Posts by Chris Hunt

It's Green too!

Being made mostly from wood and canvas, the stringbag would be biodegradable and have a much smaller carbon footprint than any jet equivalent.

They are trying to harvest power from Americans WALKING?

Even if they were able to get 100 KWh from every footstep, they'd only get about enough power to run a small bedside lamp.

Who needs tickets anyway?

It's a firework display. Go to somewhere near where it is. Look up.

News just in..

The martians are building a wall...

Hmmmm...

So the BBC are looking to replace three presenters on a much-loved show. One older one and two younger ones. The show's mostly about larking about and innuendo between the presenters, rather than being a serious treatment of the subject of the show.

Mary Berry, Mel and Sue will soon be available...

Arrr... Grocer's apostrophe on the starboard bow!

"However, not all approved coatings are necessarily listed in WARPAINT as paint manufacturers’ are constantly striving to improve their current paint systems"

Paint manufacturers' ?

Apple are suing him for breach of patent too

That petanque ball had rounded corners

"Puzzlingly, according to the report, 69.5 per cent of respondents said they had never eaten dog meat – which leaves a chunky majority who either have or are simply unsure."

Do Tesco operate in China, by any chance?

Brush up your Shakespeare

When sorrows come, they come not single spies

But in battalions.

Hamlet Act 4, Scene 5

Not much has changed since 1602.

Yeah, right

> Difficulties with Prince aside, there’s little doubt that agile is going to be the way forward.

Speaking as one of those 50+ dinosaurs (though I've not touched COBOL for twenty years), I can tell you that agile will be identified as "the way forward" for couple of years, and then be replaced by some other half-arsed methodology invented by MBA-toting idiots and imposed by people who don't really understand it on the poor sods who actually have to do the work.

The fact is that there's no magic universal approach that works in all situations, you have to blend different approaches to suit your own particular case. Sometimes that might be pure waterfall, somtimes agile, most of the time somewhere in the middle.

Not crusaders but Englishmen

Accoding to Polydore Vergil

[Edward III] appoynted his souldiers to wear white Coats or Jackets, with a red Crosse before and behind over their Armoure, that it was not onely a comely, but a stately sight to behold the English Battles, like the rising Sunne, to glitter farre off in that pure hew; when the souldiers of other nations in their baser weedes would not be discerned.

So the whole St George cross thing has nothing to do with crusaders (kicking the crap out of the muslims, and then having the crap kicked out of them a few decades later), and more to do with the 100 years war (kicking the crap out of the French, and then having the crap kicked out of them a few decades later).

Hmmm

"Good sense may prevail in the Land of the Free"

Citation needed.

Other names they considered

Artist formally known as Czech Republic

Czechers

Czechenture

Pragueburst

Conczechnia

I Can't Believe it's not Bohemia

Offensive?

If they're so keen to come up with a name that isn't offensive, maybe it shouldn't begin with a TLA that'll be pronounced "Arse"?

RRS Kicker anyone?

Potholes? Those aren't potholes!

Looks like a load of bollox to me!

"Statistically just one airplane will be damaged every 1.87 million years, says study"

No it doesn't, it says that one will be damaged for every 1.87 million years of drone flight time. Since there are (apparently) a million drones in the US, let's suppose they are actually airborne for a couple of hours a week on average - about 1% of the year - you're looking at a collision every 187 years or so. Still a pretty low risk, but not the one-in-two-million shot that you suggest.

I'm confused.

Google shouldn't be allowed to give away maps for free, because they are only doing so to attract people to their site to click on adverts. This is unfair competition with Streetmap who... wait for it... give away maps for free, to attract people to their site to click on adverts.

""We’ve spent a lot of time listening to what people using Google+ had to say."

Wait... there are people actually *using* Googlle+ ?!?

Florida Man

Plenty more like this, just take a look at @_FloridaMan

US to stage F-35-versus-Warthog bake-off

Which one is Mary Berry flying?

Hmmmmm

Looking through that Independent article, there seem to be quite a mixed bag of scams going on.

At least some of them appeared to be of the form "victim approached by somebody claiming to be from Wikipedia, paid them to get an article added/edited, and didn't get what they paid for." It's hard to see what Wikipedia could do about that scam, unless Andrew's suggesting that they be granted the right to vet every email sent in the world to check it doesn't make such false claims.

Wikipedia is big, it's high profile, and it's going to attract a lot of scumbags trying to make money off it. I don't see how changing the anonymity rules is going to change that. Any "wedding photographer in Dorset" who knows enough about wikipedia to identify an editor from their putative non-anonymous id should know enough to know that a page about a wedding photographer in Dorset is likely to be rejected for lack of notability - it's an encyclopedia, not the yellow pages.

PS. Since we're in the territory of "oh noes! wikipedia publishes untrue and unproven things about people," how about a credible source for "one Wikipedian who reported another Wikipedian to the police for serious sexual charges found herself vilified by members of the community”? I'm not saying it isn't true but, well, [citation needed].

Make your minds up!

Quote from original article:

"The new Apple encryption would not have prevented the N.S.A.’s mass collection of phone-call data or the interception of telecommunications, as revealed by Mr. Snowden. There is no evidence that it would address institutional data breaches or the use of malware."

So what are you complaining about, Mr Vance et al? If encryption doesn't stop the NSA snooping on our data, it won't stop law enforcement bodies doing so either. Sounds like phones aren't encrypted *enough*!

That's the story in El Mundo, what does El Sol have to say?

What law do ICANN think Vox Populi are breaking? From what I can see, they're just charging a vastly inflated price for the goods they are selling (in order to recoup the large sum demanded by ICANN in the first place, one might add).

If that's against the law, then there are other companies that should be a long way ahead of them in the queue to the courthouse. Starting with one from Cupertino.

"Apple has a clumsy workaround in iOS 8 for its giant iPhone 6 Plus that allows you to pull top of the display nearer your thumbs."

The "clumsy workaround" being that you can bend it in two.

Bring back the MS Office paperclip!

"You look like you're attempting to dispose of a body..."