* Posts by I ain't Spartacus

10123 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

Nuts to your poncey hipster coffees, I want a TESLA ELECTRO-CAFE

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I can't stop myself here. I must really love downvotes (given the site I'm posting on)...

I don't get this espresso thing. Perhaps I've just not drunk the right stuff, but I've drunk quite a bit of it and there only seem to be 3 flavours of espresso. Pathetically weak and watery, rancid or strong and quite nice.

Since the beans have been roasted to buggery, I've yet to detect significant difference in the taste of different espressos. Although I've read that there's been a recent fashion for using medium roasted beans, in order to get a fruitier coffee flavour into it. Which many espresso fans don't apparently like.

So you need a decent machine. Or possibly (so I've heard) one of those aeropress thingies? But you don't need to grind freshly, so long as you're not just shoving the ground stuff in the cupboard for several weeks.

What's then truly disappointing is when you ask for coffee and get watered-down espresso. Which is Americano as I understand it. Mostly what I want to drink is coffee. Get some light/medium roasted beans, grind and place in hot water. Drink black. Savour flavour. If I can't have that, I'll take a cappucino or cafe au lait. Or black tea.

Is a flat white more like a cafe au lait? I think we suffer from the collision of American and European terminology. So a latte doesn't seem to be the same as a cafe au lait, it's more like a coffee-ish milkshake.

I'm happy to be educated about espresso, and pointed in the right direction to learn the 'error of my ways'.

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Re: 2014

It's 2014! Doesn't everyone drink vodka now?

Drink! Drink?

It's 2014! One doesn't drink for heaven's sake. This is the future! One takes ones vodka in pill form. To do anything else would be terribly passe.

Brit kids match 45-year-old fogies' tech skill level by the age of 6

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Devil

Re: I would say the average 6 year old has mastered -

So they're bang-up candidates for Management then!

The only downside being the wining and tantrums. But I'm sure the 6 year-olds will be willing to put up with that...

Surprise! Government mega-infrastructure project cocked up

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Re: assumption - better network = less commuting

rh587,

I'm sure more people can work from home. Many more in fact. However many can't. That's not including the unwillingness of management to lose physical access to their staff. Also, having done so myself, I'd say that quite a lot of peole aren't suited to it. It can be quite a lonely life and there are two temptations to avoid. One is that seeing as the work's there you can end up burning out by doing too much. And/or the opposite, where the cricket's on and the sun's out. So get a beer, and relax... It's also (in my opinion) morally wrong to take business calls while naked. At the moment I work from the office, but we have 3 people working from home. However we've recruited two people who hated it, and left.

Personally I don't think that HS2 is all that relevant to commuting anyway. Most users won't be commuters, they'll be travelling for meetings and visits.

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Re: assumption - better network = less commuting

An0n C0w4rd,

I'm not a coder myself, but my brother is - and he claims that if you're working in a team you often have to talk to the other members and discuss stuff. Presumably with a computer, some pads, a whiteboard, coffee and doughnuts...

I do work in a technical sales job, and there is no substitute for meeting people when it comes to building relationships. Also, when you're working through some difficult problem, you both need to be at the same table, with the drawings spread out in front of you - or sometimes onsite looking at the actual building. Usually in some smelly and dark basement plantroom, or perched on the roof, hoping not to drown or get blown over the side.

There will always have to be travel. Apart from anything else, some people like to visit friends and relatives. Whether better transport would mean more people try to fit into London, or fewer, as it's easier to get to when needed, is another matter though.

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I think that if HS2 was sold as a capacity/reliability upgrade rather than a speed upgrade objections would have been far less.

I'm not sure. There's a lot of people living in the area affected who are objecting becasue of that, and will take on any objection. There are also some people looking at the vast cost and thinking it's a waste.

We've got into a bit of a rut on infrastructure. The Major government gave up on all new large road projects becasue of a combination of trying to balance the books and stop Swampy and his mates from being on telly every night. New Labour didn't really reverse that. And no-one seems to mention new roads any more. I don't think we can usefully expand the East Coast and West Coast rail lines. And we don't even have much more air capacity around London and the South East.

Also NIMBYs seem to be becoming BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything)...

And yet we're apparently going to have 75 million pepole living in this rather crowded country by 2030. So unless we can get most of those to live up North, we're in danger of tipping the South East into the sea (we're supposedly getting fatter as well remember). Don't laugh up in Scotland, we may all drown, but you'll start sliding as the country tips up, and then you'll end up being English...

Did the HS2 business case take this into account? Did it compare the environmental cost of all those people flying? The NIMBYs managed to kill the Chunnel frieght link that was going to go up via Chiltern Railways and some of the old Midlands track. Which was a shame.

I don't know if a business case is going to give any better idea of what's going on than a politician's guess. The answer that comes out is going to be just as reliant on what assumptions our economist chooses and what costs/benefits are ignored or impossible to measure.

I suspect the correct answer would be to build a new North-South motorway. Can't see that going down too well though. So I supect one of the politicians' calculations was that surely environmentalists won't object to trains, which just leaves the locals whose house-prices might fall.

So I'd say the real answer is it's all guesswork. And economists sometimes delude themselves that they're dealing with a science. But it can't be because it's impossible to have a spare economy to test theories on, and because politics and voter-perception are just as important as cold hard cash.

Also how the hell can we even know the outcome of current policy and trends over the next 30 years. Let alone whatever circumstances are going to hold in 50-100?

Although on the other hand, it's still a good thing to try to do the economics right. I just don't believe it's any more a reliable guide to the future than anything else we have.

no commenting?

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You need to have posted 5 times, in order to be able to start your own thread: linky

It's in the house rules, just above the posting form. You've only posted 4 times, so you just have to reply to me saying thanks, yaboosucks, or go-stick-your-head-in-a-pig, and you'll be good to go.

Scottish independence debate: STV player flops under weight of viewers

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Trollface

Re: Give Scotland to the US

Interesting deal. We'll happily take Texas and California off your hands. Erm, do we have to have the Texans and Californians too? Although if you're willing to take Ireland as well...

Do we collect, you deliver, or just wait for the San Andreas fault to do it for us?

Finally, I've forgotten, which one of us owns Canada again?

Astounding: We're about to stick a probe in orbit of a COMET

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Possibly. Although they seem to have neglected to install a beak. Therefore we need to get the lander in exactly the correct spot to make up for their error.

Hacker crew nicks '1.2 billion passwords' – but WHERE did they all come from?

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Happy

Re: Huge arctic fox

That gives me an idea for some new spam. Sod penis enlargement pills, they're old hat.

Try my new password enlargement pills. Guaranteed to work every time.

New iGasm: Apple to unveil not one but TWO iPhone 6 models on 9 Sept

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Happy

FIP investigative journalism

A proper journo would be climbing through the toilet window with a fake badge round their neck, in order to see the great event.

Alternatively, if security is too high for that, you take a fellow journo of similar looks to the pub, cosh them and tie them up, then go in on their ID.

Top Ten 802.11ac routers: Time for a Wi-Fi makeover?

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Re: speedy

Maybe. But it does mean you might be able to stream a video from your computer in one room to TVs in several others.

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Re: Shoot marketing!

I disagree. I'd imagine most people will buy routers on price. In Staples / PC World / Amazon / whatever. Although good experience of your last brand may mean you go that route.

Router models often seem to last quite a long time, although they seem to run several very similar ones in parallel. So I don't know why sensible names are a problem. And when I've looked for updates they've sometimes kept the same model number but had two versions. Where going up by 10 would be good.

I'm not such a pessimist. I believe that we can harness marketing people for good. With a bit of retraining, we can retain some to make the jungle of product choice a little less thick, and others can be integrated into other more useful sectors of society.

Odd though. I wasn't expecting my comment to be controversial and upset people so much they hit the downvote button. I guess there's no accounting for taste...

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Shoot marketing!

Many of these are consumer or small business electronics. Therefore should be named appropriately. That means that TEU751-a/ccrk400085r is a bloody useless name. Simple range name and number would be right. However 'Nighthawk' is perhaps even worse. Is it a stealth router? Does it sneak out at night and bang the neighbour's missus? Or is it just a bit of cheap black plastic stuck in a dusty corner?

They've managed it with printers. So why not routers or TVs? You can have a Thingyjet 3100 or 3200 and then they eventually get bored of the workings of the 3000, and go up to the Thingyjet 4000 range. Easy. Understandable. Everyone can find the bloddy driver software.

At least with TV models they have an excuse, in that they're deliberately trying to obfuscate things, to keep the retailers happy, so you can't compare the prices instore with those online. And so they can stick 'smart' gubbins on the same panel, and double the price. Why anyone wants the internet on their telly is utterly beyond me, but that's another story.

Router manufacturers have no excuse. Aaaargh!

Dumping gear in the public cloud: It's about ease of use, stupid

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It's the old pendulum

After a few years of cloud, the next big marketing thing will probably be 'hyperlocal'. Or some other such buzzword. Because the cloud will be the established thing, the kit-buying bureaucracy will probably have atrophied somewhat, and so there'll be fewer roadblocks in the way of buying hardware. instead the bureaucracy will probably have moved on to lock-in to the existing cloud provider, and resisting moves to anyone else.

Then IT will be able to say, "look how much we can save by bringing this stuff back in-house."

I still love the IT industry use of 'small' business to be anything under 1,000 people. What does that make us? We have 6 people, scattered over one office, 3 houses and whatever car or train our road-warriors happen to occupy at any given moment. For me the options are cloud or do without. I looked with envy at certain IT goodies that only 'small' companies used to be able to afford. Now we can go and rent something cloudy. Even a badly managed cloud service is better than what we can do ourselves. Obviously it's a totally different calculation for larger companies. Or should be.

CAPTCHA challenges you to copy pointillist painter Seurat's classic

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Re: CAPTCHA doesn't work on phones.

Do these people never test stuff for usability ?

Of course. It's just the testers were unable to log on to the test system due to failing the CAPTCHAs, deadline was upon them, so they just released...

It's obvious, from all the ones I've done, that no-one's ever tested them on anyone with less than perfect vision.

Then again, I've tried a few of the audio ones, and despite having perfect hearing and only 5% of average sight, I still use the visual ones.

METRE-LONG DINOSAUR POO going under the hammer

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Happy

Re: El Reg {rolls eyes up}!

I disagree. Playground humour is both childish and annoying. And if you say different, it's because you smell of poo.

Bad back? Show some spine and stop popping paracetamol

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Re: Tramadol or

And the short term memory loss.

The constipation's not ideal either.

Did I mention memory loss?

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Re: Nothing works faster ...

I never even had paracetamol mentioned to me. Though my problem was neck/upper back pain. I was told to use ibuprofen, which doesn't work. Well to be fair, it seems to take a few days to work on joint problems, so with something sporadic it's hard to know when the pills have fixed it, or just the waiting.

My friend with spina bifida was prescribed 1500mg ibuprofen. At which dose he saw pink elephants.

I was on a muscle relaxant called robaxin, which seems to have disappeared now. And that worked. Didn't reduce the pain, but seemed to stop the spasms. It was rather annoying that the buggers were about an inch long, and you had to tip your head back a long way to swallow them. Which with a bad neck...

I can bear the pain if I know it'll stop. So I've only asked for painkillers once. Which was when my whole neck and upper back went into spasm, and I betook myself to casualty. I couldn't even lie down. It's the most amazingly painful thing that's ever happened to me. Or I ever hope to. It went from intense pain that could just be ignored to absolute agony if I moved my head. For which I got morphine and muscle relaxants. They worked, but can't remember what they were called. Because of the morphine. I lost a week. I remember deciding I could work, after 4 days, and I remember leaving at lunchtime, because it hurt too much. I then had the embarrassment of phoning several people the next week to apologise for not getting back to them for a week, only to be told, "you spoke to me on Thursday."

"I did? Oh. What did I say?" It appears I said the right things, I just didn't take any notes, or remember anything about it.

Exercise keeps me OK so far. Morphine sucks, and is to be avoided at all costs. Seeing as it took a week to die down, that muscle relaxant probably wasn't much cop either.

SMELL YOU LATER, LOSERS – Dumbo tells rats, dogs... humans

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Facepalm

Re: ... a mammoth 2,000 olfactory receptor genes, ..."

Another policy. Helper elephants for old people. They've got to have extra-wide doorways because of wheelchair access, so the elephants will fit in your kitchen, they can pass you the stuff you need with their trunk. And help with other household tasks. They'd be great at bath-time.

I wonder how big the elephant-flap would need to be?

Abolish guide dogs, and replace them with guide-elephants. I don't know why, but it sounds fun. Elephants would surely be better than those hearing dogs for the deaf too. Much bigger ears.

I'd better stop now. I think it's looking at the accounts this morning that's done it to me. My brain hurts. Either that or this is what having a genius idea feels like...

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Happy

Re: ... a mammoth 2,000 olfactory receptor genes, ..."

it's impractical to use them for tracking or in airports for drug searches.

I disagree. Elephants are obviously larger, but then they don't actually need to go to the place where they're sniffing. If you put one between two security lanes, it can move its smelling device around, and so reach items at different angles and heights with ease.

In the case of tracking, they're even better. Why go foxhunting with a pack of hounds and a horse, when you can just take an elephant, which does both. I guess the elephant wouldn't be quite so good at jumping fences...

But then if you can't go over, you can always go through.

In fact we should replace police dogs and horses entirely with police elephants. They'd be much better for riot control, can do sniffing, as well as dealing with armed criminals. OK, they might not be able to delicately hold their knife-arm in their jaws (with the promise of more pain to come if you struggle). But on the other hand, once a few criminals have been stomped into a paste on the ground, the others will learn. Plus it cuts down on prison costs.

Also elephants wouldn't be endangered if every police force in the world had a few hundred of them.

I'm liking this more and more. Anyone want to join me in founding The Elephant Party? Our policies are elephants for the police, subsidised elephants for anyone who wants one, and replacing 50% of horse racing with elephant racing. Then we can have equal opportunities for fat jockeys, who still have a chance to win a race.

Kickstarter tin-rattlers offer reboot of '80s Integrated Space Plan megagraphic

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Happy

Perhaps he's placed a backdoor in the system. Then when he's ready he can pay all his final bills, stock his rocket with the finest goodies and art treasures, and be off to Mars before the rozzers catch up with him.

There's no extradition treaty with Mars, so he should be dead before the bureaucracy have finished all the paperwork. Let alone built the rocket and trained the police to fly it...

PayPal post-checkout cash slurp a FEATURE not a BUG

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Re: WTF?

I think PayPal are a bank in Europe. They have a banking license in Luxembourg. Don't know how they work in the US.

Don't put that duffel bag full of cash in the hotel room safe

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Happy

I still reckon that a tool box, overalls and confidence will get you past 90% of security.

A friend of mine did this. He's a furniture designer, but was meeting a client at his office. In one of GEC Marconi's buildings doing defence work. He coudn't be arsed to go through the long security checks this time, so he removed his suit jacket, rolled up his sleeves and waltzed past security and reception carrying a rolled-up newspaper, his lunchbox and a pad of paper. He got in unchallenged of course.

I presume the KGB weren't equipped with lunch boxes at the time, thus our national security was safe.

Rather like our planes are safe from the hijack danger of the metal cutlery that 1st class passengers are given onboard. This is because Al Qaeda HR policy is that people have to fly economy, on pain of a disciplinary interview...

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Re: Simple social engineering would break both the door and the safe

A confident manner is all you need. 2 stories from my last company illustrate:

1. Someone walked into one of the branches. Overalls and clipboard. "Sign here please". Put £10,000 of copiers onto dolly, and wheeled them out to his van. Byeee. Wonder how much he got for them down the pub?

2. Chap walks into head office. Finds a nice side office with 3 people in. "I've lost my contact lens, can you help me find it?" Gets them all into the gents looking, then he remembers it might have fallen out in the car. Pops out, nicks their wallets, then to allay suspicion pops back into the gents, "Sorry chaps, it was in the car, thanks for all your help." Leaves. The credit card company spotted the odd transaction, and phoned one of the guys to check it, which was the first time they noticed.

As you say, I've never had trouble getting into a hotel room. At one family occasion my brother managed to go to the desk and get a duplicate key to someone else's room. Even though we'd all booked and paid separately. And the one time I've had to ask to be let back into my room, no questions were asked but the number.

Running the Gauntlet: Atari's classic ... now and then

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Happy

Oh yes. I'd forgotten that! Running quickly down another passage, after your brother had gone through a door into a room full of nasties. If you did it fast enough, he could no longer retreat through the door and snipe at them as they came through, he ended up in the melee. Ooops.

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Happy

I had the Amstrad CPC464 version. Which I think must have been simplified. I don't remember being able to block with the shield, for example, although it was a long time ago. I don't think you could play more than 2-player either. Still, I loved it, as I don't recall seeing it in an arcade until much later. We didn't have a local one, so I didn't go to them often.

My record was to waste a whole Saturday afternoon playing a game. Play a couple of levels, load more from tape, repeat. Every so often there'd be a treasure room. I got to level 87 when it happened. I had a decent number of lives left, only a hundred levels on the tape, lots of treasure rooms done, so all stacked up with nice potions for dealing with deaths Tape error. Aaaaaarrrgggghhhh!!

I don't think I ever got much past level 30 again. I wonder if the machine overheated, it was randomness, or there just weren't 100 levels on the tape?

I want to play it again. I'm amazed no-one's released it for iOS / Android, or just as a Flash game online.

Boo, no happy wallowing in nostalgia icon. Say eating Spangles and/or Wham bars, while wearing mismatched flourescent socks and listening to rubbish music...

About comments

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Re: About comments

Many commentards agree. See the huge feature suggestion threads. Although I've yet to come across any forum software that handles everything well. But it would certainly be nice not to miss out on conversations with people who've replied to you. And fully threaded forums would be far better.

As to your second point. There is a way of telling which post a reply is to. Not that it's by any means perfect. But if you click on the little grey swirly arrow thing on the left of the post, which is there to tell you it's a reply, it puts the post its replying to right to the top of the screen. Which I do in the most confusing cases.

Microsoft: OK, Office 365 sellers – you can be customers' 'first contact'

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Happy

Re: So, handing over some control...

No new product until 2016. When they'll release Office366.

Diary note: Pluto's close-up is a year from … now!

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Re: Question

For those more up on the DSN than me, are NASA considering putting a satellite up to improve the network? I know that there's some capability to use some probes to relay from others - but would it be worth putting something at one of the Lagrange points?

I wonder if this could be a job for a small collection of micro sats to work as an array antenna? Then the array might be able to point in different directions at once.

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Happy

Answerphone

This is Uranus. I'm afraid I'm not here at the moment. Please leave a message after the tone.

And no sniggering.

Beep!

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Re: Question

bigphil9009,

I'd imagine the bandwidth is going to suck for nice pictures. So it'll store those and start transmitting the most interesting data first. After all, we now have better instruments than the old probes did. And we can often do more things at once, and stick the results into storage for later transmission.

Just a guess, but are any of the gas giants moving between us and the probe in that period as well? They're noisy and might interfere with the signal.

The other option is that NASA cut costs too much and used O2 for their data...

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Devil

Re: To boldly go

I hope you told him when he was passing Uranus...

Barclays Bank counter staff to become iPad-toting 'community bankers'

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Happy

Digital eagles may soar, but digital weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

To mis-quote Scott Adams Dogbert. He didn't say anything about digital vultures I'm afraid...

Phab-u-less: Huge MONSTER iPhone 6 not due until 2015 – claim

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Re: I for one

Lallabalalla,

There's nothing wrong horribly with the Apple mail client. It just only allows you to use one mail account at a time (the same as Android).

Whereas Win Pho gives you a shortcut to each email account, which if the live tiles now work properly means can check each one at a glance.

The other problem with the Apple client is that you have to use the same button to change accounts as to access different mail folders within the same account. And it's pretty much random as to which on you get when you press the button. So you want to look in your sent items, you often have to select the mail account again, just in order to then be allowed access to a sub-folder!

I have 2 work accounts to juggle as well. Hence I set up the gmail app to separate out my personal mail.

Oh and while we're at it, the Apple addressbook is even shittier at handling multiple accounts. I want to display my personal and key work numbers, and not mix up with the 4,000 others. And then find those by searching. But Apple don't allow that. I've got to wade through thousands or manually change address books each time.

They basically don't seem to have recognised that a phone is for both work and personal use. Win Pho has the best email and address book, although the new Blackberry seems to be pretty good at this too.

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Re: I for one

When used as a phone, my iPhone 5 and the Lumia 710 and HTC Wildfire that preceeded it were perfect. Nice convenient sizes to fit in the hand, hold up to the ear and not overfill your pocket. My personal favourite being the Lumia, for the big writing (no reading glasses when walking down the street).

Once you start doing stuff online, or trying to plan a route on a map, then they all feel quite cramped. At that point, the Galaxy Note seems like a really nice device, with a pen for sketching and lots of room.

My device is mainly a phone. If I've a lot to do, I tether to my iPad. So I'm happy with something smaller. But it's horses for courses.

Special unfavourable mention must go to Google here, for their gmail app on the iPhone. The font is absolutely tiny, and there are times when I can barely even read emails with my reading glasses on. And they've of course disabled pinch to zoom. I'd use the Apple email client, if it wasn't so crap at coping with both a work and personal inbox. Windows Phone was great at this.

Will GCHQ furtle this El Reg readers' poll? Team Snowden suggests: Yes

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chatroulette

Which garden shall I deposit my shit in today? Place you bets.

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Black Helicopters

Another worrying thought?

Do they have a working internet sarcasm detector?

If so, we're all buggered. And it wouldn't be the first time that GCHQ had technology vital to the health of the internet, and kept it secret.

SpaceX FINALLY lobs six sats into orbit (don't mention the landing)

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Devil

This is just an excuse! Everything went perfectly. But he's got to pretend that they don't yet have full control of the reusable stage return, so that when he drops one on that Chinese Tesla trademark troll's head, he's got plausible deniability.

YES: Scotland declares independence ... from the dot co dot uk empire

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Trollface

Now there's an idea...

I shall create a site forthwith, which allows you to categorise pictures of attractive and less attractive ladies plus men in skirtskilts. I shall call it:

whatshotwhatsnotwhats.scot

Read the proposed US ASTEROIDS Act to green-light mining IN SPAAAACE

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Happy

Re: Made me think of

4ecks,

What time is it?

I love Cherryh's books. And of course this law suggests exactly the problem that she covered in that book. If you can't steal the stuff before it's mined, you can beat people to the asteroid. It would be a shame if you crashed into them first…

LOHAN seeks stirring motto for spaceplane mission patch

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Happy

surely there should be a grep and an awk in there too...

The final score: Gramophones 1 – Glassholes 0

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Re: Hmm

It's not that they won't let you out of Stansted, just that there aren't any signs. Or if there are, they're incredibly well hidden.

Funnily enough I was watching a program on architecture the other day, that claimed it was the best airport designed up to that time. Although I guess that is rather like being offered the choice of smallpox or ebola.

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Re: Google Potatohead+

That's just a load of old Glollocks!

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Happy

Re: @ AC ~1220h - Photos photos

or shouting: "OK glass, horse porn, loop, mike off!"

If you do that near me, it'll have to be a swift kick to the nadgers I'm afraid. No one interrupts me when I'm watching hot sheep-on-sheep lovin'!

Say goodbye to the noughties: Yesterday’s hi-fi biz is BUSTED, bro

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Happy

Re: Bluetooth audio... pah

No. They'll release Goldtooth.

Blutooth uses the air to transmit imperfect wireless signals. For the true audiophile such as yourself, you need to be using the equivalent power of gold contacts and oxygen free cables.

Hence Goldtooth. Instead of using the sound deadening oxygen in the air to transmit our radio signals, we transmit in the less crowded helium band. As there is so much less helium in the atmosphere, we have to use much larger antennae, but this is a small price to pay for audio perfection.

The name comes from the fact that it's helium which give the Sun it's distinctive golden hue at sunset.

What the world needs now is... a Bluetooth-enabled baby's dummy

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Happy

Re: Guessing game:

The clever baby will learn to put the thing on the radiator for a bit, to get it all toasty warm - and then be given Calpol.

Most young children are Calpoloholics. It must taste really nice.

Tesla trademark spat threatens Musk's China dream

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Devil

Elon Musk owns ICBMs. Why pay someone else? He may not have nukes, but with access to heat shields and orbital velocity - that's not a huge problem...

Dubai to get huge climate-controlled domed city and giga-mall

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Re: Office arguments over the air-con controls

There will be no arguments. This is Dubai. Air-con will be set to massively, amazingly, astonishingly fucking freezing. And you can lump it.

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Re: Romdeau

You can get solar panels to mount on the side of buildings. But they're not transparent.

You could easily have a glycol and water mix wandering around tubes in the glass dome. I guess if you made the channels small enough, they wouldn't be too visible. You'd need a bloody big heat store though. Moden solar-thermal panels can get up to 300°C (although they're black) - so if you don't keep removing heat from the system they cook their own circulating pumps. This means when sized wrong they often have to go into shutdown in the hottest part of the day, and can't switch on again until the sun's gone down.