Posts by vonBureck

Forget about an AI stealing your job, even pigs can be trained to use computers

Re: Pigs have elevated privileges...

You owe me a new keyboard, have an upvote for that splendid punnage.

Chuck Yeager, sound barrier pioneer pilot, dies at 97

Re: To boldly go where no man has gone before

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat was the first game I ever bought, now there's nostalgia for you... Let us say goodbye to the flying legend in the same words I heard from him so many times:

You bought the farm.

Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village

MR SHINE, HIM DIAMOND

Now where's my Sir Pterry icon? Oh well, this will do...

Northrop Grumman wins $13.3bn contract with US Air Force to kick off Minuteman III ICBM replacement

Re: Pleeeease.....

No, they will put a web management interface on nuclear missiles. Nothing to worry about there.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

Re: Stupid is as Stupid does

It's Krikkit. Just sayin'...

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Re: Could it be

No, it's elephant fat...

Oh, the massive sky dong? Contrails from 'standard' F-35 training, US Air Force insists

Hey, who let Jeremy Clarkson into an F-35?

The lighter side of HMRC: We want your money, but we also want to make you laugh

Quoting from the linked MP motion about letterboxes

When it comes to front doors, a lot of people are very fond of their knockers.

Cue sniggering from the Honourable Members...

Huawei sales director nicked in Poland on suspicion of 'spying'

Would anyone care to spell that phonetically for us hard-of-Polish types please :-)

Are you sure you want this? :)

OK, you asked for it: agentsya bespyecheynstva vevnentshnego (approximately, full IPA transcription available on request)

Icon because of IPA...

Google-whisperers beat reCaptcha voice challenge with 90% success rate

Re: idiots like this

Select all of the boxes that show images of dams

Select all of the boxes that show images of interesting dams - there, FTFY.

What if tech moguls brewed real ale?

Root Beer

sudo get me a pint.

Leatherbound analogue password manager: For the hipster who doesn't mind losing everything

Missed a trick

The cover title should be SDROWSSAP, so the servants can't understand it...

The UK's super duper 1,000mph car is being tested in Cornwall

Just don't let Richard Hammond drive...

... well, unless you want to get rid of him (see icon for his employment history).

'All-screen display'? But surely every display is all-screen... or is a screen not a display?

... or that my right shoe is currently filled with an "all-foot foot"

No, no, no, you have it all wrong. In case you don't know or appreciate it, you are in fact in possession of an "all-shoe foot" - or indeed two such disruptive solutions. No wonder you don't work in marketing (and no, neither do I).

You had ONE job: Italian firefighters suspected of starting blazes for cash

Re: Obligatory prescient quote from Sir Pterry

>>> Considering I thought along the same lines, I think we need a Sir Pterry icon.

Absolutely, and with a commentard poll to choose it. ED? Are you listening?

Obligatory prescient quote from Sir Pterry

"...everyone had been so dead set against any form of fire brigade, reasoning – with impeccable Ankh-Morpork logic – that any bunch of men who were paid to put out fires would naturally see to it that there was a plentiful supply of fires to put out"

The longer I read the Discworld novels, the less fiction I see.

.. ..-. / -.-- --- ..- / -.-. .- -. / .-. . .- -.. / - .... .. ... then a US Navy fondleslab just put you out of a job

The snappily titled Flashing Light to Text Converter...

Was that invented and named by Leonard of Quirm, by any chance? Yes, yes, I'm just leaving, mine's the one with the Discworld novels in multiple pockets...

Swedish school pumps up volume to ease toilet trauma

Why Does it Hurt When I Pee?

Nothing like a bit of Frank Zappa to show 'em what life is really all about.

Lester Haines: RIP

We'll see you on the Great Paper Plane in the sky

Absolutely shocking news, seems only the good die young... Heartfelt condolences to the family, and I will raise a glass to you tonight, Les - have one on me up there.

Let's play: 'IT values or hipster folk band?'

> meaningless management babble, the kind a four-year-old might unwittingly utter

Hey! Don't insult four-year-olds!

Schlock and .aw as Dutch net registry rebrands

B.V. is the Dutch acronym for a limited company (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besloten_vennootschap), so within Holland an address like foobarcompany.bv would be equivalent to something foobarcompany.ltd - maybe that was the rationale. Dumb, but plausible.

Foetuses offered vaginal music streaming service

Only one album fits

In Utero by Nirvana... yes, yes, mine's the grungy mac.

Evil computers sense you’re in a hurry and mess with your head

You just broke the Internet

You do realise that anyone who tries to google "error 51" will now be directed to this rant and get trapped in an endless loop until all their little machineries go mad and the world ends in chaos and disorder? A dastardly scheme, Mr. Dabbs, mutual assured destruction indeed (see icon).

Boffins brew up FIRST CUPPA in SPAAACE using wireless energy (well, sort of)

What about misdirected microwave beams?

Remember what happened in SimCity? (hint: see icon)

Smartphones don’t dumb you down, they DUMB you UP

Is it just me..

Or has Mr. Dabbs's gone all soft with the headlines? Usually I could instantly spot a SftW headline in the Reg feed, but alas no longer. Or maybe the rest of the Reg has gone all Daily Mail, what with the SHOUTY CAPS all over the place...

(SHOUTY CAPS ICON, FTW)

Scouts take down database due to 'security vulnerabilities'

I expect someone tried to enter a new scout

Little Bobby Tables, we call him...

Quantum computing is so powerful it takes two years to understand what happened

Re: So what is it? *

Somebody punch him out...

Unlock your mobe by STROKING it with your PEARL

Dear Reg,

Thank you for directing me to a cheesy video with just 67 other views, I felt a right tit.

Androids in celluloid – which machine deserves the ULTIMATE MOVIE ROBOT title?

Re: Wot, no Data?

Screw Data, where the hell is Kryten?

World's only flyable WWII Lancaster bombers meet in Lincs

Re: Is it just me...

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat here, but otherwise just about right...

Robot snaps on yellow RUBBER GLOVES, preps to invade Canada

Re: Seeing a big hole in the page

It looks like a cross between an industrial vacuum cleaner and a girl piggy bank.

Britain'll look like rural Albania without fracking – House of Lords report

Am I the only one who read that as "Britain'll look like rural Alabama"?

I'll be off to get my new glasses prescription, then.

Privacy warriors lob sueball at Facebook buyout of WhatsApp

Pro-privacy messaging service??

Could someone who uses the Whatsit thing explain to me how sending a company all your phone contacts enhances your privacy?

Imprisoned Norwegian mass murderer says PlayStation 2 is 'KILLING HIM'

Never give him another headline

Now that would hurt his overblown, sociopathic ego. Maybe as a reminder and deterrent mention once a year that the fucker is still rotting in prison as he deserves. But other than that - never mention him again on the news, never read about his sick personality games, never comment about him on internet forums... Shit, just failed. OK, so starting from... NOW.

Qipp debuts 'Clippy for your STUFF' app

Re: Great

Either way, not something you'd need (or want) you phone to remind you of.

Wonder if you have to tag your snake before you can milk it, though...

Re: Great

Or you die on your knees milking your snake, it seems.

Blood king of the tyrannosaurus, grandad of T-Rex

FYI: http://what-if.xkcd.com/67/

Last time CO2 was this high, the world was underwater? No actually

Re: Really?

>>> That's not a lot considering that land is rising with up-to 1 cm / year in Scandinavia. Just during my 30 years I can see the difference.

Just to be pedantically accurate, in Scandinavia that's primarily due to post-glacial rebound, not so much tectonic movements. However, it could well be that the same phenomenon applies to a some of the sea-rise data, so the point stands.

New cunning linguist computer has got ancient tongues licked

Re: Tongues untied

> I cannot imagine that linguists do too much "manual" work in this area as there are software tools for almost every intellectual pursuit.

Reconstructing ancient languages requires linguists to compare vocabulary items (including related words, homonyms etc.) for multiple languages and multiple time periods, so there's actually a huge amount of "manual" effort involved. Also, consider that people tend to specialise in selected languages or language families and might not have the resources to research multiple other languages, so it seems like a natural use for computers. As long as they manage to digitise and properly process all the required data, retrieving the entire historical evolution of more or less any word in any documented language (which you don't even need to be familiar with), presumably with cross-linking and related items, will be a huge aid to dictionary-wielding researchers.

Also, bear in mind that all such reconstruction results are ultimately hypothetical, so the more languages can be referenced, the more plausible the end result. In any case, exciting stuff for the cunning ones.

Meet قلب, the programming language that uses Arabic script

Re: Not the revolution you were looking for

Google Translate says: You deserve this Alkellmaty:?!

Made me shiver, to be honest.

Playboy fined £100k by Blighty watchdog for FLASHING SMUT at kids

Re: Determining you age over the internet

> My last attempt to find the answer to how to determining the age over the internet is some sort of an quiz.

Ah, so you do remember the "age verification" in the old Leisure Suit Larry games :) Is Pia Zadora: a) short b) sexy c) a singer d) all of the above

Though nowadays that probably only tests googling prowess, so that rather defeats the object :)

Icon compulsory

Patrick Moore: Lived with cats, accompanied Einstein on the piano

I wrote to him once...

... asking his opinion on some of my ideas for my school D&T project. I was absolutely stunned to receive his reply, typed on a filing card (now I know what the typewriter was!) and signed. Life-changing stuff when you're 14... I still have that card, somewhere.

Sir, this starry night I raise my glass to you.

Paintballs proposed as defense against ASTEROID ATTACK

Re: Re. "But more importantly..."

No different to reading the EULA before opening the packaging it's in, and THAT obviously works.

WHITE WHALE spent 4 years trying to tell us something, then stopped

How to fool French peasants into thinking that you're English in one easy lesson

Fa faa fa faa fa fafa faa faa, faa fa faa fa faa fa faa faa

From Dr No to Skyfall: The Reg's one month of Bond

You must mean Physics of Heineken advertising?

There, fixed that one for you.

Icelandic town demands vulva museum

Open from dusk till dawn?

I can just see Cheech Marin reprising his role as the doorman from the Titty Twister with his "Come on in, pussy lovers" banter... in Icelandic :) Now THAT might draw crowds.

Nokia drops Lumia 900 price to $0 in response to bug outrage

I expect they were just holding it wrong

Someone had to say it...

Lingerie-clad she-devils romp past watchdog

Have you seen their prices?

2000 Euros for a set of lingerie... now THAT is exploitation of women. Scandalous and reprehensible, that's what it is. Spoils the yoof, too.

Daniel Craig like Connery, Skyfall helmsman suggests

Re: Re: pushy galore

Now that'sh what I call a one-liner!

Tablets mean tubby HDDs must get thinner - A*STAR

The rotor in the motor? Isn't that like...

... the candle with the 'andle on the gateau from the chateau? Looks like prior art to me.