* Posts by MyffyW

2013 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2013

Telly boffin Professor Heinz Wolff has died

MyffyW Silver badge

Prof Wolff and the Great Egg Race are the reasons I took apart various knackered household appliances and tried to cobble together improvised machines. I never got very far, but inspired a love of engineering that has lasted into well preserved middle age.

Forget Bruce Willis, Earth's atmosphere is our best defense against meteorites

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: So what happened to the 12,000 ton Chelyabinsk meteorite?

Must object to phrase in article that said "destroyed a lot more matter" - as others have noted it cannot have been destroyed (or converted to energy) or we'd all be lots of little pebbles orbiting in the goldilocks zone.

Barclaycard website goes TITSUP*

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Alas it was perfectly capable of telling me exactly how much Christmas has cost me so far...

SpaceX to try reusing both rocket and spacecraft for historic ISS mission

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Re: spaceshit Ctrl+W spaceship

Good for you @Duffy Moon. Being proud of my sexuality I'm certainly not adverse to Ladies Fingers being employed in this manner...

Bitcoin price soars amid technical troubles for exchanges

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Re: Can I buy Tulips with Bitcoin?

Let us raise a glass to Charles Ponzi (March 3, 1882 – January 18, 1949).

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Short

If I had a spare couple of quid (some hope at this time of year) I would definitely short BitCoin.

The key, as ever, is timing - or knowing quite when the whole shebang will come crashing down. End of 2018 is my best guess, there's still a few irrational expectations to be piled onto this Christmas turkey.

NiceHash diced up by hackers, thousands of Bitcoin pilfered

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Current situation seems to be a perfect storm of risky exchanges and (relatively) long lead times between asking to sell and the transaction completing.

And I still don't understand what problem a crypto-currency is actually solving for me: the only-slightly-paranoid (and very occasional) purchaser of politics, polemics and handbag-friendly phalli.

Hyperloop founder goes on immediate leave following sexual assault 'smear campaign'

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Re: Sexism in the Tech Industry

Just look at the stock photo El Reg used to trail the article. Doubt anybody on this august publication intended it to be salacious, but it is.

Viagra's Irish plant STILL giving local men and dogs stiffies (not really)

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Re: Drink

Sure, even the dogs on the street know the truth....

Once again, UK doesn't rule out buying F-35A fighter jets

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Why go totally F-35?

I used to think F/A-18 Hornet's were the answer (until fitting a catapult turned out to be more difficult than balancing several tonnes of aircraft on a jet exhaust).

Then I thought drones seemed like a good idea.

And then finally I thought sod it and decided it would be easier to learn French / German / Russian / Mandarin / Sanskrit [delete as foreign adversary changes] and really hit the military-industrial-complex where it hurts. Take your cancellation clauses and shove them up your venturi pipe, BAe.

Quentin Tarantino in talks to make Star Trek movie

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I'd pay to see Peter Capaldi reprising his Malcolm Tucker role aboard the TNG-era Enterprise:

"Ferengi! More like Snow White does seven dwarves. Rules of f#cking acquisition you say? Have you and Dick Twattington f#cked all the I's and fisted all the T's on the latest Private Finance Initiative?"

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Re: My first thought for casting was Samuel Jackson as the baddie

I vote for Amanda Plumber as the ships Empath:

"Any of you f##ing [species] move, and I'll execute every motherf##in' last one of you."

Citrix cracks Windows Store's monopoly on Windows 10 S apps

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"and bing"

The search engine of choice if you're the sort of person who places each-way bets.

Today is your last chance to pick up a piece of channel history

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Mystery Bidder

A certain Mr D McBride formerly of Linux sueball-emprorium SCO Group may be interested.

The six simple questions Facebook refused to answer about its creepy suicide-detection AI

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"The other outcome is they gain sentience from the farcebook users with the intelligence of a 4 year old child having a tantrum."

Ah, you've read the POTUS twitter feed then...

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Re: I wonder how many false positives they're getting...

$Deity save us from great men.

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Re: Don't go there

Some learned wonk on the Today programme the other morning suggested social media provides the same sort of dopamine hit as any other addictive behaviour. Having observed my own mood rise and fall based on likes and upvotes I'd tend to agree. So Facebook really is the last place a clinically depressed person should be. Still, if they were there anyway maybe a pop-up that said "Why don't you switch off your PC and do something more interesting instead?" would help...

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Re: SAD

My absence from Facebook is looking less and less like lethargy and more like (uncharacteristic) wisdom every day.

Elon Musk says he's not Satoshi Nakamoto and is pretty rubbish at Bitcoin

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Re: I am ...

Oengus - or should I say "Slippery Jim" ... thumbs up for the Harry Harrison reference.

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Re: I'm not Satoshi Nakamoto

I am not, and have never been, Satoshi Nakamoto. But for 50 btc I'd be very happy wearing the kimono...

Watchkeeper drones cost taxpayers £1bn

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Re: Sounds like we need to start another war

Syria has an air-defence capability which Taliban-held Afghanistan does not, hence the reluctance to use fairly slow moving drones. Plus we've got to get rid of (or justify) those bloody Tornadoes one way or another.

Russian rocket snafu may have just violently dismantled 19 satellites

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Lovely launch but a bit of a failure on the whole-rockety-delta-v-place-it-gently-in-the-right-place sort of thing. Still, on the plus side nobody died, unless Putin gets really upset and channels his inner-Blofeld.

Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Siemens tease electric flight engine project

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Re: Is the next version...

If we're going with church names it's "M-Y-F-A-N-W-Y" and I claim prior art.

'Water on Mars' re-classified as just 'sand on Mars'

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Re: but where were the spiders?

Guilty as charged, @Mark_85, although not in the Marianne Faithful way, I hasten to add.

[I really am so very glad I posted this....]

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but where were the spiders?

If ever we needed the manfromMars it was surely in this story...

Baaa-d moooo-ve: Debian Linux depicts intimate cow-sheep action in ASCII artwork

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Re: How SAD...

As a Welsh girl I feel it necessary to say "Baa" on behalf of all the sheep...

Bitcoin outfit 'Tether' reveals US$31m BitBuck BitHeist

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I feel like blockchain has become the default answer to any finance problem in the same way that dark matter is to matters of cosmology. However, dark matter is better understood.

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Re: Wording

Whilst I've always got time for an ex-Norwegian Blue (or any Python that doesn't involve coding), I think the "merely resting in my account" belongs to a certain Father Edward "Ted" Crilly of Craggy Island. But I accept the judgement on that might be an ecumenical matter ....

From Vega with love: Pegasus interstellar asteroid's next stop

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Re: To be honest...

I'll be happy with the petunias.

Nathan Barley blamed for global GDP slump

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Measure of Productivity

It's 4:25pm on a Monday. Does submitting commentard posts count as productive employment?

Warren 'Mr Moneybags' Buffett offloads huge chunk of IBM investment

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Living Modestly

...that will be the LearJet he bought which he humbly described as "The Indefensible"

He's a nice guy if you're a child in the third world saved from polio. Based on own experience I wouldn't choose to work for one of his companies though.

Rocky Ross 128 b might harbour aliens – and it's headed right for us

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Re: Memories

Ross 128 was on the trade route to nowhere if I recall correctly. Only reason to go there was to gain a permit or to conduct a photo recon mission for the Imperial Navy.

Q: Why are you running in the office? A: This is my password for El Reg

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In These Shoes?

My own gait differs markedly depending on whether I'm wearing my trade mark DMs or a pair of precipitous FMPs. For that matter even a choice of frock and foundation wear must have some effect?

World Vasectomy Day: 15k men line up for live vent-blocking

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Re: Friday?

A Friday afternoon vasectomy. What could possibly go wrong...

IBM asks remaining staff to take career advice from HR-bot

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My letters are in disorder

More of a Tom Robinson Band kind of girl, to be honest. But I'd be glad to sing with anybody... :-)

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Re: Butlerian Jihad???

Have an upvote for the Dune reference.

Thousand-dollar iPhone X's Face ID wrecked by '$150 3D-printed mask'

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Re: and Added a SILICONE NOSE for realism.

I know for a fact Janeway would use a PIN code - probably the Avogadro constant.

Rackspace, HPE pitch pay-as-you-go private cloud

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CIOs are becoming buyers of Cloud

As opposed to a rogue employee with a credit card? From a corporate point of view that's good news. But why does my mouth dry up imagining all the layers of management and obfuscation that will now embugger cloud implementations?

Los Alamos National Lab fires up 750-node RPi cluster

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Lego

Sorry, but once you ruled out Lego, all the enthusiasm drained from me

Parity's $280m Ethereum wallet freeze was no accident: It was a hack, claims angry upstart

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Re: Whilst I have sympathy..

"Tell me one country in the last 50 years, that ceased to exist , overnight and that had their currency made worthless"

Even with the examples quoted by @scrubber, nation-state Fiat currency is an order of magnitude more stable. Sure it can become worthless quickly, but nowhere near as quickly as someone can fettle with your e-tulips.

Munich council: To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020

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Thirty Eight

"I have in my hand a piece of paper"... well there was really no need to print it, hun. A PDF would have been as much use.

Stop your moaning, says maker of buggy Bluetooth sex toy

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Re: "We used it at a bar while playing pool"

It was the "six minutes" timeframe that I found particularly disappointing.... there's a lot to be said for long life batteries.

Teensy weensy space shuttle flies and lands

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Space fighter, or at least a toy for the very rich

I was really hoping I could lash a wicker picnic basket to the back, tie a silk scarf round my hair and still arrive looking every bit the thoroughly modern girl.

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Re: The critical detail...

12 yards long, 2 lanes wide,

65 tons of American Pride...

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Re: How teensie weensie exactly?

I would like to clarify that not all polka dot bikinis are itsy-bitsy.

As Anthony said to Cleopatra "Some girls are bigger than others"

Android at 10: How Google won the smartphone wars

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Re: Horsecrap

Forgive my ignorance - does "1st party" here refer to the rather small number of android handsets from Google themselves?

If so does that make Samsung a 2nd party, or a 3rd?

Genuinely curious...

NASA reconfirms 2019 will see first launch of Space Launch System

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Re: Opportunity missed

Should have used Inspiral Carpets Saturn V

Parity calamity! Wallet code bug destroys $280m in Ethereum

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Re: How many DevOps are we talking about here

Just a wild conjecture on my part - and happy to be proven wrong - but I have doubts that anybody calling themselves DevOps199 is particularly in touch with their feminine side.

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Re: Oh dear

We never had this much trouble with Tulip Bulbs

Paradise Papers reveal Apple moved bits of biz offshore

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Re: I saw that Paradise Papers programme

Mrs Brown's Boys is surely the living embodiment of Bread and Circuses (well Circuses anyway). Only our bankrupt age could have promoted it to prime time.