Posts by J

Satellite?

Satellite broadband, SATELLITE!? Yeah, right, dream on. I lived for a year in a more rural area, and the choice was dial up (sucked, cheap) or satellite: $200, with rebate, up front for equipment, then $100 a month for 1.5 Mbps -- optimistically, of course, imagine reality and downloading GBs out of a thing that gets disconnected when it rains too hard or wind is strong, or... So, for a year I had to live with dial up because my money does not grow on trees.

Now, my 1990 Dodge has amazing broadband, though. It takes only 10 minutes to download hundreds of GB from Blockbuster to my place.

See...

"The probable solar-powered nature of the sat"

See, even the military is going green! Petrol powered sats' days are numbered, I tells ya. And none of that sinister nukular stuff either, 10Q very much.

@ Airport Security

"I know I didn't feel any less safe at Amsterdam but I did feel a little more relaxed!"

Hm... Maybe it was something in the air? Airpot security indeed...

And...

"The big-chain electrical goods stores here ask for your name, postcode and house-number"

And how do they know you gave them the correct answer to those? Do they ask for your phone bill?

Anatomy

@ Rajesh

Great post, indeed. I just have a comment...

"To imagine that others could relish it is a bit disturbing to me, although perhaps acceptable."

Now, I myself feel exactly like that when I see people eating salad. I just don't say it would be "perhaps acceptable" -- I think it's truly acceptable, even if I can't do it. Just the smell usually turns my stomach. I'm allergic to chlorophyll. OK, just kidding (although some people do fall for that one). But I do have a big problem with leaves, can't stand them. Even if I don't know they are there and eat, I then feel like throwing up. Other parts of vegetables are almost always fine, specially roots and fruit. But I can't pass a day without meat, feels like I haven't eaten real food. That's how I am (and my culture).

@RW

"long digestive tract that efficiently extracts the goodness from nutrient-poor foodstuffs, i.e. veggies"

Well, sort of. Yes, our digestive tracts are longer than a carnivore's. But they are way shorter than the ones from true herbivores! We are in the middle. You know the appendix, that stupid little stump on your intestines? It's also called the caecum, for "blind" as in blind-alley. So, that is very long and complex in herbivorous species, and it is responsible for the digestion of plant matter. The more plant a species eats, the longer the caecum (sometimes, if stretched, it's longer than the animal itself!). Very little is left in us, and other apes. *Because we are not supposed to be eating just plants* Whomever wants too is welcome though -- just don't forget your artificially synthesized supplements. You don't want to know what B-12 deficiency looks like. Oh, and eating fungi (yeast) is cheating, since fungi are much closer to animals than to plants, hehe! ;-)

@ people talking about chewing sideways and flat teeth

Get a clue. By for example getting a copy (won't be cheap, try a library) of late Milton Hildebrand's "Analysis of Vertebrate Structure". If I remember my days as Vertebrate Zoology TA well, there is quite a lot about comparative teeth structure there. Our molars are NOT like the ones from herbivores -- look a horse in the mouth, our teeth are not like that, but like a pig's. Our molars are tuberous (good for succulent stuff like roots and fruit, OK enough for grinding meat when needed), definitely not flat. If your are, you urgently need to see an orthodontist.

Our teeth are NOT those of an pure herbivore, and NOT those of a pure carnivore. Our teeth are pig's teeth, appropriately enough.

This is a damn long post.

Stupid...

OK, it's her money and she can do whatever she wants with it but... it's stupid nonetheless. Just go to the fucking dog pound, find a friendly mutt with a personality she likes, pay a few bucks, and voilá! We once got a nice abandoned female Pitbull Terrier doing exactly that. She runs from the cats, they beat her...

Hm...

"Federal Income Tax - pays for the operations of Fed Govt, especially military and Medicare (retiree health), and interest on funds borrowed to cover deficit spending."

I heard it all (almost a trillion $ or something) goes to the banks, as interest. But it could be something else.

Operations of the Fed Govt? Probably not... and how did the Fed Govt work before 1913, when the Income Tax was introduced, and the Fed Reserve was incorporated (they are NOT a part of government) around that time too, I think.

@ Dan

Read again:

>"Do I have it coming just because Britain apparently has some horrible problem with groups of ruffians? (Oddly, there's nothing remotely like this going on in the crime-ridden US of A. Go figure.)"

>>Ah yes because of course there are no problems at all with gangs, teen crime, guns, or anything like that in the USA. Picture perfect paradise without any problems isn't it..........

Nothing remotely like this apparently refers to the Mosquito thing, not the crime. Context is everything. And "crime-ridden US of A" seems to point in some direction too.

Yep...

The poor will get richer, someday. There's not enough planet for everybody to be comfortable, let alone US levels comfy, sad but true. Those will be interesting times.

Re: Pigeon English?

Neither pigeon nor pidgeon, AC. The guy really meant PIDGIN English.

I know because that's what I speak (and, scarily enough, sometimes it seems like I'm better than most natives... a sad reflection of the state of your educational systems indeed).

Does eBay sell dictionaries?

No, no...

All wrong. You guys have got no clue.

The way to really stop spam is... Voodoo CAPTCHAs!

Here's how it works: do whatever, preferably nothing. Then ask a witch doctor to put a spell on your registration mechanism, or whatever bloody thing it is you're doing. For the spell... something sweet and simple will do, say: registering for spam purposes? OK, the author of the bot instantly get an incurable testicular cancer -- or other body part of your choosing, of course. Ask your local witch doctor what would be preferable. What about random organs? Organ of the day?

But that's not all, the most important comes now! The CLIENT of the spammer gets an incredibly painful brain tumor -- fatal, of course. OK, the brain itself does not really hurt, you will say, but any respectable witch doctor should be able to take care of that...

If you implement my strategy, I assure you that spam traffic will be reduced to 1.3% of current levels in a few days. You're welcome.

So LISP is the language of the future

And usually the things of the future stay like that forever... Like in "Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be".

Best

Haha, they trademarked it and... Makes it even better.

The only Am. football game I watch during the whole year is the Super Bowl, and I guess this was the only one I needed to watch, really. Mind you, if I had turned the TV on just as the game started, I would have been neutral -- I had no reason to root for either. But I happened to turn it on 45 minutes before... those TV guys wouldn't stop licking the pretty boy's arse, and I wondered how nice it would be if they lost after all that... Happily for everyone I've talked to here in VA so far, I got my wish.

Personal responsability

That's what these socialistic hippies denying AGW lack: personal responsibility. They don't want to answer for their past/present/future hedonistic, wasteful life styles, so they say it's not our fault. It's all the sun's fault, sue the sun! Or whatever. Just don't take my toys away... And if disaster does ensue (which always fucks up the miserable to begin with), who cares? I'll be dead anyways...

At home...

We laughed a lot at the US during the 2000 electoral fiasco. In Brazil, we've had electronic voting for a long time, and we've never heard of any type of problem. And that's the sure catch: we've *never heard* of them. I hope they really don't exist...

Piracy

False alarms aside...

Piracy has always served MS well, and they know it. So I suppose they committed a blunder with the new "zero tolerance" measures, and are backing down before damage is done (fortunately for them in this case, Vista's uptake has been slow).

heh

"because it will provide a serious alternative to Google"

So they are admitting they currently suck, really? hehe

Maybe...

"It's not so bad, but there are also going to be shipping costs etc. added on for getting from the US to here..."

Maybe you mean "from China to here" ?

Re: Actually, if you look at it rationally

"YEC's, creationists, and others of that particular group are poorly represented in higher academic fields....Except for--wait for it--ENGINEERS."

It's interesting, I wonder if there are any *real* studies (not based on FOX or, shudder, Wikipedia material!) on this, but my own anecdotal experience is the same, and I thought of the same explanation. I come across these types quite frequently both in real life and online, being a biologist who works on evolutionary matters, and the "engineer" type is quite frequent among them. I wonder if some sociologist will take this one up to study...

What I do know was counted was the religiosity among the members of the USA Nat. Academy of Sciences, and the discipline with the highest proportion of believers in some sort of god was the Mathematicians (lowest was Biologists, don't remember the rest). But that must be because Mathematicians are not scientists at all to begin with...

But...

Did it need to be SO ugly? Yuck...

PS3 factor?

Well, as someone said, if you include them, you overestimate, if you exclude them, you underestimate.

Easy solution: look at the number of MOVIE DISKS sold... OK, some people will invent some reason why this might be flawed (like, BD people buy more disks on average or whatever), but seems like it would be a more significant estimate, no?

And I sort of remember it's been on a Reg article a while ago...

Prescription but...

Don't go wishing to have to use it medicinally (well, in any legit way). As far as I remember (not much, but not because of ganja use...), marijuana is used to increase appetite and diminish nausea/vomiting in terminal cancer patients (so they can eat something AND keep it down). It's supposed to help with the pain too.

If I wasn't so lazy I would Google it to see, but I suspect you don't want to have those diseases. Vulture icon for obvious reasons.

Profit?

"Has it occurred to you that the upfront price might not actually cover the cost of the device?"

I remember reading somewhere (here on El Reg, I'm sure) that someone had disassembled a Jesus Phone and come up with a bill of materials of around $200 or something like that. So probably yes, they would still profit a little (I wonder what would marketing and distribution and etc. costs be per phone).

Out in the real wordl...

...I suspect something like this is happening, somewhere:

Joe Consumer, who does not read El Reg or the like, buys one of these funky "HDTV" thingies -- which they use to watch regular cable or satellite anyway. Nonetheless, the DVDs do look pretty good there, and the family goes to Blockbuster to rent some movies.

Joe to BB employee: "Hey, what does that big banner about hi-def Blu-whatever means?"

BBE: "It means you can rent HD movies right here, blah blah sales talk."

JC (eyes glaze for a moment, then come back): "Oh, cool, I just got an HDTV. Can I rent one of those?"

BBE: "Do you have a BD player already?"

And Joe eventually goes and buys a BD player, because that's what he knows he can rent in his neighborhood's BB. He buys it now if he's rich. Later if he'd rather wait for prices to be reasonable (4x more than HD-DVD player, I saw it last weekend in Circuit City, I think).

@Consultant

"Maybe if more of your populace was well armed, they could scare off some of your criminals."

Oh, yeah, the simplistic moronic "logic" rears its ugly head, as expected.

By your "reasoning", the USA must be really safe and peaceful then, eh? Oh, sure you think it has not enough guns, that's why it's not safer... Japan must be hell then, I suppose.

Yep, ignore the complex cause of the problems (whatever they are) and just get guns and it will be alright.

Guns are not the real problem. Mentally ill societies with guns are the problem.

I wonder...

"Can the wheel flash to the beat of your music?"

If that's in the plans, will they be sued when someone has an epileptic fit while using a flashing iPod?

Hm...

"One could easily view this as an attempt to profit from Mr. Ledger's death"

Which it surely was. And hoping to get a promotion out of it when the cunning plan generated a lot of sales, I'd suspect. And so what? That's what they all do all the time... Maybe in slightly subtler ways, which does not change anything.

Because?

"Why the CoS hasn't been branded as a "terror group" or simply outlawed as a crime syndicate by now is beyond me."

Simple: because it's called a religion and people stupidly think that "religions ought to be respected". So politicians don't want to be seen disrespecting anything remotely associated with religions, cults, whatever.

Give Scientology another, say, 100 years or so and they will be something like the Mormons. Who knows, Cruise's great-great-grandson (or daughter) might even be running for President of the USA by then...

Hmm...

Batman R.I.P. is the title... and they say people are going to be shocked? Unless the title is a lie! They would NEVER do that (lie), of course...

I knew...

I was sure the comment section for this one would be full of "great" jokes... And it would become Roto-Router, instead of Roto-Rooter, no? (my humble contribution)

Er...

The article text is never to be taken as a trustworthy indication of whatever was done in any study, or even "study", so I guess applying truth table thinking to this is not of much value...

"your bound to loose more weight?!

Who pays these people?!"

I'd suspect nobody does -- students they were. But I'd be totally for not paying anybody who writes "loose" when they mean "lose" or, even worse, "your" instead of "you're".

Are you at least a legal alien, like me?

wo!?!

"Just type "winver" at the command line to see the real version number"

What!? Command line!?? Heresy! Burn the heretic!!!

Would they be...

Would the suspects by any chance be Russian, blue, funnily-dressed, angry little people? It could be the trauma, you know...

Bad...

"a cunning plan involving the Negev desert, huge mirrors and solar energy"

That line immediately reminded me of Baldrick, which can not bode well for any plan...

Ah, Brazil...

You guys think your politicians/bureaucrats are stupid and corrupt here in the Northern lands? You should get a taste of our ones in Brazil. After that you might even think things are not so bad in the UK/US most of the time...

As AC said above, it's someone pandering to the evangelical nuts (their number is growing faster than mushrooms on manure after a warm summer rain) in election year.

@Scientology digs

"They're no wackier than any other religion."

They are sure all bad enough, but I'd say the Scientologists are even wackier (and specially more corrupt) than those you mentioned -- actually, more than almost anything I've ever heard...

Pic of Xenu, courtesy of Hubbard himself.

Oh, well, El Reg will probably delete this before they sue the site (watched the South Park episode?)...

@ an AC

"*Microsoft support, obviously a good thing, anything Microsoft supports can't be bad for us can it - HD-DVD wins."

Hey, you forgot the joke alert there!

And...

And to think there are (crazy) people saying that "downloads are it" for high-def content, plastic discs are dead, etc...

Who?

Who needs a fecking Mac Book Air when you can have this!? I wonder whether some sad geek ported Linux to the SX64 though...

23 lb? Piece o'cake! I suspect my photo equipment bag (K1000 based) is about that weight...

Re: They attacked the wrong crowd.

Well, do it right then; don't get caught. Otherwise, THEY sue you and YOU end up paying tens of thousands of $$ and some jail time...

Sure

I think I'll get one to go with my Ferrari. Oh, wait.

I think I'll have to get an eee go go with my red 1990 Dodge Daytona then... Not even that.

@David Garon

"I couldn't believe most of the comments on this issue until I remembered this was a UK site. Is it possible that you don't have Cable Internet service there?"

Well, I wonder where you do live. I live in the US, and do have cable (supposedly 8 M). So, all the comments still apply, no? Oh, and that's because I'm back in the city. Six months ago I was 30 miles away, like so many people here, and all you get there is the telephone line.

Re: So, it's 1995...

Yep. Wait until 2018 to watch you movies then... Were you trying to be funny or just missed the point of the many comments above? We might have such bandwidth broadly available some day, but what matters is that we do not have it NOW, or in the near future as far as we can see.

Icon says it all

'nuff said