Posts by breakfast 1557 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007
So I know that parliament is subject to the rule of law, and that is what makes us a democracy and whathaveyou, but when they are being ripped off by contractors like BAE and us taxpayers are pouring income into these ridiculous and worthless contracts, could they not change the law a bit and get themselves out of it?
At least they get to purify it these days, unlike the hardy sailors of yesteryear:
"Is Captain Rum joining us for this bring-a-sample party, or is he going to sit this one out?"
"Oh no, he's been swigging his for ages. He says he likes it. Actually, come to think of it, he started before the water ran out."
"Similar boxes are used by managers of fleet vehicles and police forces, with dramatic improvements in accidents."
There weren't any fewer accidents, it's just that the ones that happened were more dramatic and provided a more significant opportunity for development of the personal plot arc of characters involved in the accidents. Although a road-safety disaster, the black boxes were considered a major theatrical success and very popular with the critics.
The problem I'm seeing is that nobody appears to be building any nuclear capacity ready for the future. What is going on with that? It takes years to build power stations doesn't it? Why are our so-called representatives sitting around on their flabby asses crying about the world knowing how much of our money they have squandered on expenses rather than doing something worthwhile and averting a future energy crisis.
The evidence I've heard, from people who worked with statistics under various governments over the last thirty years, is that the Tories, particularly later in their reign, were deeply abusive of statistical evidence ( or refused to collect it if they thought it might make them look bad ) and the 1997 labour victory was a breath of fresh air. I wonder if it's just another symptom of an old tired administration that has nothing left to it but hubris and lies.
It seems like every laptop maker is out on this crazy "widescreen laptop" thing at the moment that means that if one was to buy a laptop with a 15" screen the actual visible height is no better than on a netbook with a regular proportion 10" screen so you end up needing a huge screen just to get enough scroll height that you can have more than your browser's toolbars visible...
For some reason I saw the surname and my brain filled in "John Shuttleworth" rather than Mark, which made the rest of the article very confusing. However, I think that maybe John Shuttleworth should be making some of these presentations as I'm sure they would make more sense to the man in the street.
It does count as ROTM because these engines will surely be going in drones and whathaveyou. So yes, soon they will be able to kill and eat us meatbags at will. Huge robotic eagles swooping down, laser eyes blasting, to grab puny humans into their huge fuel scoops for "processing".
I, for one...
This is spot on. We don't need to care how data is stored or processed, we just need to have a standard for what data is stored and for how that data is made available for other systems/providers. A set of standards and interchange formats would facilitate diverse solutions and a more balanced market while avoiding the creation of monolithic centralised systems.
"In Britain, we had actual socialism in the telephone service and abandoned it. This was a good thing,"
Have you dealt with BT lately? I cannot imagine there is any conceivable way in which they could possibly offer a worse service to customers. They are an attrocious disaster of a company. Even NTL at their worst, who I was also a customer of, can't touch BT for sheer terribleness. I'm all for Telephone Socialism if it isn't what BT are now.
I'm sure someone who knows electricty will be able to explain- does this magnetic induction thing mean that any ferrous metals nearby will be attracted/repelled/magnetised?
Will it affect my precious collection of stereo cassette tapes, which I used to kill music through the medium of home taping back in the nineties.
... but fewer people would be good news for the planet, no question. Resources are kind of limited and as a species we do tend to be pretty greedy. Given that contraception is probably the least painful route to fewer people in future, it seems like something of a no-brainer.
Hey! No-op is the machine code for... oh, wait.
I bet the extremely smart and technically literate engineers at Google never thought of that at all. Well spotted folks.
I guess if they couldn't get away with "noop" as "no-op" I'd find my local coop only stocked eggs.
Given the constant hassle they're giving my wife, in spite of her regularly providing all the required information for ongoing deferment and the frequent opportunities they take to steal money from her with neither the right nor permission, I expect they're too busy with their embarrassingly fumbling and shockingly incompetent debt-collection oafs to remember to lend any new students money.
Good work, Science, this is exactly the kind of information we need to make decisions in our daily lives.
I feel vindicated in my choice of gingernuts and jaffa cakes as my biscuits of choice, although I suppose in the interests of threat mitigation we should all be nomming as many custard creams as possible in an attempt to eradicate this threat once and for all.
Presumably to allow the targeting of web 2.0 powered Twitterhawk missiles.
Anyway, I thought Twitter was utterly pointless drivel until I discovered The Longest Poem In The World ( http://www.longestpoemintheworld.com/ ) now I think it is pointless but often hilarious *rhyming* drivel...
So the more we diffuse our attention across different media the worse we are at concentrating? And thanks to the internet we have a device for diffusing our attention almost impossibly thin.
I suggest this is a plot on the part of our future AI overlords to create a slave race with the attention-span of gnats who are able to do little more than gibber and carry out simple instructions for them. Or perhaps provide fuel for their meat-harvesting killbots.
Not optimistic, I admit, but we'll see who is right when the robot swarms sweep them to power and we're too busy checking twitter, facebook, five different forums and the Register to even notice.
I find it funny that the internet is now old enough that Register readers are now the middle aged generation frowning on the antics of those pesky kids over on 4chan.
Don't worry, guys, in time the circle will turn and 4chan will become a respectable middle-aged site complaining about how those kids over at some other site are all taking things too far and how we never did that stuff in my day.
Sometimes I think about times I spent playing games and it seems like such non-achievement, so far from being anything real, that it's like big chunks of my life just gone for no return. All those times I killed ten Fozzbears and three Greater Fozzbears in Wow so some dude with a questionmark over his head could tell me to kill ten greater Fozzbears and three Dire Fozzbears, well, in retrospect that time could perhaps have been better spent. But then the time I played right the way through Quake on co-op with three friends, that was pretty much awesome.
I guess it comes down to what you want your life to have been about when you look back on it from your deathbed- do you want to count your achievements in the wider world, whatever their magnitude, or how many Dire Fozzbears you did away with and how epic your mount was. It doesn't really matter which, as long as you can have your expectiations set.
Mr Metric is a little known superhero whose powers largely revolve around the ability to convert inches to centimetres really quickly. He's also quite handy between litres and pints.
His nemesis is The Emperor, whose irrational Imperial System drives him into fits of apoplexy and whose constant taunts about Mr Metric's manliness ( some things will always be measured in inches ) often haunt the superhero as he lies awake through the long hours after midnight, imagining himself heroically opening the eyes of the world to his more rational system of measurement.
So is "bing" now being used as a verb to mean "looking for something but not quite being able to find it?"
Like when you bing for scissors by wandering around the house making "scissors" kind of motions with your hands? Or the other day when I was binging for my wallet and then remembered I had left it on the desk at home?
If so, that's actually quite a useful word.
During the period that we were stuck with mobile broadband while BT spent a few weeks arbitrarily cutting off our ADSL with neither warning nor explanation the speed was fine.
The little USB modem, however, is an absolute pain in the ass. It drops out on a regular basis, if you don't connect to the service in the first minute or two after starting up then you're not going to unless you unplug the modem and plug it back in enough times and in the correct sequence to proptiate the insane gods of mobile broadband service.
But when the service was accessible, it was fine. Not amazing, but quite useable.
I'm amazed they even know the words "Customer Service" at BT. My experience has been that even the most theoretically simple interactions turn into bizarre kafkaesque meanderings through the twisted layers of their insane beaurocracy. I have never had such irritating dealings with any company and I used to have my phone line with NTL.
It's the Jazz part of this story that worries me. It seems as though whenever I'm stuck in the endless trail of traffic behind some relentlessly sluggish gimmer or other pedlar of exquisite slowness they are driving a Honda Jazz. The last thing we need is an excuse for them to go even more slowly.
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