Posts by Graham Bartlett

But why

have they named it after a brand of margarine?

$35 million but can't afford an iPad?

Remember that the guys actually selling the stuff are rarely the ones taking the profits. Check out "Freakanomics" for the economics of drug-dealing.

Stinky alligator?

I had to read this, just to find out if it was about the ones living in the sewers which come up the drainpipe and bite your bottom. (At least that's what I'll be telling my son if he starts spending too long sat on the crapper.)

How does that work?

Great, you've stopped your workers walking out. Now how do you make them work while they're there - and how do you stop them actively sabotaging production? Of course there's the school of thought that says pissing in a lager barrel is never going to be noticed. But there's any number of ways that switched-on workers can knacker you, starting with a large increase in minor "accidents" which might be down to individuals, and working up to more significant incidents (e.g. broken CO2 lines) which would be sackable offences but would be impossible to trace if all the workers are in on it.

Obligatory references

You are in a maze of twisty councillors, all alike.

It is pitched by quacks. They are likely to be beaten by a clue.

I'm sure that's a great relief

If you're a ferret.

I for one welcome our tube-rat overlords.

"Reach round"

Surely Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann is worth the quote here: "I'll bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddam common courtesy to give him a reach-around!"

"You mean I still can’t record and search my calls in 2012? Wow"

Every phone I've owned (from early Nokia bricks onwards) has had a log of who I've rung and who's rung me. As for recording, storage has been a problem until very recently, and remains a problem on cheap phones. On higher-end phones, apps *do* exist that'll automatically record calls for you. Phone manufacturers can't do this by default though, or even give their customers the option in the default setup, bcos many countries have laws about notifying people before recording their conversations.

So Mr Geddes is pretty crap as a commentator on this.

Prior art?

Anyone know whether this has actually happened yet? Of course it's possible to check crew rosters on Spacelab, Mir and ISS - although that doesn't help if it was two male astronauts decided to play hide-the-rocket, and the physical motions are much the same either way. But last I heard, no-one had definitely established whether they had actually been there, done that.

Awful name

Did anyone else see the ads for the PSVita and think it was about a new brand of diet crispbread?

Baby dribble

My Nokia E72 seems to be fairly resistant to baby dribble. (And believe me, it's had some serious suck, er, soak tests.) I suspect drool is viscous enough that it doesn't easily get into the works.

Just what you wanted

Perfect opportunity for all the "have you ever thought about letting Jesus into your life?" types to bore the arse off you all flight. (I'm not anti-Christian, I'm anti-proselytising.)

And you can also guarantee that anyone of the female persuation is going to be mobbed by weirdos for whom this might be the closest they've got to a woman all year.

"Apocalypse Politics"?

Excuse me? Back in the 80s when everyone was predicting that oil would run out in 20 years, fracking wasn't an option. It's been figured out since then, and that's great - loads more cheap energy for us to use. But does that mean we should rely entirely on blind faith that something will be invented to save us?

Back in the 80s, folks also discovered a sodding great hole in the ozone layer, caused mainly by CFCs. Now we could have sat around and said "no worries, someone will invent something to squirt up there and sort it out"; or we could have done what actually happened, which was saying "unless we stop using CFCs, we're screwed". A lot of companies using CFCs heavily screamed blue murder about that, but they got told to belt up. Having been given no option, they went and invented their way to stuff to use instead of CFCs.

Back in the energy world, we can keep assuming that some McGuffin is going to magically solve the problem, or we can start preparing for the day when it doesn't happen. For example, California is already doing that by mandating an average fleet fuel consumption for a manufacturer's cars, forcing them to invent their way towards more energy-efficient transport. It's a win-win situation - if some magic McGuffin gets us more cheap energy then we can use it better, and if it doesn't then we're better prepared for tightening our belts.

Rule 34

How long to print a six-inch model of a boner...?

dotCYM

Just don't tell anyone it's pronounced "dot-cum",.

Assembly and size

Folks, you might like to notice that this is only a model of the real thing. RTFA and you'll see that they're talking about building the real thing out of carbon fibre.

Of course, how well a balsa wood model will represent the actual behaviour of a carbon-fibre thingy is open to debate.

No 90s alt-rock reference?

"Brimful of Asha" - cool song. And would have made a nice subheading too.

Pics?

So where does the naked woman on the headline pic come into the story?

Borg attack?

I'm a bit worried that these guys seem to be taking on a Borg cube, according to the pic. Is there something that NASA should be telling us...?