Hold on...

15 fcuking miles long???? This thing's got a starring role in a future Michael Bay movie!

'Gordon Brower with the North Slope Borough's Planning and Community Services Department told the paper he saw some jellyfish tangled up in the goo and someone else retrieved bones and feathers from a dead goose.'

This thing's carnivorous???

We are so boned...

...on the upside it might be the only thing to save us all from Lewis' refrigerator-sized immortal jellyfish (El Reg passim).

I wonder how it handles Humvee sized Arctic spiders???

@ Parax

'Thanks, that would be a good half hour (45mins?) after launch then?! I could have sworn they dropped it way earlier (shortly after meco) I obviously spent to long listening and not watching...'

You're right, the ET's jettisoned about 8 1/2 minutes after launch just after MECO; but it's only just sub-orbital so the burn-up is between 60 and 80 minutes after launch. It only needs a small change in velocity to put it into LEO, so during the 1980s there were a number of studies about putting the ET into orbit as the basis of a space station.

Yesterday's launch is here, the tank is jettisoned around 9 minutes in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_MlgxV1lqo

@ Elsie

'Get there before they finish!'

Yep, there's going to be a big gap in launches before the Ares V flies.

NASA doesn't have that launching until 2018; but that's going to be a monster - 110m tall and 3,300 tonnes - it'll be like the good old days of the Saturn V. Now if only they'd built the Nova - that'd have been TWICE as powerful as the Saturn V; and if they hadn't had a sudden attack of 'what if it all went wrong?', the upper stage would have been nuclear.

If only they'd put Gerry Anderson in charge of the space programme.

@ Anonymous Coward

'Not surprisingly this went down like a lead balloon with the NI Unionists...'

I wonder if this was a concession demanded by the Unionists in exchange for the support they're regularly giving the government to overcome Labour rebels on the backbenches?

Ummm folks...

He's not expecting to receive $5 million. It's a class action suit which if Amazon were found liable would see $5 million - expenses shared amongst the plaintiffs.

That's not to say $5 million is a reasonable sum, it's hard to see how they came to that number without knowing precisely how many cases have been sold and I doubt Amazon have released that number.

@ Parax

'So does anyopne know where they dropped the Main Tank last night??'

It's jettisoned into the Indian Ocean, but they ensure it tumbles on re-entry so that it breaks up at altitude.

Still not sure what they're planning on selling

After all, Microsoft doesn't make computers. Go into an Apple Store and you see the software running on an Apple machine you can buy there and then. Go into a Microsoft store and - ummm...

They'd be foolish to tie the XBox brand too closely to the rest of Microsoft, part of the console's success is that it's seen as 'cool' - something Microsoft isn't. To a lesser extent Zune benefits from not being seen as a Microsoft product.

But if the stores are going to concentrate on selling software and improving user skills they're going to be seen as copies of the Apple Store Genius Bars and professional sessions.

So is this anything more than Microsoft once again deciding it has to compete in a market just because someone else is making money from it?

Oh well, if nothing else I guess we'll all get to play with Surface.

Any idea...?

Why the BBC no longer has the rights to them?

@ EnricoSuarve

Good points.

I'm guessing the voicemail is being highlighted because the NotW would have hoped they'd get a juicy bit of gossip from one sleb or another along the lines of who's shagging who and how often and what flavour dildo was inserted where.

How much...

...of the drop in emissions is down to the Conservatives closing coal mines and switching to gas-fired electricity production? (Policies I think the likes of Gordon Brown opposed in Opposition)

Because I'm buggered if I can think of anything this government's done to reduce emissions. Well apart from screwing up the whole economy so spectacularly that there won't be a factory left in the country and we'll all be too poor to fill up the car. Taking us back to the Dark Ages will have a nice effect on CO2.

It is now imperative that...

...a PlayMobil reconstruction is made available ASAP - I'm having trouble visualising some of the finer details such as whether Optimus Prime was the Matron of Honour.

@ ElNumbre

'Other than having the ability to make the SRB's fall into the ocean, rather than on someone's house, is there any other reason why they don't launch shuttles from the drier Nevada desert rather than the tropical Florida coast?'

Not really. Canaveral had always been there so that missile tests could drop harmlessly into the Atlantic so it made sense to keep on using it. As Ian R 1 says above, you also get a small extra kick into orbit by moving the launchpad closer to the Equator.

The Shuttle was originally also going to fly out of Vandenberg AFB on the Californian coast to put military satellites into polar orbits - the SRBs dropping into the Pacific. Although the USAF had been the biggest influence on the Shuttle's final design, they dropped it like a hot potato after Challenger and went back to big expendable launchers.

Which in a way was a good thing. The Soviets were terrified the Shuttle could be used to lob a huge nuclear weapon over the North Pole as a first strike weapon. Scrapping polar flights solved that little Cold War nightmare. But not before the Soviets bankrupted themselves by building their Buran Shuttle capable of doing just the thing they were worried the Americans were planning.

Oh how we miss those days of bat-shit insane paranoia.

@ TeeCee

'What's the runway for?'

Landing in the event of an emergency.

HOWEVER - the Shuttle has real problems with bad weather in the event of an abort. The first being that it has a sink rate about that of a brick and is extremely vulnerable to side winds - there's no 'go around' if it can't land - so the weather has to be calm.

The second is that the heat tiles form the aerodynamic surface of the Shuttle; flying through large raindrops or hail could shred the coating on the wings, destroying the lift and - well that gets nasty. NASA was very strongly condemned for launching into heavy clouds shortly before Challenger made its final flight.

@ Dave Page 2

'Is there a technical reason for the seemingly random launch time? I'm (perhaps naively) assuming that it's not a case of launching at that precise time so they can fly in a perfectly straight line to the docking port on the ISS.'

Pretty much it - the launch window is when the orbital plane of the ISS intersects Kennedy. It's actually a window opening at 19:34 and closing again at 19.44. The Shuttle tries to launch right in the middle of that window to reduce the amount of maneuvering needed to intercept the ISS. There's a similar length window open for each of the next few days.

The Shuttle's launch window is further constrained as NASA tries to launch when the transAtlantic abort sites are in daylight. If the Shuttle has a major failure - such as the loss of two engines before main engine cut-off it doesn't have enough velocity to go once around the Earth and return to the US, and it's going too fast and too high to return to Kennedy, so the plan would be to hop across the Atlantic and land the orbiter at one of several extremely long runways including RAF Fairford, Zaragoza and Keflavik.

HTH.

Oooh please sir, please sir!!!!

Change one word from the current TV Licensing advert so it's now

'YOU'RE in the database'

That'll be ten million quid, a Lear Jet full of hookers and a bin bag of the finest Bolivian please.

@ Joe Zeff

Absolutely.

Until we have evidence that Galileo described Neptune as a planet, then the first person to observe *and recognise it as such* was Johann Galle in 1846. We still credit William Herschel with discovering Uranus even though it had been recorded in observations as far back at the late 17th Century, but always marked as a star.

Tough choice...

Which is the more appalling prospect - swine 'flu or watching cricket for a couple of weeks?

Isn't lassa fever an option?

Oh and I thought it was going to be bouncy

All those big rounded corners and bright colours had me hoping they'd designed a neoprene or silicone covered netbook that could take a tumble. A ruggedised model would go towards justifying that price.

But as J 3 says above, wake me up when there's something new...

...you know radical stuff like higher resolutions or more than 1Gb RAM, or a browser that thinks it's an operating system ;)

4kg?

And it seems to be mostly made of plastic. Have they stuffed half a brick in there or something?

@ ChrisInBelgium

'Just bought 'Digital Fortress' by Dan Brown for € 7.50 - with free delivery. '

In the name of sanity - WHY????

@Paul Coen

'And software. Telling someone "Hey, stop using Photoshop Elements and use this thing called 'GIMP' instead" gets you funny looks. The stupid name is half of it, of course, a common problem with many open source packages.'

One reason not to use GIMP for photographs is that it is still limited to 8-bit TIFF. After finally getting photographers to start using RAW, it'd be a huge backward step to ask them to start using an inferior piece of software.

And the name's shite as well.

Ummm... this has been tried

It wasn't that long ago that an iron fertilisation experiment was tried in the Antarctic Ocean which is also iron deficient.

The phytoplankton bloom - and are almost immediately gobbled up by exploding populations of zooplankton which feed fish... This keeps the majority of the carbon in the upper part of the water where it can re-enter the atmosphere rather than sinking it to the ocean sediments where you want it.

http://www.awi.de/en/news/press_releases/detail/item/lohafex_provides_new_insights_on_plankton_ecology_only_small_amounts_of_atmospheric_carbon_dioxide/?cHash=1c5720d7a1

The only new thing here is that the North Atlantic is poorer in dissolved iron than we thought.

Mind you if the Icelanders are clever they'll fertilise the oceans, get more plankton, which are gobbled up by copepods, which are then snacked on by capelin which go on to feed minke whales - which are delicious and best served rare with a portion of guilt on the side.

Kind of pretty - but...

...the styling makes it look like my Dyson's long-lost cousin.

@ Anonymous Coward

'What I just love is all that pre-packaged pre-cooked food that comes with lovely bright pictures on the packaging and the printed phrase "Serving suggestion". Which sounds like some kind of a recipe, but is in fact usually just a euphemism for "Rip off the lid and slap it on a plate."'

Believe it or not, it's a legal get-out; by putting 'serving suggestion' next to a picture of a delicious egg with buttered soldiers they protect themselves from morons who might sue them expecting to find spread and the Light Infantry inside the carton.

Hold on- where is she?

Everyone knows the reason the Eee was so successful was that the Reg only ever featured the netbook with it's beach-loving best friend.

If you want to dominate the World, the RegPad will also need its own nubile handler. Have you seen if Paris is available for photos and fondling?

'15 markets worldwide'

So that'd be China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus...

'soon be reduced to "substantial"'

Does anyone ever expect the terrorometer to fall to 'normal'? Just like the Department of Homeland Security has never bother setting the threat level to blue or green.

If things look dodgy for the police budget, expect them to leak a few stories about 'active plots', 'imminent threats' and 'intelligence sources' in the sympathetic parts of the media. Then they'll announce the threat level has been raised to 'trouser filling' as a precaution against Al Qaeda unleashing radioactive badgers on the Tube and the money will come flooding in.

Hopefully...

These will be placed alongside the pre-peeled oranges (no really) and bottled water, so the terminally stupid don't have to wander too far from the carers.

But what shape bottom is it?

(Oh do stop sniggering!)

Is it a U, a V, a W or an L?

Huh?

From the BT Spokesdroid: 'we don't have immediate plans to deploy Webwise today.'

Clearly they're not excluding the devious possibility of having long-term plans to deploy Webwise today.

Oh well, can't cry. Anything that's bad for the likes of Patricia Hewitt and Norman Lamont has to be good for us.

LROC resolution

Is 50cm per pixel (http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/EPO/LROC/lroc.php?pg=specifications)

And the LMs won't be slightly different from the surface, they will be blindingly different - the lunar surface is very dark, they are covered in reflective mylar; they will also be casting shadows. Depending on the angle of the Sun it should also be reasonably easy to see the trails left by the lunar rovers and hopefully also by the Soviet Lunokhods.

Whether we can find Al Shepard's Apollo 14 golf ball is another question.

'suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface'

With no atmosphere and a - 233C to +123C temperature variation I think it's more than 'suggesting' it's inhospitable.

@ Anonymous Coward and @ Spielberg while I'm about it

'He doubled the size of the raptors to make them look impressive.'

He did, then the palaeontologists went and uncovered Utahraptor which stood up to 2m tall and is best described as combined the cuddly nature of the great white shark with the contents of Gordon Ramsey's knife rack.

Ship names

The only thing that will boost morale on the USS Gerald R Ford is that they won't be crewing the USS George W Bush.

@ Frank Bough

'What does the 'thopter design offer over a rotary wing alternative?'

The opportunity to acquire bags of DARPA funding.

Nic Cage on line one...

...apparently he's up for the lead role in my musical remake of 'Pong' also starring the late Peter Lorre as the evil 'bat on the right'.

@DVD

I particularly enjoy the UK DVDs where the media company hasn't even bothered to change the copyright warning and still threatens me with the warm rubber gloves of the FBI and a huge dollar fine.

Mollie Sugden

I naively assumed she'd died years ago - after all you didn't see her at all after the Queen Mother died.

Coincidence???

@ Pete 2

'However if you asked the same MitS to name any 2 male scientists, I would expect the overwhelming answer to be Einstein, followed after along pause by "that guy in the wheelchair? yooooo know - wassis name?".'

Davros????

Erm...

They're working under the assumption that indexing Twitter comments will make for a BETTER search engine???

How the Reg should respond

Is that this site is the main Swedish news outlet in the UK. Never before have the British public been so well informed about the rich variety of Konungariket Sverige - and its seismic cows, faecal lagoons and pineapple mashing.

Meanwhile, in Sweden: 'Swedish docs cleared over misplaced colon' (http://www.thelocal.se/20392/20090701/)

Bit worried about how readily people will comply

On Saturday I helped at a big event where the public were each given a wristband containing an RFID chip. The organisers wanted to know how people moved around the various venues, how long they spent at each one and so on; so each building had an RFID reader at the entrance to which people could touch their wristbands.

There was no element of compulsion, no prizes to be won by taking part, and you could simply walk past the reader without being scanned. The only thing was a 'it'd be nice if you could...' from the people doing the registrations.

I'd say over 90% of the public happily swiped their wristbands and some actually got upset when the PoS software reading the tags didn't register their presence.

I asked - almost none of them knew why the tags were being used, what the technology behind the tags could be, none of them had asked how long their data would be retained or what data would be recorded and for what purpose. When you told them that this sort of technology could build up a detailed profile of their movements and that it could be read covertly - THEN they started getting worried about the implications.

So as long as the government can keep spinning the 'benefits' of this white elephant there's a good chance most people will sign up for their numbers.

Depressing.

@Anonymous Coward

'Is it just me or does the idea of an island nation without a navy seem completely idiotic?'

Works for Iceland.

But then they don't go round the World insisting they're a serious military and economic power.

Mod time...

Who's going to be first to turn it into a Davros wagon for the Home Secretary. I mean if we're going to be ruled by power-mad dangerous lunatics, they should at least look like power-mad dangerous lunatics.

"the card would produce £6bn net economic benefit to the UK"

That's over 30 years - anyone willing to work out how much money could be accrued in interest if the cost of ID cards was invested?

@ Mayhem

'Russia went with Earth orbit rendezvous, and focussed on putting up a space station in local orbit before going anywhere else. Funnily enough, Mir lasted twice as long as Skylab, and russian tech is a fairly fundamental part of the ISS, especially since a progress visit costs a fraction of what a shuttle visit does.'

Except they didn't. The USSR originally planned an Earth orbit rendezvous with a 50 tonne payload; but when it was clear the US was moving ahead with its Gemini missions, the Soviet's realised they didn't have enough expertise in EOR and switched to a direct ascent on a bigger rocket which became the N1 L3.

Their space station programme was never part of the Soviet lunar programme and really only got going when it became clear the US would be the first country to put a man on the Moon. Salyut 1 wasn't launched until 1971 and then its size was limited by the amount of mass a Proton could put into orbit. It was far less capable than Skylab. As for Mir lasting longer than Skylab that's only because the US Shuttle programme was so late in making its first flight. A decision had been made in the late 1960s that no more Saturn Ibs would be built, so by the time of Skylab 4 there was only one spare launcher in inventory. The plan had been the Shuttle would be the only way to get Americans into space. There were advanced plans to boost the orbit of Skylab and refurbish it for missions, but in 1979 the station smashed into Australia, two years before the first Shuttle launch.

Our moral guardians

The Daily Star???

Oh FFS, stop the World, I want to get off.

Someone's been drinking Kurzweil's Kool-Aid

The assumption that intelligence is just the result of a larger number of FLOPS is a pretty poor one. Still if they're throwing money around I'll be willing to take a swig of the Singularity cult juice.