Posts by Dr Patrick J R Harkin

Needs a new name...

How about "Grand Collaborative Effort For The Good Of The State Auto"?

I compared the sat photos on my house on iOS6 and Android maps last night

The Apple pictures are newer, but much blurrier. Perhaps my street contains a secret Taiwanese missile bunker.

Are these "real" crimes?

Or phone lost/smashed/dropped in water which would otherwsie be uninsured?

Waiting on a pay check

I doubt if anyone has been kept waiting on a pay check or cheque, although some may have been kept waiting for one. More importantly, will this affect my standing order to the British Pedantic Society (which I am lobbying to have renamed the British Society of Pedants, as it is the members who are pedantic and not the society)?

Meh. So information goes a bit faster than light...

As we Brits know, monarchy travels instantaneously. When the current monarch dies, the next in line becomes king (or queen) without any delay regardless of how far apart he/she is. Admittedly, you can only transmit one bit of information per royal, so we don't use it for signally much.

I understood every word of that.

The actual sentences, on the other hand...

Postage

Probably about half of that will be direct costs - they'll ship in a cardboard-backed envelope and will be classed as 'large' (as it'll have to be bigger than the FDC). I must admit, dealing with play.com and Amazon have made me start to query almost any postage costs!

is it just me...

...or does this ruling actually say "It's illegal to identify the users from their IP address and warn them before blocking their internet connection" but it DOESN'T say "You can't block their access", so what we've lost is the "three strikes", but not the "you're out".

The "landing zone" is over 7000 miles wide - more than half the planet...

But they happily specify its limits to 0.1 degree. I must rush off the check my current latitude.

It would seem that in the future

Beggars will be cleaner, tidier and more polite than now. Why has everyone assumed he's a beggar, rather than a charity fund raiser? Or a someone working for the chairty in the field, or at an organisation the charity supports?

Dare I suggest closet racism? "He's wearing funny clothes - must be a foreign beggar!"

Limitng staff access to medical records...

...is a no-win area. It's possible to lock down records so nurse X can only read the records of patient Y - and then patient Y is transferred to another ward where nurse Z can't read his (medical) records until (patient status) record is updated. Or nurse X phones in sick and nurse W covers for her. Or (this is the NHS, remember) both of the above, plus sixteen other random confusing events all occur at once. So the usual compromise is: the records are open and readable by appropriate grades of staff (eg nurses, doctors, clerical, but not management, catering, security), but access is logged: read without just cause, and you'll be disciplined. Some data is "siloed"; GU medicine clinic records are kept apart from general records, but within the "silo", same access rules apply.

Hmm. Doing the same thing a lot affects your brain.

Who'd have thought it? I'd like to have seen a study with 1 group playing FPS, one perhaps playing computer puzzles, one doing paper-based puzzles and one watching the Discovery Channel, or soething else "innocuous".

Hell, I reckon a week baking bread will change your brain somehow, somewhere.

I see your BAAPS and raise you...

...the Sexually Transmitted Infection Foundation (STIF) course - see http://www.bashh.org/education_training_and_careers/stif It's run by the Bristish Accociation of Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH). I don't know if any of the members are bishops.

I don't suppose there's any hope...

...that the X-Factor broadcast system is SCADA controlled?

I'd love one of these

But I have no idea what I'd do with it. I did have an idea for a variation of their chess game - my pieces would be real (with barcodes underneath), the computers would be images but look as similar as possible.

I have some moon rock.

I know it's real, it has "MOON" written all the way through.

Didn't Dilbert cover this recently?

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-07-24/

I don't THINK it'll work on my Galaxy S

I use the "Swype" input system and even it doesn't hit 70% accuracy some days...

"activated within 15 minutes"

That's quite a loooong fuse....

Over a year...

...and only 148 records accessed.

From that, I'd be tempted to assume that only Google or other spiders ever found it! Especially if there was no link from the live site.

A gun which fires GPS at passing cars?

Really? Wow. How does it make the unit stick? And doesn't it make a hell of a clang as it hits?

Did we learn nothing from Alien?

In space, no one can hear your attitude control thrusters. (At least I think that was the tag line).

Shame the re-enter, parachute, retro-rockets, pulley sequence fininshed so soon. I think a big white-gloved hand should have popped out from behind a panel a carefully placed the Rover on the Martian surface (after clearing the dust away with a handerchief first, of course).

Oh. It said "tram".

I thought it said "train". Got my hopes up for nothing.

Neighbourhood Watch

You gotta keep an eye on these Centaurans. Did we learn nothing on Babylon 5?

Speaking as a professional deadologist...

...everybody dies of something. Prostate cancer isn'r great, but I'd rather have it than pancreatic cancer which, IIRC, is associted with heavy coffee drinking. Perhaps that's why the study found less prostatic disease - they were all dead from something else before they got it!

US resident. University of Salford.

How long is that keyboard cable? (Or do you mean "US citizen"?)

Where's the pedantic icon - apologies, where's the icon for use by pedants? (The icon itself cannot be pedantic, after all.)

"it could eventually let you play old DOS games."

Give.

Now!

@adamill

I think that would count as "social media"; it's social and it uses media! The mechanics - whether it was Skype, a live video feed, a hole in the wall, a T3 line or dial-up - aren't really the issue. I was in Australia when this broke and there was discussion in the papers about whether the concealed camera invalidated the consent and this should be charged as rape, but I left before I heard any more.

Quill pen in bottle of green ink

I DEMAND that this USEFUL and VITAL icon is institued IMMEDIATELY. I AM UNABLE to comment IN THE way I WaNT withoUT IT.

I can sort of understand this.

AFAIK it isn't a crime to open the combination lock on your locker - though it would be a crime to take anything out. Likewise, figuring out the password for the connection does no harm in itself. Actually USING the connection is a different matter.

I don't like it, but i can see the reasoning.

Solution is obvious.

"App" is short for "Application" so just use a different abbreviation. Instead of the first three letters, use the firsr four and call it the ApplStore. All solved!

That isn't her real voice.

She's miming to a track by Stephen Hawking.

I've emailed them a possible fix.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

Peopel keep saying "Apple have had time to sort this"

But actually, they've had two hours less than you think...

I find this curiously reassuring

Only last week I was looking at my keyring wondering "What the hell do those ones open?" and thinking I was going senile. But if everyone is in the same boat, my memory is no worse than - what were we talking about?