* Posts by Steve 48

38 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2009

Story gone

Steve 48
Paris Hilton

Re: My Impersonation of these Questionnaires

>> Are you a banker or a tax accountant?

No - it's clearly George Osborne...

Paris 'cos it's Friday!

RAC's Bristol data centre breaks down

Steve 48
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Re: Hmm, considering...

Plod uses MID (Motor Insurers Database), which can take up to 7 days (14 for comercial and fleet policies) to be updated from individual insurers, as Plod requires "reasonable grounds" for ticketing/further actions/seizure he/she can't rely solely on MID & so they are supposed to check directly with the insurer before proceeding. If Plod is unable to cofirm with the insurer for technical reasons, the most they can do is issue a "Producer" notice requring you to prove your insurance within 7 days, that is unless of course there are other contributory factors - i.e. you are carrying 8 passengers in a Mini whilst being 5 times over the blood alcohol limit and doing 85 mph in a 30 zone!

BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH

Steve 48
Holmes

And...

Add to that a whole pile of "Lightscribe" disks that the MD wanted 'cos paper labels or marker pen are naff, whereas having a unusable for 25 minutes whilst the disk is being titled with "Holiday Pics" is so cool that only 6 out of 350 disks have been used, three of which were me setting up and demonstrating the process!

LOHAN to straddle meaty titanium rod

Steve 48

Bending rods

As mentioned elsewhere, using a supported guide rod with C shaped bearings would ensure that the rod remains parallel to the truss, otherwise you may end up with the nose of the orbiter hitting the truss during ascent and take-off, unless you have some cunning method of coutering the bending moment of a long rod! A cheaper option to using titanium might be something from the DryLin range from Igus - it's available in all sorts of shapes and sizes & it has good low-temperature characteristics. You might even be able to blag some "samples" - they're usually pretty accomodating.

Austrian daredevil Baumgartner skydives from 71,581ft

Steve 48
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Re: on his way down...

Oh no, not again.....

Parasites spark swarm of zombie bees

Steve 48
Coat

But...

... can a bee be said to be or not to be an entire bee when half the bee is not a bee, due to some unsavoury larvae?

Channel 5 snubs Freeview HD again

Steve 48

Actually the +1 channels are useful (on Sky at least) - occasionally when channel hopping I stumble across something interesting half way through a program - if it's a channel with a +1 partner I can watch the +1 version. Plus it's sods law that on the increasingly rare occasions when there is something on worth watching there's two other programs on at the same time that I want to watch or record.

ISS 'nauts need not fear head-on space junk smashup

Steve 48
Joke

They need to get rid of all that old space junk - what they need is a big vacuum....

Microsoft to offer dual upgrade path for Windows 8

Steve 48
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I never run an upgrade, I always do a fresh install on a clean disk - that way if it goes wrong I can simply swap the original disk back in. Okay it can be a bit of a bind re-installing all the apps that I use, but on the upside it means that the ones I don't use anymore don't get installed and all the little bits that get left behind from an un-install are gone too & the registry is cleaner.

UK nuclear: Walking into darkness with eyes screwed shut

Steve 48
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Whilst the figures on health are "economical with the truth" in the article, we don't know how many cancers and deaths etc have been caused by burning fossil fuels - it wouldn't surprise me if an accurate factual study could be undertaken it show it roughly even across most forms of energy production. And if you can provide clear accurate factual evidence of these "cheaper and cleaner alternatives" then I might drop support for nuclear!

Buxom soul diva to show a real use for NFC at last!

Steve 48
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Urge to press a big red button

Reminds me of a Father Ted episode which is far more enjoyable than trudging into the centre of Cambridge & taking out a mortgage for car parking just to watch a Z list *celeb* who ranks even lower than the moronic numpties on the psuedo local radio station pressing a button/waving a phone under the pretence of turning on naff lights that waste money and energy half of which will fail before Cristmas - oh bah humbug!

Hypersonic missile successfully hits Ronald Reagan

Steve 48
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Doh...

Yet again Mr Page shows his lack of military knowledge and understanding. Tomahawk-esque cruise misiles have a much lower thermal bloom and tend to be launched from mobile platforms so hence are much less likely to be observed/detected being launched compared with an ICBM launch from a silo in a fixed location with massive bloom. ICBMs have largely been directly associated with nuclear weaponry so on seeing one or more unexpected launches one may reasonably expect it to be some form of nuclear attack.

Amazon's new Kindle Fire stripped naked

Steve 48
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Actually quite easy - I've sucessfully done it loads of time on similar arrangements using a hot air gun and a pot of liquid flux. You have to be carefull with the temperature, length of time that you blast and the direction of the airflow, but it can be done. You can also get table top ovens for about £100 (£200 with PID power controller) that do quite a nice job.

Lego movie greenlighted by Warner Bros

Steve 48
Coat

Arghhh......

Just when I'd managed to lock all memory of "that" film away from my conciousness someone has to go and mention it again! Hey-ho back to see my therapist.

Mine's the one with the ACME anvil in the pocket...

A tenth of Chinese farmland polluted by heavy metals

Steve 48
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Actually the bigger imapact is from WEEE - we're not allowed to dump anything in the EC so it has to be recycled. In reality this means sending it to China where the recycling process is more about extracting the most profitable materials for the least cost with no regard to the effluents produced.

Modern lead free solders are actually as good as traditional leaded solders for most applications provided they are handled and used correctly - many assemblers actually went Pb free long before RoHS was mooted. The higher incidence of early life failures is more to do with the low-cost manufacturing processes and counterfeit components, as high volume production has moved towards China so the level of ELFs hase increased. In over ten years of overseeing production (and repairs) of numerous electronic products, the only time I have seen issues with lead free solder joints was when we tried a budget assembly service.

Fujitsu busts K super through 10 petaflops

Steve 48
WTF?

Reg units

I refuse to accept Petaflops - can we have it in terms of ZX81s instead?

Bill seeks to decriminalise pianos in pubs and schools

Steve 48
Boffin

If my memory serves correctly...

It all depends on the type of average used - most people think in terms of the Arithmetic Mean average, but there is also such things as Modal and Median averages, plus lots of variations on them and some nasty statistical averages that aren't really averages to most people.

...mines the one that looks a bit like an anorak...

Google confirms US antitrust probe

Steve 48
Flame

Yay

Okay, let's put this into the context of supermarkets ... Tesco offers a wide range of "answers" or products from a wide range of providers, including a large range of own brand ones. Because Tesco has become so big and dominant, we now want them offer items from the Sainsbury's range - that doesn't seem too-onerous, except that we want Tesco to put the Sainsbury products in prominent positions and pass all proceeds from selling those items back to Sainsbury's - not even taking a cut for overhead costs!

Makes great sense to me!

Robot air fleet can launch mid-air from cargo plane's ramp

Steve 48
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And the winner is...

Hmm, according to good ol' LP we could dispense with expensive fighters - so what's protecting the bridcage/trash hauler whilst on approach and launch? Even third world nations can field half decent fighters capable of knocking out a C-130.

Spectre/Spooky (AC-130), whilst a great weapons platform, is only any better for close support than fast air when all reasonable anti-air threats & fighters have neutralised otherwise it's vulnerable.

Brazilians slap health warnings on knickers

Steve 48
Joke

Can't resist, but...

I say knickers to this pants idea!

Death threats against 'worst song ever' YouTube teen

Steve 48
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You asked for it...

Oh freddled gruntbuggly

thy micturations are to me

As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.

Groop I implore thee,

my foonting turlingdromes.

And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles

Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts

with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!"

MythBusters: Savage and Hyneman detonate truthiness

Steve 48
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Yawn..........

Theese guys annoy me to hell - apart from the oh-so-obvious poor scripting and execution of the script, most of their experiments wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. They tend to run their tests based on very narrow assumptions that have been tailored to give the answers they want, then claim that a myth is busted based on absence of a "sucess"; also much of the "science" they base their experiments on is wrong. At least with Brainiac they got the right mix of tongue-in-cheek, eye candy, presenters and assorted explosive materials.

Ofcom calls on BT Openreach price cuts for ISPs

Steve 48
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Yah, right...

Virgin won't provide a service to our village beacause it's "economically unviable", even though some of their high capacity backbone fibre runs less than 1m from my front door. There is a proposed new housing develpment, BT have said that if it goes ahead then they will upgrade the local infrastructure; Virgin response - it's not even worth providing it in the new development - depsite new build being far cheaper to install to / getting the developer to pay for!

BT are investing in areas where they will get a modest return that will help to fund investment in low return areas - that's how the ADSL rollout was done

NO-SH*T CURE FOR BALDNESS discovered by accident

Steve 48
Paris Hilton

Sooo....

...how long before the V1agra bunch start touting this?

Paris 'cos, well, erm I wonder if she knows anything about a particualr form of baldness?

New RAF transport plane is 'Euro-w*nking makework project'

Steve 48
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Yawn...here we go again!

Bunk and junk...journalism is supposed to be about reporting the facts and maybe a bit of speculation with some spin on the side, instead here we have yet another case of puffing out a 3 or 4 para story by regurgitating the same old anti european/buy USoA tripe. What should have been a story about some has-been in ermine making comments after one too many sherberts has been turned into yet another diatribe. Change the record will ya...

Little Chef in 'I ♥ Charlie' t-shirt outrage

Steve 48
Joke

Perhaps

they ought to do a fleece version - it's what they've been doing to anyone gullible/desperate enough to walk through their doors!

Spuds for laptop fraudsters strike in Huntingdon

Steve 48

Easy

It doesn't say they got the money from a cash machine! According to the BBC and Hunts Post they withdrew the money from the Bank - Lloyds IIRC.

Steve 48
FAIL

Actually...

I can quite believe it as I live near Huntingdon. There's the "Oxmoor" estate there where half the population behave like (and may well be) drug dealing crims, the other half (mainly chavs) give credence to the local joke name of "Oxmorons" & to be honest many of the residents of nearby towns and villages are as bad.

BT bids bumpkins to beg for better broadband

Steve 48
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Title

I hate to come to the defence of Broken Telecom, but...people seem to forget that since good ol' Mrs T sold it off it is no longer there to provide a public service - it is a commercial entity and is duty bound to try and make as much dosh for its shareholders - rolling out this tech to everywhere will not necessarily achieve that. What I suspect is really going on here is that BT are trying to guage the overall demand for FTTC/FTTH in a slightly more inspiring way than they did with the BB rollout. At least BT are looking at widely rolling out as a posed to a certain competitor that refuses to invest in networks to new areas. The only response I ever get from a certain competitor is that bringing their services to our village would be prohibitively expensive despite them owning a multi-channel high capacity fibre link (with spare capacity) running 2 foot from my front door along the main street in the village & they have never canvassed the area to determine demand.

Koran-burning 'pastor' loses website

Steve 48
Grenade

Pot calling kettle...

One of the justifications this nut job gave was about the link between Islam and terrorism - how about he reads the history books about things such as the crusades, witches, the inquistion and the sectarian violence in Ireland - violent episodes *justified* by radicalised christian views. Perhaps this guy should extend his event to include bible burning too, no scrub that - let's have a tw*t burning instead!

NASA 'nauts wrap ISS pump job

Steve 48
Boffin

But

Much higher, you forgot to include working on a Sunday - another 2x$500 and most importantly the call out charge - $1.3 billion, but since they were in the area you get a bit of a discount - call it $600 million. Tell you what - make it a nice round $500 million cash & by the way you ought to sue the clowns that installed the first one - absolutely shocking workmanship...

Hoodies swipe bus for YouTube joyride

Steve 48
Joke

Doh...

Am I the first to say they were Bus-ted?

There really ought to be something like the Darwin awards for dumb tw*ts that are stupid enough to a) pinch a bus and b) post the footage on the net.

Atlantis spacewalkers snapped through shuttle windows

Steve 48
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Erm....

I may be wrong, but aren't pencils in space a bad thing ... especially the "mechanical" type that are prone to snapping off. Small lumps of conductive graphite floating uncontrollably around all that sensitive electronic kit could result in a panicked call to Housten!

UK competition authority probes Amazon

Steve 48
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Erm...

I'm with Amazon on this one - if it's being sold via their site, surely they have the right to define the pricing structure. Anyone who wants to sell via Amazon chooses to do so under their terms and conditions - if you don't like the T&Cs then go elsewhere!

RAF's new military airlifter finally lumbers into the air

Steve 48
Paris Hilton

Six figure payoff?

"Never mind that, as is usual in these cases, we could almost certainly give every sacked British worker a six- or even seven-figure payoff"

Someone must have been bottom of the economics class - if we hand a big pile of money over to Uncle Sam for the alternative it won't be floating around our economy, therefore a whole load of taxable transactions won't be occuring and so UK.Gov won't have money to make the payoffs, so even less money runs around and fewer transactions result in less tax so the UK.Gov has to make more cuts, resulting in fewer transactions....ad nauseum all at a time when we are trying to pull out of recession!

Perhaps we should all club together and buy Lewis a one way ticket to the USofA since he's such a fan!

Paris 'cos she probably understands more than LP.

Microsoft and EU close on browser settlement?

Steve 48
FAIL

Oh go and get a life...

So MS are not allowed to sell their own product with their own free software installed, coupled with Mr Opera (how appropriate - alot of incoherent nonsenical warbling!) wanting MS to stop using a long established brand/trademark. As for not organising the ballot list alphabetically - that's just sour grapes given that Chrome and Firefox would be higher than (W)IE and Opera - maybe they should change their product to be AAA Opera. I'm no MS fanboi, but I do think they get alot of unwarranted hassle just for having done a good job at dominating a market for something that is free!

Michael Dell: Netbooks go sour after 36 hours

Steve 48
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Duh...

The problem is not the products, but people mis-understanding what they are - netbook != notebook. If you want something light to fit in your/your missus' handbag to browse t'internet, check emails and type the odd document on then a netbook is ok, but if you want to watch pr0n in HD then a notebook is what you want!

Microsoft's browser ballot bodge gets the nod

Steve 48
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Waste of time...

Clearly the clueless morons that run the EU don't understand that supplying IE pre-installed doesn't prevent users from choosing to install a different browser, which is more than can be said for buying cars. If I buy a Ford, I can't ask them to fit a Mercedes odometer display - why should Windows be any different - especially as you are not paying for IE.