A good start

Great stuff. Let's see this followed up with arresting all mediums, witch-doctors, crystal sellers, chakra botherers and all other purveyors of superstitious mumbo-jumbo (yes like priests, vicars and whatnot).

Dinner

Does that include a second dinner?

Funded by?

Come on Reg, tell us who funded this. I'm guessing it's any one of Orange, O2 or Vodafone.

Supt Andrew Murray

Joyless bastard. A rare story about coppers just being human and they get bollocked for it.

Only one way to find out

Time to dust off that ducking stool!

This from a USB hard disk enclosure I got a few years back

HDD Assemble Illustration

1, Place the hard disk drive in HDD Enclosuer[sic].

3[sic], Plug a power cable from the case power supply into the power connector on the hard disk. (A)

2[sic], Plug an IDE cable connector into the hard disk drive IDE connector. (B)

4, Use LED cable provided with HDD Enclosuer[sic] to connect to the (c) and push it into case.

5, Secure the metal case of the HCC Enclosuer with four screws.

Is good with machine plank according to the right method conjuction the hard dish[sic], lock the right adn[sic] HDD, can immediately trust the usage.

Web search

As long as I'm not stuck with Google for web search. I'd want to Bada Bing.

Love the name (seriously)

No chance of Nick Griffin endorsing it.

Yawn

Another 6th form design and technology project. Wake me up when there's a real car.

And while they're at it...

Credit where it's due, good idea. While they're at it the DVLA can stop selling my data, too!

Someone's been working too hard

Are we witnessing an Alan Partridge scale breakdown here?

"whitehat" worm

If you ask me the worm he wrote was a "whitehat" exercise.

It drew attention to a security hole in many users' iPhones in a harmless and playful manner.

If his worm had, say, nicked a load of contact details or whatever other information people had on their phones, then that would be a different matter entirely.

Better?

The study focusses solely on carbon emissions. There are other factors in choosing your fish such as the pollution caused by many (but not all) fish farms and conservation of fish stocks.

If their purpose was to muddy the waters of the enviro-fishing debate they've done well. If they actually intended to contribute towards it then this narrow study has been a complete waste of time.

Who was it sponsored by, Iceland?

Netbooks without Windows tax again

Ignoring the thrilling debate about what is/isn't an OS, this is good news as it should see a return to netbooks shipping without Windows. Which is nice.

Cockpit canopy-like bulge

Why does it have a cockpit canopy-like bulge?

I bet there's still a pilot in there and all the clever robo-pilot tech is a load of old Spinvox.

Just make the screen the right size!

Do one without a massive bezel and I'll buy it! I'll figure out what it's for later!

LAPtop?

I'd not fancy having the edge of that screen digging into my lap for more than, say, a minute.

"Ah, Findlay: it's our kind of town."

That's my holidays sorted for next year then!

WANT!

I don't know what I'd use it for but I want one - once they've integrated the wireless receiver. Full marks to Asus once again!

Fugly

Appropriate that such a butt-ugly car should be named after the postcode for Blackburn *

* I come from Blackburn so can say that - you can't!

Oxo Tower

Personally I think there are better spots for entertaining our Olypmic guests. For example I'd like to take each of the women's highjump finalists up the Oxo Tower.

Dom Joly would be proud

HELLOOOO? I'M FLORIDA!

FLORIDA!!!!

NO IT'S RUBBISH!

Hmm

This report is not always comparing apples with apples. Neandethals were an entirely separate species to homo sapiens. Although they were once thought to be our ancestors, it's more accurate to describe them as very close cousins. As such you might as well say gorillas are much harder than we are. It's true, but so what?

The comparisons with super-fast aboriginals, etc. are entirely valid. And as for women yanking my conkers during childbirth. Ouch! To paraphrase Jim Royle, I've done my bit already!

Har har har

Google: "Fixed that for you"

Love it!

They'd better get this right

I can smell a mass-exodus here

@TeeCee

What would streaming video over the web have to do with a USB3 demo?

And the battery?

That's going to be hopeless unless they've crammed 5kg of batteries in it somehow.

Wow

Their software's bobbins but credit where it's due here. I've no idea what I'd do with it, but WANT!

Online Auctioneer?

What was wrong with tat market or tat bazaar? Sheesh!

Moron gets 6 points

A story to show the system doesn't always get it wrong. Thanks El Reg!

As long as it's clear that requestors can use the info...

OK so I, with my (imaginary) journalist/blogger hat on, request some info from Southampton Uni. I can publish that information in my article, on my blog or whatever, but can't post the doc they sent and link to that.

That's fair enough as long as they make it clear that I have the rights to do that. If Southampton Uni are unsing this licence biz to suggest that I can't publish a damned thing then they need a slapped botty from the ICO.

NIce concept, daft phone

I like stylish phones that just do call and text, but not this one. The part black, part translucent look doesn't do it for me at all.

So that's why they're called "Nice"

So "Nice" refers to their comparative safety, not their flavour, which let’s face it is a bit rank. Thanks MindLab!

700ml

Speaking as someone who's had to improvise with bottles in long past lager emergencies, I hope they sell them in multipacks. 700ml is no match for a proper night on the lager.

£75 a month?

God almighty! Is it solid gold?

£295?

That's way too high for something the non-geeky segment of the netbook market will view as a glorified calculator.

Drop it to £200 and lose that horrible bezel and I /might/ get one.

@Sampler

I agree completely. The Asus 701 didn't appeal to me for that exact reason. It wasn't til the advent of the 901 that I seriously considered a netbook, eventually getting an Acer Aspire One.

Another vote for dumbphones

My phone makes and receives calls; sends and receives texts and doesn't put stretch my pockets too much (in both senses). That's all I want. Generally people don't /need/ mobile internet, they just use it because it's there. I'm happy to have a break from the fecking thing!

Smith?

If he wanted to step out of fat Bob's shadow he could have gone for Robert Smyth and avoided coming across as a complete bellend. Ah well.

@TeeCee

It certainly stopped me whining. Well it did until this season's fixtures came out.

Texting?

Next it'll be a PhD in going to the pub. Actually that'd do me nicely.

@Charles King

And gaffer tape. If it doesn't work, you're not using enough gaffer tape.

More complex

It's probably a lot more complex in reality than our boffin has realised. The beeb covered this before this season's fixtures came out.

As an example Norwich being home or away can affect the fixture-scheduling as far away as West Ham (seriously - read the article below).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulfletcher/2009/06/secrets_of_the_fixture_compute.html?page=18

"Better checks and balances"

"Better checks and balances have been put in place" - only for them to be labelled as unnecessary red tape at the next round of spending cuts and thrown out.

Cheese?

I've not looked at Google Moon since it launched. Great as it is I'd love to see the return of the cheese when you go to maximum zoom.

@Steve 64

Bad example. Both bands are both tossers and wankers.

@chris

Boycott one and you just end up buying from some other cnuts. No such thing as fairtrade petrol :o\

Smut Basket

"sweepingly throwing a whole country in the smut-basket of TheRegister.co.uk"

Magnificent!

Usability

That shoulder surfing isn't an issue may be true but a big feature of usability is familiarity. I used to read Nielsen's column before he ran out of ideas and started coming out with daftness like this.

There are several usability areas that Nielsen himself would say aren't ideal but are familiar enough to be classed as a standard (e.g. using HTML select boxes for navigation and having a window's scollbar on the right, away from most websites' main naivagation menu).

Even if I believed that plain text was easier, there's no way I'd waste time arguing that my company's websites should use it. Our credibility would take a nosedive and we'd be fielding far too many support calls on it.

It may or may not be a good idea but it'll never float!

@Graham Marsden

Just because this didn't result in a prosecution does not mean it's a waste of money. In fact the law has been further clarified and now it's less likely that more public money will be spent chasing smut writers.