Posts by Uncle Slacky

Re: Déjà vu

NSA, I'll buy that rock!

Re: Yeah, but no but yeah

Wow - using *both* "your" and "you're" incorrectly in the same message! Impressive!

Re: Any terrorist not a total retard will use a VPN

But, as someone pointed out a while back, the smarter terrorists make bombs that actually work, and kill themselves in the process. This leaves only the dumb ones behind who can't blow things up, so it's a kind of self-limiting thing.

Re: IF a$ = "W" THEN GOTO 210

I also tried turning one of the books (Island of the Lizard King?) into a BASIC program on the Speccy - as I recall, I ran out of line numbers...

Re: "...a social robot companion..."

DON'T DATE ROBOTS!!!!!!

Re: Ideas

Tim Curry's just had a stroke, so he'll be out of the running anyway...

Re: hacking required

To be fair I think they stole that one from Bill Hicks: “You know we armed Iraq. I wondered about that too, you know during the Persian Gulf war those intelligence reports would come out: "Iraq: incredible weapons - incredible weapons." How do you know that? "Uh, well...we looked at the receipts."”

Re: Taxes strangling the high street

Take most small French towns for example, with low biz rates and no parking fees - result: thriving town centres even with the presence of out-of-town hypermarkets and warehouse-type stores.

Re: The fall out of Win 8

Most recent versions of CorelDraw seem to work well with Wine - which one are you using?:

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=440

Shirley you've seen the study...

...that shows that Fox News viewers are even less informed than people who watch no TV news AT ALL:

http://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5

Re: I'm sure Outlook.com has cost them a lot of users

I feel your pane...

Re: Mach 1.2?

XB-70 Valkyrie?

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/bomber/xb70-1_300-2.jpg

Re: Inertial? no way

You can use MEMS inertial sensors, which can withstand huge accelerations (>20,000 g) - I used to work on them.

Re: 30th anniversary of every man and his dog releasing a Spectrum-basher

The CPC had the advantage of having its own display, so no fighting over the (usually) single shared TV in the house. Having said that, I now wish I'd hung on to my Speccy for another year or two and bought an ST or Amiga instead of the 6128. Still, I recently picked up an Amiga 600 at the local dump^H^H^H^Hrecycling centre for a fiver, so I got there in the end.

I was allowed access to the M5 in a local computer shop by the owner, on the pretext that I'd write some demos for it, but I wasn't really inspired by it.

Re: In other news ...

The CO2 in fizzy drinks comes directly from the atmosphere in the first place, so it's actually carbon-neutral (except for the energy required to make the drink in the first place).

Re: Stop the press

The 1990s called - they want their FUD back.

Re: you forgot!

I used to have one of those - unfortunately it was too big and heavy, so it went to the skip in about 1993.

Re: Thank goodness for right-thinking scribes!

No, removal of Fox News would be a positive benefit, given that their viewers are in fact less informed than people who watch NO NEWS AT ALL:

http://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5

Re: Nope

"My Pi is barely ever more than lukewarm from use which is very impressive and of course silent. If only it were a bit faster..."

Have you overclocked it yet?

Re: Congratulations PC makers!

I've played DVDs (in VLC) on an 800MHz Gateway desktop (Essential 800) dating from 2001, with 256Mb RAM. Granted, this was in Bodhi Linux (based on Ubuntu) but it could also run XP acceptably.

Re: Shouldn't the rest of the world help save the world?

There is already an organisation called Spaceguard, which has tried to get international backing to track NEOs - some might remember Lembit Opik championing it a few years ago: http://www.spaceguarduk.com/

At European level: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/NEO/Spaceguard_Central_Node

Re: Wouldn't happen in England...

They dropped the "both parents must be native born UK citizens" requirement a while back - however, unofficially all this means in practice is that you may get as far as the interview, but you'll never actually get a job offer...

Re: Pretty nice machine

The Amstrad CPC6128 (and the PCWs, I think) also used 64k bank switching to achieve 128kb RAM - nothing unusual about that.

The keyboard was a bit better than the Amstrad's - similar to the Electron's IIRC.

Re: I want to like the BBC

They did announce something similar about a year ago called "Project Barcelona" - it's supposed to be a kind of iTunes arrangement: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/15/bbc_director_general_confirms_project_barcelona_apple_itunes_rival/

Before that ISTR GReg Dyke wanted a free archive of all old BBC material made available for download, but when he left it seemed to go quiet.

Re: Researcher mistake #1 ...

Porn.

Re: Been using iGoogle for similar

I switched to Netvibes (netvibes.com) when the iGoogle closure was announced. At the moment there's a banner on the site warning of latency, presumably due to the exodus of Reader users.

Re: Thanks Andrew...

Sounds a lot like the Victorian idea of the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor you're talking about there. Are you in the Cabinet, by any chance?

There will always be some small amount of fraud in any such system, the only way to avoid it would be to have NO welfare system at all.

In any case, the actual amount of benefit fraud is tiny, around 2% of the total, whereas public perception is that 1 in 5 people believe a majority of claims are false, while 14% believe a majority of claims are fraudulent. (All stats sourced from links here: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6348/economics/cost-of-benefit-fraud-v-tax-evasion-in-uk/ ).