* Posts by Paul RND*1000

406 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2009

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Earth escapes obliteration by comet

Paul RND*1000

Yeah and it's been a while since he showed up on Letterman too.

Paul RND*1000
WTF?

The Internet is made of stupid

"pass close enough to the planet that its gravitational pull would cause loads of earthquakes"

So this comet, it's not made of ice and rock like a normal comet, it is in fact Jupiter cunningly disguised as a comet? W...T...*F*, people?

Never mind Don's car, the simpletons who sit in their parents' basement eating bag after bag of Cheezy Poofs and posting daft conspiracy theories to the Internet exert more gravitational pull on the earth than a comet 22 million miles away does.

Paul RND*1000

I did think about it. The atmosphere means that a single large chunk with a mass of, for example, 100 tonnes, stands a much greater chance of reaching the ground with some intact mass than any one of 100 chunks each weighing 1 tonne do.

World Solar Challenge: Why the winners were so good

Paul RND*1000

Good point, with two caveats to what you said.

The first article in this series mentioned that drivers must weigh 80kg (I assume this is a minimum, it wasn't stated in the article). That means adding ballast to make the lighter guys weigh 80kg and you're not going to find any drivers weighing more than that being put in the cars for obvious reasons. You can safely assume that every car's driver in race get-up weighs exactly the same 80kg.

There are also limits on the wheels. They have to be road legal, whatever that means in this case, but super-skinny wheels may not meet that requirement. Special low-rolling resistance tires are a possibility though.

Crap alchemist jailed for poo-into-gold experiment

Paul RND*1000
Flame

Try again, this time after drinking vast quantities of Goldschläger.

Putting those faeces anywhere near a heat source might not be such an awesome idea though. Flames icon because, well, duh.

Sixth of Britain's cellphones have traces of poo on them

Paul RND*1000

I'll keep this in mind the next time I decide to lick some random person's mobile phone.

C and Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie reported dead

Paul RND*1000

Very much agree. As significant as Steve Jobs was in IT, Dennis Ritchie's impact was much deeper and wide-reaching.

Pay Jobs due respect - by crushing the empire he created

Paul RND*1000

"Who made up the rule about only using one OS or computer manufacturer your whole life?"

The same idiots who would rather argue endlessly online that "my <insert consumer electronics brand> is better than your <insert other brand>" rather than going out and proving their point by using the damn things to get shit done.

Too blinded by dogma to see that one size does *not* fit all (what a boring world *that* would be).

Would you trust a dot-bank site more than a dot-com?

Paul RND*1000
Thumb Down

I'll take a "no" please, Bob.

Banks and the finance industry as a whole have proven themselves entirely untrustworthy over the last few years.

I'd trust a .xxx site over a .bank because at least their intentions are honest and the people being screwed are there by choice and being paid for it.

Google hits the boozer with own brand of beer

Paul RND*1000
Happy

Someone was putting their 20% time to good use I see.

Paul RND*1000
Pint

Keep in mind this is the USA market we're talking about, where 24-packs of fizzy urine are often mistakenly labeled as "beer". I can't imagine how Carlsberg could be worse than those.

Paul RND*1000
Pint

There certainly is a lot of good beer available in the US if you avoid the mega-corporate-breweries that sponsor sporting events and churn the stuff out by the tanker-load.

The better known craft brands can even be found in the "beer" section of your friendly neighborhood megastore surrounded by the worthless pish you refer to.

The life and times of Steven Paul Jobs, Part One

Paul RND*1000

Indeed, as proved by the dozens of occasions where an obituary got published by accident when its subject was very much still alive.

It does allow for a much more complete obit though, which is why it's always been done this way.

Paul RND*1000

Sorry, but I had to downvote that. Uncalled for, N2.

Patent troll lawsuits may be on thin ice

Paul RND*1000

Oh, definitely the tea party if voters are dumb enough to allow them to.

But have a guess at what most of the tea party affiliated politicians were doing before they became politicians. (Clue: the same thing as most politicians were doing before they became politicians. Not only do we have a legal system created by lawyers, benefiting lawyers; the rotten bastards have taken over the political system as well.)

What's not in the iPhone 4S ... and why

Paul RND*1000
FAIL

This is why HTML5 REALLY needed a "SARCASM" tag.

Geez...

Fire burns away the Kindle dream of interactivity

Paul RND*1000

So they've proved that most people really can't be arsed being "producers" even if you make it ridiculously easy.

That's probably a good thing overall.

HideMyAss defends role in LulzSec hack arrest

Paul RND*1000
Big Brother

Their Ts&Cs "no illegal use" clause is almost immaterial; that they store anything at all for long enough to have to reveal it under court order calls the point of using their service into question. You never know when you might suddenly find yourself having "something to hide".

Law enforcement has proven time and again that it isn't above going on vague fishing expeditions backed by a court order (or local equivalent) and government has proven time and again that it's not above moving the goalposts to suit its own ends. There have been times in not too distant history where, practically overnight, it became a very bad thing indeed to have been opposed to, or even slightly critical of, some political or religious movement while that movement was making its way to power.

But do note that I stated "almost immaterial". Using a service which states "no illegal use" for something that's illegal when you do it is a pretty stupid move.

NASA to trial laser-powered space broadband

Paul RND*1000
FAIL

@The Mole

Just because you have higher speed options available for not too much more than 5 quid a month doesn't mean everyone else here does. Chances are OP would happily pay a reasonable amount for faster, reliable broadband IF IT WAS AVAILABLE. Chances are very good indeed that their broadband provider just flat out sucks and is incapable of providing a decent service at any price.

Oh sure, if you have endless supplies of cash you can get pretty much anything done. Otherwise you're stuck with what commercial providers offer, which sometimes isn't very good at all, sometimes isn't *anything* at all.

Rogue toilet takes out Norfolk server

Paul RND*1000
Facepalm

"Septic Shock Slays Server" ?

"Number too large" ?

"Make: Don’t know how to make clean."

I used to work with telephone exchanges and recall how we snickered during training when they started telling us about "big dumps" and "small dumps". Why yes, we *were* all straight out of university.

Facebook suggests sharing everything all the time

Paul RND*1000

“We wanted to make timeline a place you’re proud to call your home.”

That's a terrible analogy, unless your house has glass walls, no doors and a crowd of your friends (90% of whom you've never actually met in real life) always hanging around watching your every move.

I'll take a pass on this "feature" thanks.

Why was Duke Nukem Forever s**t?

Paul RND*1000

No good ever came of IT projects with this much slippage

When your software project slips so badly that you start to measure the development time in years rather than months, you might be screwed.

Smut domain scores big bucks for not handling smut

Paul RND*1000
Facepalm

So I take it Concerned Women of America won't be paying the one-time fee to protect their domain name (I assume they have one) from .xxx pornstar-dom then?

'Find My Car' iPhone app finds anyone’s car

Paul RND*1000

Those pay and display lots aren't really appropriate for this sort of scheme anyway. Most such lots I know are small enough that you shouldn't be misplacing your car in the first place. There are no barriers so all a would-be thief needs to do is pick a nice looking car, gain entry, get it to start, and drive it on out of there unimpeded. They don't need an app for that.

For parking garages with ticket dispensers and entry/exit barriers it would be a piece of cake for a *competent* development team to come up with something that works as intended AND is secure, as described by the post you replied to. Every large multi-level parking garage I've ever been in, both in the US and UK, works like this and those are the places where someone of sound mind could misplace an entire vehicle and spend a lot of time trying to find it on multiple levels.

It could even be extended to ensure that the vehicle exiting on a ticket is the same vehicle that entered on that ticket, so the tealeaf finding a dropped ticket can't just choose the nicest car in the garage and drive it out for the cost of a few hours' parking. The barrier won't open for them unless the car and ticket match. If the ticket doesn't obviously link to a specific car, good luck finding the right one on the first try.

With a properly designed system the only way a ticket could be linked to a vehicle by any outside observer would be if the driver dropped the ticket as they left their car, or left the ticket in the car where it could be found. That's not the parking lot operator's fault.

Note I stated "competent". Westfield's mistake was hiring incompetent developers.

Hacker defaces Irish Catholic paper: 'Gotta love false hope'

Paul RND*1000
Angel

Apple, duh.

Paul RND*1000
FAIL

You rather missed the point., ZankerH

Which was that those atheists who would force-feed their belief to everyone are no better than the religious types who do likewise.

Different dogma, same pain in the ass.

9/11: The day we lost our privacy and power

Paul RND*1000

I grew up in Northern Ireland during the peak of the Troubles, and you're absolutely spot-on. The attitude was generally one of "we won't let fear dictate what we do or how we live, if we do that the terrorists have achieved their goal". Yes, there were traffic checkpoints at times, yes there were bag searches in the larger stores in Belfast sometimes, and yet there was not the same sense of curtailed freedom and Big Brother surveillance that is present in the "free" world today.

To me, purposely refusing to live in fear is a simple concept, yet when I try to explain it to my American friends, it doesn't seem to sink in. Sadly there seem to be people in the UK who have the same problem understanding. How quickly we slipped from the Blitz/Troubles "screw you, business as usual" attitude to "OMG protect me from the bad people do whatever it takes". WTF??

Will the zeitgeist change back? Only if the people start to pay attention to what's really going on. That might require the press to grow a pair again and start shining light on the things that are happening. It sure as hell won't happen because of politicians.

Apollo 17 Moon landing: Shock revelations

Paul RND*1000
Pint

I'll have two of whatever it is Lester had for lunch today :)

McAfee: Cyber thugs will turn your car into Christine

Paul RND*1000

With the size and heft of smartphones these days...

...I think you could use one to remotely open the windows of any vehicle from a reasonable throwing distance. Your wonky BL clunker^H^H^H example of fine British automotive engineering included ;-)

Painters wrap Forth Bridge job after 121 years

Paul RND*1000

qjbhqb

Like staying opted-out of Facebook's privacy invasion schemes.

Nokia offers $10,000 for new ring tone

Paul RND*1000
Coat

For the classical music lovers

Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35, 3rd movement ought to sum their "new identity" up rather nicely.

Ford readies in-car Sync for 2012 release

Paul RND*1000

I'd like to see...

They should add a feature where if it detects you texting while at the wheel, it takes control, pulls over safely, opens the door, pitches you out onto the road, then deploys a telescopic foot to kick you up the arse a few times.

I once thought this Sync thing was a terrible idea. "Microsoft software in a car, OMG no!" Got to play with it in a rented 2010 Focus we had for a couple of weeks after one of our cars got totaled and it turns out it's really rather good.

Don't buy your iPad in a McDonald's car park

Paul RND*1000

She could always

Sell it on eBay as a "limited edition Apple promotional cutting board" or something. Except Apple would sue her.

The moral of the story: if you're going to insist on buying hooky goods in a car park, at least make sure they're what they say they are before you hand over the notes.

Apple ejects FT app from iTunes

Paul RND*1000

What is reasonable?

It costs money to build an app, plus the ongoing cost of Apple's cut of your subs. Then you also have to have an app for at least Android, maybe even Blackberry too. Then hope that Apple don't decide to hike their percentage without warning, or Android/Blackberry decide to follow the same model, thus screwing up your carefully calculated quarterly estimates.

It also costs money to build and run an HTML5 webapp, but you only need to do it once for all platforms and you don't have to pay a percentage to anyone. You can reasonably predict your ongoing costs to host and maintain the webapp, making the annoying beancounters happier.

Bearing all that in mind I figure "reasonable" would be somewhere well below the point at which building it in HTML5 starts to cost less over the lifetime of the product.

Sky makes iPad trolley for square-eyed shoppers

Paul RND*1000
WTF?

Oh yay!

The excitement of dodging sullen teens too busy texting to look where they're going was starting to wear off, now it'll be shopping carts full of soft drinks and frozen microwave meals steered randomly by oblivious morons.

What are these geniuses working on next? iPad steering wheel mounts so you can play Angry Birds while driving?

Kremlin green lights Siberia-Alaska tunnel

Paul RND*1000

Technology changes too fast.

And any technology manufacturer which doesn't already have the new shiny things shipped and waiting to go on the shelves by the launch date isn't going to be around for long.

Consumer goods aren't built to order. They're built to meet projected demand at the time they hit the stores. Sometimes the projections are a bit off, which is why you end up with shortages on unexpectedly popular items and warehouses stacked full of HP TouchPads nobody wanted to buy at the MSRP.

Facebook ditches Places - but embiggens location tracking

Paul RND*1000

So once again

We'll be checking our privacy settings to see what they're trying to sneak past. Thanks for the heads up!

Big pharma discredited by Twitter drug-pushing: Official

Paul RND*1000
FAIL

Lucky for you

Obviously you'll never have to worry about dealing with "chick crap". You might want to watch for carpal tunnel though, I hear that repeated back-and-forth motion can set it off.

Paul RND*1000

No

It's so that consumers don't get bombarded with the sort of crap they do in the US. If I "asked my doctor" about every prescription drug which I see advertised and which I somehow believed might possibly help me, I'd be on more medications than I could count and my entire paycheck would go straight to Big Pharmaceuticals (presumably to pay for more advertising).

It's comical, watching how they try to make these ads memorable while having to list the assorted nasty side-effects. But it must work, or they wouldn't bother.

I've sat in a doctor's waiting room where the patients and staff combined were outnumbered by drug company sales reps.

It's a big racket, designed to get as many people as possible on as many drugs as possible, to make as much money as possible. As far as I can see the biggest difference between their behavior and that of your local scumbag drug pusher is that the shady blingy dude on the corner isn't allowed to advertise his wares during the evening news broadcast.

That's why the PMCPA exists, to keep that slippery slope fenced off.

New Apple move against Galaxy Tab on Euro front

Paul RND*1000
FAIL

Dear Apple,

This sort of chickenshit anti-competitive bollocks is the EXACT reason I stayed away from Microsoft products for a long time.

Unlike Microsoft ca. 1994, I truly think your product can compete on merit. I've seen it and I like it. Microsoft had good reason to fear competition because their products at the time were steaming piles. The iPad isn't.

I used to like Apple. Now, not so much. Thank you for reminding me that corporations might sometimes deserve my business, but they NEVER deserve my loyalty.

Gerard Depardieu takes piss on plane, gets tossed off

Paul RND*1000

Toilet facilities

Which you can't use if we tell you to stay in your seat.

Piles of unshiftable HP fondle-slabs choke Best Buy

Paul RND*1000
Thumb Down

*sigh*

No, they want a tablet *which works*. The iPad happens to be one of very few which meet that requirement just now. HP's effort, not so much.

Europe's PC mountain barely dented in price slash bloodbath

Paul RND*1000

Figures, really

I wouldn't want to try doing my job using a phone or tablet, so there's a large PC with multiple monitors and scads of memory and storage at my desk.

On the other hand, outside of photo editing which I sit down at a desk and (easily upgradeable) desktop PC for, most of the day-to-day computing stuff I do at home is based on the couch where a phone or tablet would be a much better choice than the big ugly laptop I use now.

Most average consumers could survive without any sort of "PC as we know it" at all. Maybe that's what the figures are showing.

BBC explains 'All your Twitter pics are belong to us' gaffe

Paul RND*1000

"and it is true only the pro's or semi-pros seem to take umbrage"

Because they recognize the value of their work and that the value is measured in coin, not worthless "exposure" or "credit".

Most people don't bother because they don't realize their image has value, or they don't care because "OMGWTF I'm on the BBC!" or they're still naive enough to think that this will somehow be their "big break", or they've swallowed the "all information wants to be free" line without critically examining *who* it is that's pushing that agenda.

LinkedIn U-turns to appease peeved users

Paul RND*1000
WTF?

NO-tification?

So if you don't read the LinkedIn blog and do use an ad blocker, you wouldn't have known anything about this. Which explains why I didn't know anything about this...

They have my email address, surely this was important enough to warrant sending notification emails to the user base?

LinkedIn pulls Facebook-style stunt

Paul RND*1000
FAIL

Different audience

If LinkedIn want to go all Facebook on us with respect to privacy, they could do well to remember that the average LinkedIn user is a great deal more likely to pay attention to and care about this sort of thing.

It's not a population of bored teens who are perfectly OK with posting every intimate detail of what they do and where they go.

Mr Bean prangs £650k McLaren

Paul RND*1000
FAIL

"We're sorry but reader comments are currently unavailable"

So how many of those comments do you think were taking the Faily Fail to task for being sensationalist idiots and writing a headline which is almost completely unlike what actually happened?

Hobbyist killed by home-made hovercraft

Paul RND*1000
Coat

So?

"the part of the design they're referring to is the propulsion. which is the same in this case"

The Wright Flyer used rear-mounted props in a pusher configuration too. I don't hear anyone accusing *that* of being a hovercraft just because it happens to share a similar propulsion design.

Russia: 'We'll dump the ISS into the sea after 2020'

Paul RND*1000
Joke

Or...

I propose we send up some really large living quarters to add to it, enough to hold all the politicians and lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Then strap a bunch of Shuttle SRBs to it and light the fuse. Don't care where it goes as long as it's away from Planet Earth.

Toyota tech to steer cars round jaywalkers

Paul RND*1000
Facepalm

Awesome

From the company which brought you "unintended acceleration". No, I can't see what could possibly go wrong here.

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