* Posts by Tom

69 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2007

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iPhone 3G S in the UK: what you need to know

Tom

too expensive

I've been on an original iphone for about two years at 35 quid a month. I have recently been waiting to see what the third gen one would offer and cost, but it's £185.

Sod that.

US firm says handheld puke ray is ready to go

Tom

Too deniable

What's to stop over-zealous police from using it when it's not really called for and then just denying it? They could make someone puke and there would be no evidence that they did it.

Green GT rolls out sexy e-supercar

Tom

Batteries not needed

So long as there's somewhere to plug in an extension cable inside the Le Mans circuit, the car can just drive around it without ever coming unplugged.

UK tech quango eyes 10Gbit broadband

Tom

10Gb broadband for everyone for £29b?

Sounds like a better return than we get from nationalising Northern Rock.

Gov 'smart meter' plans: Sky box in charge of your house

Tom

Sounds like a bad idea

Does this mean your electricity meter will be able to crash and effectively cut your power supply off by accident?

Will they be secure enough that only ther energy company can cut you off, rather than some script kiddie on the net?

Do not want.

NASA's Kepler dazzles with first pics in new-Earth hunt

Tom
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Kepler's on Twitter

Kepler has a twitter account and it's kind of interesting. You don't get many tweets, but they're written in a charming style.

http://twitter.com/NASAKepler

O2 starts giving away iPhones

Tom
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Two years

Two years?!

Samsung punts popcorn flicks for pounds

Tom

ELEVEN QUID?!

Firefox is £3.99 on play.com. OK, you don't get it instantly, but how can they charge £11 for it as a download? You'd have to be a proper idiot to pay that.

Google tosses free texting

Tom

Foolish?

They weren't that foolish. The app must have been pretty cheap to make, so they might have seen some profit for hardly any effort.

Scotland Today in news nipslip outrage

Tom

not a button hole

Button holes on women's clothing are on the left.

Brit, French nuke subs collide - fail to 'see' each other

Tom

What?

"The sub filled up so quickly that there wasn't time to seal the bulkheads, and she imploded just a few minutes later."

Why would a submarine implode after filling with water? Stop making things up.

Satellites crash over Siberia: Iridium bird destroyed

Tom

Throwing Peanuts

I guess it would be like throwing peanuts at each other from opposite sides of a football pitch, but what you're missing is that you'd be throwing them several thousand times per hour for a few decades.

US lawmaker injects ISP throttle into Obama rescue package

Tom

American Politics is Rubbish

This is reminiscent of how the UIGEA was tagged onto a port security bill in the middle of the night.

It seems like the way to get your legislation through is to stick in with something else and hope nobody notices.

What a joke.

Google's AOL stake walks the plank

Tom

$5.5bn

"If 20% of AOL is worth $274m, the whole thing is still valued at $5.5bn. That's quite a lot."

Why, is that just the rubbish 20% or something?

NASA deploys huge clingfilm strato-pumpkin over Antarctic

Tom

@Simon B

"ONE TON brick comes crashing down from 22,000 feet?! Bang! Nuke! Wipeout! Ooops! sorry???!"

Yep, because when, for example, planes weighing far more than one ton crash there's always an accompanying nuclear detonation.

Send old Shuttles to Mars, says Scotty ashes prang man

Tom

parachute vs wings

"If there isn't enough atmosphere for a gliding landing, why would there be enough for a parachute?"

Because you could provide the shuttles with a much larger parachute than their wings. That way you get more drag from the same atmospheric density.

They might be better off keeping the shuttles in orbit and using Soyuz style entry modules to get the crew and supplies to the surface, though.

TVonics DTR-Z500 500GB Freeview+ DVR

Tom
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it's not bad

I've had one of these for a couple of months and overall, it's not bad.

I have one major gripe, which is the remote control's volume buttons don't affect the volume output by the TVonics box! Instead, you're supposed to set the remote control to output the correct IR codes to control your TV's volume, which doesn't work at all with my setup, which is a TVonics box, AV amp and projector. I have tried and failed to get any customer support from TVonics.

In the two months I've had it, it's completely crashed once. This left me with a blank screen and a high pitched tone, until I turned the box off at the mains. It recovered fine when I turned it back on, but I did fear it might corrupt the hard drives and lose recordings. It seemed to cope though.

I have also found it sometimes flat out refuses to set a timer via the guide. Normally, you hilight a programme and press record and it says "Setting timer for Name" for a couple of seconds, then underlines it in red. Sometimes, it says it's settign the timer, but then doesn't. This is rare, but when it does it you have to manually set it, by telling it to record channel x from a until b. Not a big deal, but a bit of a drag at times.

My final moan is that the remote doesn't seem very powerful. I have the box on a top shelf, behind my sofa and I always have to point the remote backwards, over my shoulder to use it. My older freeview box never had that problem.

Like the review says, it doesn't do upscaling, but if your display does it anyway this is not a problem.

Having said all that, I am actually quite happy with the product overall.

New .tel domains bid to be world's phone book

Tom

What?

Why not just give someone your existing website and have your contact details on that?

I recognise that I may be being thick, but what's the point of this?

Lapdancing 'not sexually stimulating', MPs hear

Tom

Stringfellow

If there's anything that can prevent sexual stimulation it's Peter Stringfellow.

Juror dismissed over Facebook poll

Tom
Unhappy

This is insane

How stupid would you have to be to do something like that? The whole case could have been jeopardised because of her actions. She is lucky to avoid a contempt charge, but maybe the rest of society is unlucky, as it hasn't taught anyone else how serious this is.

Apple updates iPhone firmware

Tom
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Finally!

This is great news, just for the fact you can turn off auto-incorrect. I'm so sick of seeing that 'feature' changing what I typed just as I hit 'send'.

Nvidia pitches Tesla GPU-as-CPU tech 'personal supercomputer'

Tom

"4Tflops of floating-point maths"

Must try harder.

Berlin bans handy iPhone metro app

Tom

Common sense failure

They should embrace the individuals who made these applications, not hinder them.

Hoon: Not building überdatabase would be terrorist licence to kill

Tom
Unhappy

Not good enough.

Why is Hoon not advocating saving our lives by photocopying all of our snail mail too?

I won't feel safe until that happens.

SanDisk reinvents 1980s personal stereo for the noughties

Tom
Stop

wtf?

FAIL.

iPhone auto-correct puts Euro tongues out of joint

Tom

Oh man, I hope they let us turn it off.

God, the auto-correction winds me up so much. For a start, it's the wrong way around. When it suggests a word, you should have to tap the word to accept it, not carry on typing to accept it. I particularly hate it when you type in something you would like to search for, the suggestion pops up without you noticing, and on hitting 'Search', it changes your search term. Bag of shiy.

Just let us turn it off.

Oz woman sold mobe with preloaded smut

Tom
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money

'The rattled victim and her partner "met with Dick Smith Electronic's area and state manager late yesterday in a bid to reach a compensation settlement but the company referred the matter to its legal department". '

It sounds like she wasn't hurt by this at all, but rather was more concerned about what would have happened if a child was exposed to the images. So how does compensation come into it?

Greed.

DARPA seeks sticky-goldenballs Casimir forcefields

Tom
Stop

Writing Style

Why is it that whenever you guys write about DARPA you descend into this weird writing style? Is it just because all you're really doing is copying and pasting the report from somewhere else, so you feel you have to pad it out a bit first? Whatever, it's tedious having to read twice as much article to get the same amount of news.

US runs warzone man-tracking 'Manhattan Project'

Tom
Stop

Oh please.

Why give the guy any credit when he's trying to sell you his book?

Medical isotope scarcity as Dutch reactor goes titsup

Tom

66 hour half-life

Would there even be any point using this in a dirty bomb?

TOWN CENTRE CLOSED FOR WEEKEND. etc.

Engineer accidentally deletes cloud

Tom

P45?

Surely he's the least likely person to do something like that from now on.

Tesco causes couple condom catastrophe

Tom
Heart

What's with all the sexism?

I notice most commenters think the woman was a bitch for accusing the guy. Maybe she had good reason to because he's had affairs before and is generally a bit untrustworthy? Maybe she also knows he's stupid enough to make the kind of mistake that would result in them showing up on the clubcard.

It's hard to care either way, but how about a bit of balance?

Nike pulls Air Stab trainers

Tom
IT Angle

groan

Cue the trainers becoming sought after and going for a song on ebay.

BT breaks up families

Tom
Heart

Cover

Is this the guy who recently got brained? Maybe this is just because he's unable to appear in the ads at the moment.

Sun unfolds 1TB of tape

Tom

@Andrew Baines

16 furlongs and a chain.

Jacqui Smith kick-starts yoof ID debate site, site kick stops

Tom

cynical

I thought I was cynical, but the idea that young people will be lucky to benefit from being the first ones to have ID cards forced on them really takes the cake.

Judge grants Viacom 12TB of YouTube user records

Tom

Gmail

I hope it doesn't occur to Viacom that people may have quoted lines from their shows in emails. They would then surely demand Google hand them all the data stored in Gmail.

That must be quite a bit and quite a bit more personal.

UK developer trio accused of game plagiarism

Tom
Stop

Bonkers

It's almost as though the publishers had no knowledge of some of the most successful games of recent times or never even bothered to look at the game they were publishing.

It almost seems as though the developers had no knowledge of copyright law.

It's almost so ridiculous that they could try and claim it was a deliberate attempt to demonstrate the lack of respect people have for the hard work of others.

Ransomware Trojan code break 'impractical'

Tom

I agree it's pointless

Even if it could be done with 15 million computer years of work, wouldn't we find they started using a different key and we had to start again?

DARPA pilot-ware unflappable in wing-fling damage test

Tom

Wings too big

Obviously they just made the wings too big in the first place.

Heathrow T5 security tackles Transformers t-shirt threat

Tom

idiots

This doesn't make anyone safer, but makes everyone's lives worse.

Air France pilot in white-knuckle near miss

Tom

"So you can get into the cockpit by being a child?"

You sure can, but only if you don't have a beard.

US airline pilot pops a cap in cockpit

Tom

bonkers

"No, the ultimate deterrent to hijacking a plane is armed passengers"

That sounds like a great way to destroy a plane by mistake if you ask me.

The best way to prevent hijacking is to not have a door between the cabin and the cockpit. The pilots could board the plane through a different door entirely.

Unfortunately, it'd be more expensive to retrofit planes, so instead they put guns on them and make them more dangerous than they were in the first place.

32nd Carry On film is go

Tom
Stop

It could be called...

Carry On Wondering Why British Cinema Sucks

BBC iPlayer for iPhone and iPod Touch is iGo

Tom

What's the point?

I don't understand the point of this if you can only stream programmes. It would actually be useful if you could download stuff while in range of a wireless network and then watch them when you like.

3G wouldn't help much on the Tube.

ISP data deal with former 'spyware' boss triggers privacy fears

Tom
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benefit?

"Net users will benefit from more relevant advertising"

I have never wanted to see an advert while I'm using the internet, so how is making advertising 'more relevant' going to be a benefit to me? I'll still ignore them.

Newcomer punts miniature 'pub phone'

Tom

Pub phone?

Who would go to a pub where they didn't dare take their normal phone?

Drink somewhere better.

Is this the world's most expensive desktop PC?

Tom
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Nice try

If only they didn't look shit.

New Bond movie is Quantum of Solace

Tom
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Bourne, not Bond.

Does anyone else think that the Bourne films are actually everything that the Bond films should have become by now?

Bush overrules judge in US navy-v-dolphins sonar case

Tom

passive sonar

They should use the cetaceans' sonar to detect enemy vessels.

eg. multiple allied vessels listen to the sound emitted naturally by whales and dolphins and use the differences in what they hear to reconstruct the size and shape of objects blocking the passage of the sound through the water.

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