Posts by Marvin the Martian

A title cannot express how unrequited this newspost is.

Who gives a lying uck? Dr. Who, H2G2, fine it's what we all watch, sometimes even on tv. But some fossil goes to a farm, wha?

Building aquaria in an earthquake zone?

Smart move. I hope they remember to quickly fill it with rare animals.

"They told me I shouldn't build an aquarium in an earthquake zone, so I went ahead and did it anyway. That aquarium cracked, but I rebuilt it, and the next quake got it. The third aquarium got hit by a wall, fell over, and only then cracked. But the fourth aquarium, my lad, will one day be yours..."

Where's the SwampCastle icon, because enough management stories are about such enterprises?

Can we combine it with the Dell offer?

Can we mebby not get Firefox but in Spanish for only 0.01euro?

Wow

> THESE GUYS AR UDNERAPRECATED [etc]

I probably could have said it less clearly, throwing in something about the futility of trying to recapture the spirit of Hammer horror (The Reptile!), eh -- what next? Remaking Ealing comedies? Carry On maybe even (oops)?, b

but then I can't be bothered --- I have my just-arrived telescopic magnet-on-a-stick (with LED light!) to play w^h^h^h^h^h^h retrieve dropped screws from my desktop chassis.

Because they work day and night?

So it's clear they just want to be annoying. The name has been circulated since a few hours after the hack. Do they choose to pay a visit when the trail is hot? No, they choose to do it on a weekend night hoping to find some marihuana and embarass a father-democrat rep.

Well played, sir, well played.

I must protest to the utmost!

Sir,

I must cathegorically protest against this misrepresentation of civil servants. All of my colleagues are responsible and upstanding citizens, as for example my friend Winston who helps old ladies across the street; mr Warner who leads the boys choir and my friend Albert who volunteers in a wedding shop as well.

Sincerely,

William Edward Stratham the Second (Mrs.)

I like the licence-detection people

I've move around in London and further afield, every time not having a TV. So you kindly phone the men, say the name they have at the address is wrong and say you don't have a TV.

Then they go all serious and threatening on you, disbelieve you and nothing happens. At one address a man turned up, but looking for the last renter (although I'd registered myself there for the TV licencing). I said I wasn't him (no papers needed, clearly) so he went away and didn't even want to come and see the absence of a TV.

Now, to me the obvious thing is to link databases of councils and TV, but what am I thinking? Voting and council taxing paperwork isn't even name/address linked. Given that your ID in this sad little mess is established by gas bills [Bill Bailey: <midnight, Turkish border. "Passaport? Passaport!"... "No, gas bill" "Ah, ok, good."> ]. I guess you don't want a database because it cannot be perfectly protected, so the solution is not to have any kind of protection. Clever, that will fool 'em.

Where's the "we want an ID database and be quick about it" icon??

I can't find it on ISI web-of-science

Logging in today to the ISI Web of Science database today, I can find the author in a few similarly titled thingies, and the IEEE Software journal (indeed respectable at JCR 1.4 score), but not the two combined. Strange, strange.

I haven't seen the ads, but

<I thought the one with where the giraffe gets moved and the two muppets have to do some punishment by sandpapering, was quite amusing the first time I saw it.>

Moving giraffes is obviously core to Vista, igeddit. Hm, Maybe (confused) bunnies would have been more appropriate.

We need a bunny icon, obviously. Flames because they make bunnies tasty (after skinning). Hmm... lapin a la flamande.

As a single mother, I think...

[Don't you love non-sequiturs starting with that info?]

Well, not being a single mother, I like this type of study. For example, driving a motorbike carries a slightly higher risk as driving a car while both drunk AND drugged (being just one of those two being much safer). But the big difference is that the motorbiker risks mostly him/herself [75% of accidents being one-sided, even]. The conclusion is obvious: force any person found texting in a car, to drive a motorbike [and allow them to text then]. This is a Darwinian approach, leading to superior bikers. I as a biker without driving licence strongly approve of this.

Great, they're reinventing the NHS!

"Sorry we're out of real medicine, but we've given you 100lindendollars worth of virtual antibiotics. KTnxBy."

"in a bid to reach a compensation settlement"

Read "hopes she faked enough outrage to extort some cash".

A photo of a clothed employee outside the store on a demonstration phone [AKA the last one] in a store? Outrageous! Have been possibly even telling customers how to use the phone's other features? CPW would never stoop that low!

Cached internet?

What's the point? You'd want to check news stories and mail, what else? And how do they cache --- do they make a dvd of that InterWebNetszoneThing (or at least all the sites the "techie" nephew of the CEO views) once a month and put it on board after snipping the dodgy 95% off? Sounds like a job.

If you want to browse your pr0n just bring it on your EEE --- that makes it all hard(to see)pr0n.

Well..

Anything to make us forget that incredibly crappy fifth book, really.

Clandestine tagging

How about labeling the suspect with a dash of, say, polonium?

Never mind the apostrophe,

Exactly which juices from innocent kids are we talking about here?

I'm sorry, mine's the dirty Belgian one.

It's not like it was funny before or after this change

Thank god the Herald Tribune recently stopped paying my cash to the worthless cartoonist.

Academic aims and standards.

> convert a straightforward observation into a non-committal abstraction.

This is the aim of academic research, to gather lose data into general knowledge.

That said, this is far worse plagiarism than stealing a bon mot or two (as IEEE cat 4 implies), it is stealing the underlying ideas and considerations wholesale. Stealing entire paragraphs is here basically done, but then dressing the corpse with incoherent english.

On the third hand, the authors being non-anglosaxon enters into a very very structural problem. Not being a native speaker of (let's call it) high-english relegates you to the amateur league. Top quality scientists can often not get their message across because of this. People like this just ruin it further for their third world peers. For all I care, even Ramanujam could not get his ideas across because it didn't fit in the academic form all of us atlanticists expect/demand --- others basically re-created what he did (and he had recreated what others did before).

Yes but no but yea

The preloaded it with <a> (or <a'>) linux but of course I want it with <b> or <b'> linux! Eejits!

Insert any combination of a few hundred flavours. And that's with either the <a> or the <b> the more hardcore (think gentoo) or softcore (think suse).

In slackware or gentoo I don't want to know how much struggling will ensue for Lenovo to get all little thingymajiggies going (thumprint reader? hibernate-on-close? 3g-dongles?), with ubuntu or suse you get disparaging remarks (from people who can supposedly put their hardcore version on it themselves in a flash, so what's their point?).

I spotted one of those sites.

It said I had to download a codec called <Silverlight>. They're really thinking I'm stupid.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Because I distinctly remember them lowering their UK prices by 10% when the pound climbed from 1.75$ to 2.00$.

Should have used Springfield

Because it's one of the most common city names in the US, you'd worry a lot more people with a <chemical explosion near Springfield> mail than <nuclear meltdown in Fairbanks Alaska>.

London, Ontario + UK might be fine, but Exeter has 7 duplicates... not sure their total populations add up to the Ellowen Deeowen one though.

But the <UK govt has hushed up existence of London reactor AND its explosion, fallout now in Canada> plot is semi-smart -- I'd expect pollution to reach sweden or danmark first.

<The LHC is situated 50 to 175m beneath the surface>?

I understand the Heisenberg insecurity principle, and I get it that the LHC is stationary. but this is ridiculous.

Outrageous!

If you're being sold at the roadside against your will, I think government compensation is due. I also think they were worse off, because in African jails it's often a no-meals system, where you have to let your family members bribe the guards to bring you food... how much would they bother for the goats?

I wonder if this Congo ruling has implications for road-side fruit vendors all over the continent.

T-shirts indeed

"Bletchley to Bury: UK govt spying on communications since time immemorial"

The altogether cozier world of academia?

Now he's in for a surprise. There the fighting is so much more personal, because the stakes are so low.

I don't know 9.10's name

But 26 versions from now will be Hungry Hippo. Because Cheers is out of fashion (else it'd be Hungry Heifer).

But... they're called pool-cleaners

and they already exist since a while?

LCD that boosts battery life with 4hours?

That's clearly a rubbish claim, to have a screen that boosts battery life by four hours.

If true, I'd install it immediately on my old powerbook with its dying battery --- say 25min life left, tops --- and pronto, I'd have a 4+hours workhorse.

So gimme a fraction ("30% longer", yet that depends on the rest of the architecture obviously), or, dare I consider?, something boffinatic like watt/hours.

Well, it beats the usual "psychologist invents affliction" thing.

Dear mr. Reg,

can you please point out which is the correct WikiPedantry-replacement-horse to bet on? Every week there's another, improved, more vetted, better, 2.0er etc version.

This is like the bad old days where I signed up to Friendster, read that the Google-empire would triumph with Orkut, most of my acquantances went to Hyves, my younger family members to My(play)Space, and in the end only Facebook will make it? I reverted to email after a few months and haven't bothered since.

Damage? What damage?

So instead of being a forgotten 80s figure, this blogger helps keep up mr. Rose's name recognition factor? I say Rose's management owes the guy some money.

cat-mouse intelligence scale?

Are there any neuroscientists actually connected to this process?

I doubt it, for the very simple reason that there is no such thing as cat-level-intelligence in opposition to mouse-level: yes, brute number of brain cells differs, but encephalisation quotient is roughly the same. So built one and you basically have the other. Now, fruitfly-level or parasitoid-wasp-level (those that were the model for Alien --- a nightmare if you're a fruitfly) that would make sense.

I think if I built a cat-based platform, I'd just put a big frikkin' laser on it --- no point jumping over fences, or hunting mice: just fry 'em; a pursuing dog? Not for long!

Bullmoose-size-laser-equipped also has its attractions, but you know it's gonna go haywire at some point (probably because it's WEP-controlled). Next step: MetalGearRex.

Time to give up on the web.

And there was stupid old me thinking that Amazon was a discount bookstore --- no, it turns out to be a platform for people to share ideas?

It just goes to show I'm roadkill on the infosuperhighway and haven't understood anything of the intrinsic underlying dynamic whatchamacallit... web.

Lies, damn lies, and large numbers.

You are aware this "4.2million cameras" number is mostly bogus? If you look for sources, normally you just get another page/paper quoting the same number.

For all I know, they've taken a 200yard stretch of Oxford street, counted cameras, and multiplied it by street lengths in the UK. Or selected street lengths (discarding rural roads). Or divided the number of cameras by the number of pedestrians on the stretch and multiplied it by the British population size. Or otherwise. They being a class of 12y olds on a project, a first year politics student, or any of a number of Quangos (ah, favourite suspects).

Now, I'm definitely not a reporter so please indulge me and show us the root documents, clarifying the method.

@radian: living in a shed

Living in a flat is no reason not to buy a shed. I had one to function as my man-cave, a 100% intrusion-free space. This is a simple necessity when sharing a house.

Sometimes called a thinking shed... There's even a company selling 150--200y old reclaimed north-swedish sheds (salty sea air keeps it from rotting, and weathers it beautifully).

If this is the ULTIMATE, then the penultimate shed song frightens me.

Festival of unfun

Wow, what a funny joke.

Amy Whineweasel jokes were totally like fresh around 2006 like, dude. At the point where she started falling apart and cancelling shows and being an obvious wreck, it was a bit... passe? I know time slows down up north but this is a bit much.

Judging from the top-ten it still beat out the others in freshness [OK, one references Obama but it's a pre-2000 Bush joke, when Bush converted] but still. If you want to throw up, google for photos of the Rivers creature --- "when plastic surgeons go bad" or something.

[Hippopotamuses thing is not even close to true --- not even in africa, where you have a world war going on killing a few millions the last five years.]

Flash over silverlight: Smart!

For once the micros**t marketing department made a smart choice --- if they'd gone with silverlight and the thing crashed and flamed as webby2.0 apps are bound to, this would have cost them even more silverlight-interest --- those are paying customers, as opposed to these photostitchers.

Even if silverlight were innocent of flaming death, it would still be suspect.

Finally!

Now finally you *can* go out crossdressing while still drinking warm ale like a real man. Bless this scept'red isle.

Why not solve it in the opposite way?

Instead of very short landing planes, cant they make a very long landing strip? Observe the butterfly's tong that rolls into a tight roll, and scale up. So a kind of furlongs*-long inflatable erection, rolled out over/above the water as needed. If you'd allow photo-comments I could clarify it all...

Will also make for good Navy slang and lowbrow humor.

[*Is the furlong an accepted Reg standard dimension, or only for speeds (furlongs-per-forthnight)? Sometimes I can't remember anymore, and that scares me. Paris because... eh... I don't remember either.]

And good riddance!

... that is, if this means I get to read mr. Vance's articles instead of bleeding David "Oooh -- it's all so lovely and fine and dandy" Pogues' so-called tech pieces in the International Herald Tribune.

I'm too excited now to look up now if said poguething is from NYT. Let's have a liedown.

OK, bad marks for logic, you get.

A shortage is a good sign because it shows the product is popular? No sir, it doesn't show this, it just shows the product is more popular than the sales projector (?) suspected (or the distribution's screwed up).

Even with sales of 10units/year you'd get a shortage if you stock 5. And conversely, massively overstocking a popular product doesn't mean it's losing popularity, it just means overstocking.

A program to push the erase button, wow!

Several commentors see the use in avoiding controls ("parental controls in OS", "accessing blocked sites at uni") where it obviously does no such thing --- it just goes to Preferences and clicks ClearCacheNow and ClearHistory. [I'm amazed and disappointed they didn't build a robot to move the mouse to actually do this.]

OK, true, it's mildly more sneaky --- an empty cache and history show you've deleted it, not recording in the first place is far better --- but it's not like it installs a proxyserver to evade any controls.

7000? That's... 2days wages?

So if the guy takes out 2days' wages that's suspicious activity! So equivalently HBOS would block my account if I take out a malicious-looking 130quid? Pfhwew, lucky I'm not there...

Aw c'mon, lay of the boy.

Given that good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes mostly from bad judgement, the lad's halfway.

Laser contest going too far

Why have they stopped doing their airborne version? Because they realise their pilots would point it at the very first chav with a laserpointer shining into their cockpit?

PH because we don't get it.

Go do it in Iceland*!

Given that the Icelandic currency has very recently tanked dramatically (think -40% in a quarter), giving then all the advantages of skilled recently-unemployed etc, plus their closeness to all manner of volcanism (remember Surtsey growing out of nothing), isn't that the obvious place? Like send the money now, before their bank recovers, and let them dig there (not too deep)?

(*not the supermarket, the country --- do they have a food store called "england"?)

The Cameronisti Srike Back

So according to the Tories, using a YouTube site for weak responses to lame jokes by a set of opinionate knuckledraggers shows NjuLabor being out of touch with the plebs and the times?

I think a closer look will show them it's them that has seen the marbles but not figured out the game.

Efficient?

Friggin' turtles always messing up my fees-paying plantation...!

Well, given that this is the first turtle who once in its life passed through some plants, and there seems to be no correlation between cannabis plants and turtle walking patterns --- nothing to be dug up online --- isn't it more effective to let the rangers randomly walk through the habitat? But apparently there are enormous numbers of cannabis plantations on national parks and BLM grounds, with very little to link it to any specific criminal; given good climate, just sow and go harvest before someone else finds it.

OK, sometimes you get shootouts (with freeloading harvesters) and dead rangers because of this, so bullet-proof turtles might be the way to go.

They're asking for it!

So if you decide to name your team after the phenomenal Belgian national football squad*, are you aiming for (a) greatness, (b) grandness or (c) gaffes?

The vulture icon as it exhibits the same savoir faire.

[*name coined in 1906, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_national_football_team ]

And golf as well!

It can also be shown that golf improves the speed of surgeons.

As in <oh noes, my round starts in 35min, let's stitch 'em up doublequick>.