* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

So just what is the third Great Invention of all time?

Tom 7

Re: Liability

Its certainly heavily abused. A pub/hotel I used to drink in was phoenixed by the same bloke on an almost yearly basis for the 10 years I was there. And the building industry is rife with it too.

I'm guessing limited liability is used by the open cast mining companies to avoid filling in the holes like they promised and by many other organisations in similar ways.

If you use it I guess you might think its a good idea but I doubt it has any real positive effect on the economy.

Doctor Who's The Girl Who Died ships in nasty Vikings floating atop a time-bending tidal wave

Tom 7

Re: Viking electric eels ?

And they dont flash when they activate their electric fields either!

Self-driving vehicles might be autonomous but insurance pay-outs probably won't be

Tom 7

I have a feeling the insurance companies wont like this.

A self driving car is almost certainly going to have all the evidence it needs to defend itself and/or improve the software. I (optimistically perhaps) imagine that the engineering and co-operation of these vehicles will reduce accidents due to self driving cars. The end result will be far lower insurance for these vehicles followed by corresponding increases in manual vehicles and rapid uptake in self-driving cars and a much reduced market for the insurance companies.

They probably wont be allowed though - co-operating cars optimising the use of roads might be regarded as socialism!

Tom 7

RE:you start at 20,000' you'll have passed out long before

30,000 maybe - I've wandered around quite happily at nearly 20,000 and not felt like passing out.

And even if you do pass out as the air gets thicker you'll come round.

Apple 1 goes on sale, expected to fetch £300,000 to £500,000

Tom 7

Didnt one of these not sell a couple of weeks ago.

ISTR there was one up for auction that didnt reach its minimum.

It is a lot for a machine you can simulate faster in javascript!

Tom 7

Re: Thinks...

I have one that still works! I'd heard that one went for £600 on e-bay. Which makes my least powerful computer my most valuable.

BBC bypasses Linux kernel to make streaming videos flow

Tom 7

Re: This is why I love the bbc: when there is a vacuum somebody will write a perl script to fill it.

get_iplayer is indeed in perl

Facebook's UK wing paid just £4k in corporation tax last year

Tom 7

Re: So how many commenter use FB accounts?

I have one. But its a bit like having a village square (or Mall in modern parlance) where I can meet my friends and have a chat. I'd rather we met on Diaspora or something far more suitable but someone sent a free bus to get them all there.

I just hope in 10 years time people will have their own Open Standards Compliant diaspora type hub either with their FTTP* or self hosted in the mist.

* sorry - my version of a hoverboard, one I've ridden alas.

Tom 7

They do just not to the uk.

And that's a problem for the UK and we should sort it out.

I dread to think how much of our lauded GDP (see the weekend article) now heads offshore without paying for the roads its driven on or all the other services that need to be paid for for it to be generated and launched out of the country.

I wonder how hard it would be sit down and calculate (say) just how much government subsidy for power and internet provision etc could be realistically allocated to this overwhelmingly generous contribution to the UK economy.

Hurrah! Doctor Who brings us a bootstrap paradox treat in Before the Flood

Tom 7

Re: I enjoyed that, with one reservation....

Err some of the people of Norfolk walk round with ferrets in their trousers. Not all the time and we were all pissed but it does happen. All it takes is alcohol, ferrets and young men and you're there.

A thousand mile Atom merci mission: Driving from Monaco to London in an open-topped motor

Tom 7

Re: The bloody flies (and other airborne thingies)

I was heading up the M6 and the lorry in front suddenly popped open a set of louvre doors along the side and several hundred racing pigeons took flight. One hit my windscreen and would have had my head off if it not atomised and covered the windscreen in un-wipeable pigeon fat. Still not sure how I made the hard shoulder amongst the ballet of cars and birds.

I've never had the courage to ride a motor bike or windscreen less vehicle that does more than 40 ever since.

How much do UK cops pay for Microsoft licences? £30 a head or £137? Both

Tom 7

The use of "commercial confidentiality"

should be made invalid as an excuse for not responding to FOI. Anyone competing for public money should be beaten with a baseball bat with 'free market' written on it in 6" nails.

World's oldest person scoffs daily ration of bacon

Tom 7

Re: Bad timing

Think about grits - only force feeding as a child can make you consider this pleasant.

Google and pals launch Accelerated Mobile Pages project

Tom 7

A bad workman always blames his tools

and any new design method is going to need 20 years of debugging before its decided another new method is needed leaving the wrong people still doing to designing and adding the trackers and overloads of adds and stupid graphics.

Javascript has a bad reputation cos its been written by idiots and the inexperienced. Whatever comes next will suffer the same problems but everyone will be inexperienced.

Its not working out for Google because they are the main problem, followed by all the other parasites who wish to freeload on others web pages.

White House 'deeply disappointed' by Europe outlawing Silicon Valley

Tom 7

Safe Harbour bombed

Pearler!

Linux kernel dev who asked Linus Torvalds to stop verbal abuse quits over verbal abuse

Tom 7

Re: all moot

Now that is some serious abuse - the manipulation thing at the end.

The most abusive person I have ever met never swore, never used physical or verbal violence but made Nurse Ratched look like an angel. When confronted he would produce reams of documentation of minor infarctions by others - largely imagined but enough real to give it credence. To call him a seriously fucking evil tosser would be a complement.

Much prefer a bit of verbal abuse with a sorry later (if deserved). Overdone PC ishness is a bit like overcleanliness - leads to intellectual asthma and is not healthy.

Microsoft gobbles Chipzilla's Havok 3D physics unit in cloud gaming play

Tom 7

Re: Cloud gaming...

So you can download 12 channels of 4K (assuming your physics chip is so shit it doesnt add anything to the screen)

What's your problem? Cloud gaming is going to be shit because of the other idiots in the cloud - not due to your bandwidth problems

Mold whine: Soylent superfood shipments stopped by spore scare

Tom 7

I'm not sure what the problem is here

if you cant be arsed to chew your food perhaps you should just let the mould digest it for you too.

Doctor Who's Under the Lake splits Reg scribes: This Alien homage thing – good or bad?

Tom 7

Re: Science happens to other people

There is a big window in the door - plenty of bandwidth for a variety of transmission methods.

Mars water discovery is a liberal-muslim plot, cry moist conspiracy theorists

Tom 7

Re: The solution to limbaugh

Set him up on a blind date with Katie Hopkins.

Is the world ready for a Raspberry Pi-powered Lego Babbage Engine?

Tom 7

Whatever happened to lego?

When I was a kid you had some lego and you built anything you wanted with it.

Now you get a kit that will build one thing and that's it.

Now someone wants money to built a computer out of lego ... driven by another computer.

Dodgy amphetamines drive drug-crazed man on to pub roof

Tom 7

Re:PCP aka Angel Dust would be my guess based on symptoms and behaviour.

I was going to say lager.

FBI: We unmasked and collared child porn creep on Tor with spy tool

Tom 7

Re: Polygraph?

Its only just recently the FBI have given up using hair examinations as evidence. There are a lot of innocent people in US slave camps as a result.

Well innocent of the crimes they are in for.

Massive global cooling process discovered as Paris climate deal looms

Tom 7

New? Even defra knew about this in 2007

defra ffs.

Find shaving a chore? Why not BLAST your BEARD off with a RAYGUN

Tom 7

No No its already been done

Is advertised on the telly a lot the nono or whatever.

NEW ERA for HUMANITY? NASA says something 'major' FOUND ON MARS

Tom 7

Re: Halophylic prokaryotes

You never met a bunch of geeks without at least one with ... hygiene issues?

Astroboffins snap BREATHTAKING, WISPY Veil Nebula supernova debris

Tom 7

Anyone know what the video was meant to do?

I was hoping to see the nebula drifting over time not some random 3d trip.

Bletchley Park remembers 'forgotten genius' Gordon Welchman

Tom 7

Re: Please can we keep the accolades coming...

When Flowers got his medal in 1980 he gave a bit of a talk and seemed to have trouble talking about the stuff then. Where would the world be now if he'd got his bank loan after the war!

BOFH: I'm not doing this for the benefit of your health, you know

Tom 7

Re: Laminated Glass here :(

I was once asked it I'd read the safety manual - apparently this was listed as mandatory for all employees in another manual that was restricted* - so I quipped that I had received a paper cut while reading it. A few days later the delivery man got a hernia bringing the new laminated version round to everyone.

* I'd swear some companies model themselves on Dean Warmer from Animal House and run things on a permanent 'Double Secret Probation Level' so they can instigate wild-cat strikes during the rugby world cup.

UK.gov creates £500K fund to help universities teach cyber skills

Tom 7

Re: Universities can't do training, they just do "Education"

and the ones I remember from an interview.

E: The requirements for the post have changed since we called you in. We need someone with 5 years experience in X.

Me: You do know X is only a year or so old,

E: Next....

11 MILLION VW cars used Dieselgate cheatware – what the clutch, Volkswagen?

Tom 7

Re: "Wide Open Throttle"

Is it economically unfeasible to have no NO2 in diesel exhausts? How about new engine designs - ultra high temperature running leads to massive improvement in efficiency (up to 3*?). This can be achieved by replacing the air with O2. The O2 is generated from electrolysing water and the H2 is partly stored for use in fuel cells to boost maximum power requirements, or just for plain running the car.

So actually you've got an electric car running with a diesel generator - but with no nitrogen oxides.

Michigan sues HP after 'botched' $49m upgrade leaves US state in 1960s mainframe hell

Tom 7

Re: Same old, same old

Replace it with something new? You mean one of those new computing languages that will be replaced by another one in ten years by someone who knows enough about 10% of computing theory to think their new language will be better and proceeds to fall at every hurdle every other language fell at.

The question that should be asked is: Can we somehow use the old code in a way that we can make it run as fast as we need to and interact with it in a reasonable manner. Something that is 50 years old will be largely debugged and can probably be set running on a modern installation without too much effort.

You may have worked with EDS porting projects and had problems - that would be EDS I would imagine.

A krayshee sexy Dutch post-pub nosh neckfiller: Stamppot

Tom 7

Champ

poundies or whole other gamut of mash and veggies with other bits. Adding various cheese could be fun too.

Must find out how to make rookworst!

Microsoft has developed its own Linux. Repeat. Microsoft has developed its own Linux

Tom 7

Maybe it is the year of LDT

seems nearly half of all dells sold in china are loaded with NeoKylin (based on ubuntu)

Not sure I want to try one though...

Tom 7

RedmondHat Inside

Sounds like a Dutch Cap.

BBC Micro:bit delayed by power supply SNAFU

Tom 7

Re: Why not a Pi

Why not this and a Pi? This is the cheapest way to add accelerometers to a Pi (assuming its as cheap as I've heard). I was hoping to steal my daughters when she got it to make a solar powered robotic weeder for my veggie patch.

Scotsman cools PC with IRN-BRU, dubs it the 'Aye Mac'

Tom 7

Has anyone successfully done this for less than the cost of the off the shelf

system that would go that fast anyway?

Microsoft to splurge $75m on computer training for kids

Tom 7

Thats about a million Raspberry Pi's and the rest to me

I'll spend the rest of my life running a web site with lots of open source lessons on programming and stuff.

Man given positive pregnancy test in an Apple Watch box

Tom 7

Cheaper and less invasive in the long run

The baby of course!

US librarians defy cops, Feds – and switch on their Tor exit node

Tom 7

Re: 2A

"people who have not proven themselves unsuitable"... by massacring a few dozen innocent members of the public?

Yup - you can have a gun until then. Then they may take it away from you.

SOHO solar scope spies 3000th 'sungrazer' comet

Tom 7

Worachate Boonplod?

Is this a Douglas Adams story?

The ONE WEIRD TRICK which could END OBESITY

Tom 7

Smaller portions will not work.

I was in a rather good (and cheap) Indian restaurant one evening when about a dozen suited and booted and designer dressed people turned up. They'd been to Hintlesham Hall in its designer food days and they all sat and ate as much as they could manage. The Indian meal for all of them cost them less than a main course for one at the hall but a popadom had more volume to it.

As others have pointed out we need to reject certain foods - glucose fructose syrup gives me the munchies by 9am but a home made jam with sucrose in it on my breakfast toast leaves me happy till lunchtime.

A pint of tap water before meals works wonders too.

Robots, schmobots. The Rise of the Machines won't leave humanity on the dole

Tom 7

We can always get jobs as luddites.

Or dole scroungers.

Android 5 lock-screens can be bypassed by typing in a reeeeally long password. In 2015

Tom 7

What they need to do is model their language on an a world class object oriented language.

This should be the get-out from Oracles stupid API case!

Unless java does this shit too!

Brown kid with Arab name arrested for bringing home-made clock to school

Tom 7

A movie bomb!

So who has the definitive movie bomb to compare with this and why aren't they in jail for having one?

Tom 7

Re: Hysteria

There are 2 billion passenger flights a year. Since the improved security we have around an extra 2 hours at the airport before each flight. That's about 6 thousand lifetimes wasted at airports every year which is considerably higher than terrorists manage.

And the economic cost of the time wasted...in expensive coffee shops and restaurants.

I wonder if Costa paid for 9/11 training?

'To read this page, please turn off your ad blocker...'

Tom 7

Evolution will win

The next level will be an ad wiper - loads all the adds but makes them invisible.

A parasite that kills its prey dies out. If the parasite learns to be a benefit to the host and the environment in general it will become very popular. That rules out most ad agencies at the moment.

German army fights underground Nazi war machine hidden in Kiel pensioner's cellar

Tom 7

Re: Previously Raided???

Legal niceties? The probably had a warrant for Nazi memorabilia that wouldn't work on tanks and torpedoes so had to get a warrant for those after tripping over them on the first visit.

They could have adopted a more lax approach and got the whole thing thrown out of court.

Unique astronaut job perk: Create a SHOOTING STAR by having a dump

Tom 7

Phoenix Asteroids

If they drink Guinness does their poo burn black?

ESA tries UPLOADING PATCH to Philae lander to fix radios

Tom 7

Fingers crossed!

But I dont have much hope seeing that rock that got flung into space. It seems potentially a lot more hostile down there than we hoped.