

Only 2Gb...?

Surely he needs double-digit storage?

ICO raids and shuts builder blacklist firm

There big mistake was...

...not putting the data on a web site hosted somewhere else?

Texting: Good for kids after all?

Giving lessons in txt spk...

...would soon help kill it off. If kids were taught to text, they wouldn't want to bother.

I do all my computer 'writing' using voice recognition software which is brilliant, and I've always thought using a voice medium such as a phone for typing is ludicrous.

Home Office plans to force CCTV on shops and pubs

Put them on the net, then,,,

I'll be able to drink cheap supermarket booze and still have the atmosphere of my local.

Council to crack down on Cracknuts Lane

Losing history

Idiots are destroying an important aspect of social history. And now watch a few clever people slip ones in unnoticed.

Fly-tipping yes, dog poo no - Jacqui promises Ripa changes

Getting rid of dog poo

This is one of the uses that it SHOULD be put to. Forget terrorists, get those dirty people.