I think the step that Google are looking for is the introduction of lucidity into the Graph. As far as I can make out from my convos with devs, the ability to see through bullshit is the Holy Grail. A sort of cold reader bot, that has a very high percentage of correct guesses first time round. When lucid logic can run believable probability indexing, it may require no more than a cynical smartarse with a spreadsheet to sift the weirdly anomalous results and grade them according to accuracy over time, then backtrack through the logs when it hits an unexpected bullseye..

It won't be the wingnut press who start bleating when a robo-savant oracle starts hypothesising too accurately about the various Emperors' new wardrobes. It'll be their tailors.

Yahoo Groups was the mutts nuts back in the day. It was like a slightly less cock-obsessed MSN Groups. YM was full of toxic ASL bellends trying to find the last surviving single female on the interwebs..The chatty thing on the Groups was nice and private and you could use the banhammer to get rid of the dickheads. Then Yahoo pissed it all away with 360, which didn't work properly for three months, alienated the dweebs with prissy rules and broken code, and then vanished into the ether. Rubbish direction crapped from a great height on their socmedia roots. I wish them only pain.

Myspace reinvented itself when Rupert sold up. It's a fairly useable musician's directory these days. Not wonderful enough to want an account, but useful for those who want to viralise their musical output. Kids these days, eh?

Fuddyduddy old bellends like the Dirty Digger are happily using social media to bitch about social media, blithely unaware of the inherent irony.

This reminds me of plodsworths stopping people taking architectural photos in London and elsewhere on bogus "national security" pretences. I carry a netbook, and introduce them to Google Streetview, and ask them when they're going to plug this huge threat to our "national security". I also voice record them in case they take violent exception to logic.. The inevitable conclusion is that the results-based law enforcement bunnies will be able to claim that they're doing a great job preventing bad things, while still being useless gumflappers who haven't got a clue.

In lawyerspeak, this definitely qualifies as "hearse chasing"

I tip my hat to you, sir. A week off the booze should ensure that you get plenty of bang for your buck when you return to your local hostelry.

What happens if Apple stock rediscovers its nosediving capabilities after another innovation-free year? Will St Steve convene a Ouija Board meeting to re-activate the company's hype glands?

IIRC, investor confidence is one of those volatile commodities that can easily burst a bubble. If Samsung and their SE Asian cohorts continue to innovate relentlessly, with OLED and fancy shared memory chips, for instance, will that whittle away at current "certainties"? Comparing R&D budgets might offer a more accurate image of the future than the gloop provided by Wall Street hyenas.

Mr Garibaldi dunnit.

When Flash autonukes itself on a 64bit system, it seems to have a blast radius far exceeding its usefulness. I use NoScript to muzzle it.

Should be able to find ink caps and puffballs on flatter ground if it's reasonably cold and damp. Garlic grows wild in southern Europe, as do spring onions. There might also be girolle and pied de mouton mushrooms if cep can be found that easily.

Beanfarts: The horrible truth.

I eat a fair amount of pulses, grains, and beans, and being veggie, they flush through my digestive system smoothly in about 12-18 hours, as the stomach acids aren't "busting a gut" to break them down into energy.. This means that my fartstench index is remarkably low, and only goes up a few notches if I partake of ales.

The foulest farts tend to be due to a combo of sugary lager and junk fried chicken. I once shared an office with someone whose diet consisted entirely of those two items, plus large amounts of high-fructose cola. His inability to fart outside the confines of a small office was matched by his inability to think, work, or wash.. His sacking saved us the effort of digging a shallow grave.

I save all of my RAW files. If I publicly post photos to social media sites, they're tagged. If someone wishes to remove my tag, and make *commercial* use of a photo, then I will gladly go to court for redress and damages.

The cost of archiving the original RAW files is trifling. Once a few negligent/dishonest ad agencies have had their nuts dragged across a cheesegrater in court, the benefits of due diligence may well become apparent.

This botched legislation is a piss poor attempt to distort "fair usage" into a legal right to steal copyright. The only way to fight such legislation is to publicly inflict some serious financial damage on a high profile IP abuser in corporate clothing.

The copyright lawyers will be rubbing their hands in anticipation of some expensive lunches. Exemplary damages tend to concentrate minds. Ignorance/incompetence/negligence is not the best legal defence in civil proceedings.

The likely result, after a few hefty hits on corporate and public sector wallets, will be some Cabinet Office "best practice" bumph, to prevent civil servants throwing taxpayers money to the wolves by doing stupid things with other people's IP.

Meanwhile, in the real world, printable quality photos will continue to be used and credited by reputable agencies, because badly optimised Instagram phonepix look dated within a few minutes, especially on the web. If a client is paying top dollar for their campaign, they're not expecting a copyright shitstorm to erupt around their brand.

The quality of photos on socmedia platforms is limited by b/w constraints. A 35meg RAW image, squished down to a 100-200kb jpeg is not going to be quite the same thing. So for anyone getting a rage on about "the man" dredging digital landfill for nefarious purposes, the more likely IP infringers are going to be the knockoff merchants who plague online sales sites like Ebay and Etsy. Takedown notices on Ebay seem to be taken quite seriously when original EXIF data is shown to exist. A phonecall and a supporting email, and woof!, culprit no longer has an account.

My designer friends routinely search for copies of their work, using Tineye quite effectively to find copyrighted photos from original collection shoots. They also keep a list of knockoff merchants, which is available through the specialist boards where these things are a hot topic.

Sensible search terms are useful on Google image searches, so the guff posted about the obscurity of the Vulture logo in the first few replies is a bit of a straw man. An image search for "the register logo" isn't rocket science. Trebles all round!

The thing about listening on headphones is that it's personal, not social, industrial or political. No two sets of ears have the same frequency response across the entire spectrum, so it's all subjective. For someone whose eardrums have taken a pounding from close proximity square waves, most audiomush sounds fine if it's really fookin' loud. For someone who wants detail, and doesn't need their head stoving in with loudness, a pair of ye olde Quad Electrostatic headphones might be closer to ambrosia. And gloriously fragile.

Myself, I monitor on a cheap-ass active Sumvision pc speaker thing when I don't want to annoy my neighbours. Otherwise it's ATC SCM10s and a couple of A&R Cambridge IC blocks from the waybackwhen. Not exactly audiophile, but they're nicely matched. I've got a pro line driver stuck in front of them, and the feed for that comes from a fancy DAC in a TC Konnekt 48. It works for me.

I use two sets of cans for checking the consumer reality. Closed Sennheiser HD 570s for the warm woolly tube sound, and open HD480s for the brutal dj monitoring experience. If I'm compressing wavs to mp3, i strip out the very low subs <50hz, and push the resonant bass frequencies around 250Hz. I leave 0.3db of headroom to stop it squeaking on tiny low quality DACs, using an Ultramaximiser plugin to give it a sweet dynamic optimisation, that doesn't trade off clarity and warmth for loudness (other costly plugins are available). Then I crunch the wav down to 320VBR, and it sounds rather sweet, even on my Sony phone with soft earbuds.. You could use any cheap headphones to listen to properly mastered music, and it would refuse to sound crap (psychoacoustically), because it's designed for a wide range of kit, from budget to unaffordable..

The Beats headphones are heavily biased to the budget bass end, which, in a closed space, reduces the available headroom for the rest of the signal. When punter X cranks up the volume in order to hear the top end, it's kinda obvious that it'll sound awesomely bassy, but it's just turbulence in a teacup if you like a warm balanced sound.

Some of the encoding on the interweb just baffles me. A mindless dork murders a fabulous 70s funk track by optimising it to death, a few hundred more give it the gushing thumbs up, and nobody seems to notice the vile whistling artefact that makes it unlistenable to anyone who's ever heard the vinyl. Beats headphones are sold into that blissful ignorance market..The same market that thinks having a 500W PMP subwoofer in your boot equates to sound quality, when all you can hear is panels and fixtures rattling.

Day 1: Value style pot noodle x 2

Day 2: Value spaghetti with tomato puree and a hint of pot noodle sauce.

Day 3: Value mushy peas and a baked potato with a hint of tomato..

Day 4: Value spaghetti with tomato puree and pea/potato sauce.

Day 5: Microwave Lidl egg fried rice. (properjob luxury!)

Breakfast toast for the week from a 50p Lidl large wholemeal loaf. Think of the fibre.

Asda Value teabags at 20p for 80 ought to slake the caffeine thirst (four to a cup), and a scout through the supermarket bins should turn up a past-its-sell-by pud or two. Just peel off the blue bits.

Place a sneaky £1 bet on yourself at 200/1 against, and you'll still have 30p left over to celebrate your good fortune.

placeboh!

I want one of those there placebo bomb detectors "our brave boys" use in Iraq.. Gubmint approved, so they must be good.

Phones are rapidly mutating into lifestyle statements, which allows brand junkies to state their opinions as fact, in the belief that other brand junkies/haters will rally round the flag.

The "best" phone, until the next "best" phone comes out next week, is surely the one that meets your personal needs for form, function, and value. Beyond that, it's as silly as going to war over matters of taste. I'd rather waste my energy in the pub.

I'm quite happy with the hybrid drive on my clapped out core 2 duo laptop. Seeing as a 32bit OS can't see more than 4gb of ram, I doubt that I'll be adding four more anytime soon. I'd have been interested to find out how many of these top o' the line gizmos are running a 64bit version of Win8, and more importantly for business users, how many films they're good for in twoo HD during an arduous train journey to company outpost X in the low wage hinterlands. One simply can't abide an executive laptop leaving one in battery fail limbo just as that nice Mr Bourne/Bond is tearing someone's leg off with his pinky.

As Orwell might never have said "They danced around the MayPol"

I'd be more concerned for my sanity if May and her securitech lobbyist acolytes weren't such a bunch of useless wasters. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they've only spent ten quid creating a consultation document, and the rest has gone on team building exercises and lunches at Jamie's.

This is a job for....[gnarly fanfare]...Tubgirl!

only took them three months to get the login page working...briefly

Tom Cruise: A narrow-eyed glare that's looking a bit past its sell-by.

I'd go with "pas de fumes sans feu" on this one. There's probably been a major security snafu in their intelligence gathering, and this is their chuckling media-friendly way of burying the bad news. "ooh!....a butterfly!"

Perhaps M. Hollande's freshly tax liable friends in high places are shredding the electronic audit trail to the gnomes in La Shweesh.

In answer to those wailing about speaking ill of the dead...I wonder how much ill you spoke of Hugo Chavez. Or Thatcher's old chum, Pol Pot.

Personally, I won't give a tuppenny toss what anyone says about me when I'm dead, because my hearing will have ceased to function round about the same time as my heart.

Perhaps it's some bizarre religious hangover from the Roman Empire.

The old witch certainly didn't do much in the way of good for the people outside the Home Counties. Stoking up the civil war in Norn Ireland with rabble rousing hollow rhetoric and state sponsored assassinations? Very diplomatic.

Friedmanism demands that the elite thrive at the expense of the masses. She certainly carried that one through. Not quite as murderously as her beloved Augusto, but their bueprints for social division and asset stripping were like peas in a pod. Hectoring narcissistic imbeciles may be seen as useful puppet figureheads by the wealthy elites who patronise corrupt politicians, but in the real world, you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Attempting some childish guilt trippery on those who have good reason to loathe the woman, and the circus of boojwah entitlement she fronted, shows a peculiarly pissy and very selective approach to the real world.

For the home user or nanobiz, it'll make zero difference. I'm sure I'm not the only person with a win98 machine purring away on my home network, running postwar legacy stuff that no longer exists for any other platform. It will affect musos and other holdouts with expensive legacy 32bit outboard in their studios. Focusrite home studio kit drivers for post XP OSes are notoriously useless. The lag between new versions of the OS and the driver support necessary to run glitch free is one of the major bugbears for anyone investing in A/V outboard. Especially when a software upgrade requires an OS upgrade.

I have a full set of the various flavours of Windows on wonky old boxes, in order to retain compatibility with the reluctant upgraders who live by the "if it ain't broke" maxim. If replacing a functioning sytem, from OS to outboard, costs an arm and a leg, most skint musos will choose to retain their corporeal integrity. I hung on to a Stacey with Creator/Unitor etc for midi sequencing until 2004, because analogue bods were reluctant to invest in new fangled PCs, smpte, midi interfaces, and cv/gate generators, et al. There's something to be said for old school simplicity, even if 4meg of ram and a 40meg HD seems a tad restrictive these days.

In the average bustling public sector organisation, the change resistant plodders will be quaking in their boots, having only just recovered from the Office 2003 to 2007 upgrade that perturbed them in 2011.

re: quality

I wouldn't keep all my eggs in one NAS shaped basket. Please take and post a photo of the expression on your face when it goes tits up and requires a reload. Seen this happen twice now producing 4TB of corrupt files. Cases are bulky, but tubs arent. Anything I shovel onto a hard drive gets a secondary rip to dvd.

From my detailed experimental work carried out on a brief visit to London Zoo, I can confirm that poop-flinging monkeys are not fond of having it flung back at them. I think this applies equally to middle managers.

Keep the Nobel Prize. A beer will suffice.

The only flaw I can see in any grand cosmological theories is that we can only observe stuff "out there" from a relatively fixed perspective in this section of our galaxy. My brain melts when I attempt to imagine a spherical or tubular version of this process.

Place a pizza box and yesterday's Metro on top of anything that looks like an archive. Hey presto! Problem solved.

The digital pizza box has been with us for years. Love those proprietary legacy enterprise applications, which not only stored junk in a proprietary format, but did it using technology that was obsolete when it was rolled out. The client, the budget.

Just guessing, but I think it will be a useful tool for those underground pirate radio types who resent intrusion and extortion by the RIAA and BFI. I can also see a few niche content providers using it to avoid censorious blocking.

however...

I'm pretty certain that tales of St Steve's resurrection and second coming would have had the susceptible fanbois welling up and racing for their Twitter accounts..

Especially if there was some puff for the iCryo Skyhook Rescuscitator Mk1 prototype to hang it on.

I think I prefer the stealth hoody, and the graun gogs. It's tough trying to be funny when you're phoning it in from under a table in Ye Olde Pickled Frogge.

This?

brrrring brrrrring!..."I can't reveal my identity, or who I work for, but if you don't send me large bundles of used fifties, there's a sports holdall with your name on it"......click!

(later) brrrring brrrring!... "Isn't it about time you got dressed and made your way to the bank?"....click!

(later still) brrrring brrrring!.... "Don't say I didn't warn you" ....click!

I returned home about 5:30 pm this evening to find my dead housekeeper neatly folded up in a sports bag in the bath. The answerphone volume appeared to have been set to "off". A tragic, but very preventable accident has occurred.

If you have a "page", it implies that your pushing something, even if it's your own lack of talent. I know a good few people with small niche businesses (promoters, film makers, designers, togs, MUAs, djs, lighting techs etc) who've been trolled on their pages by weird vindictive sockpuppets, who seem to be acting in the interests of competing small businesses. I've chased a few away by trollbaiting them to the point that they breach fb's abuse threshold and feel the banhammer. As a grownup, I think it's better to unwrap them and see what's driving their spleen. Some well directed ridicule of their hackneyed technique poops their party every time, and deters them from returning with a fresh alias..

Heavy handed moderation unbalances a site, and seeing as how facebook mods seem to have eased off on the kneejerk timeouts, it seems only fair to keep the monkey dancing till it's all worn out..

Younger folk can find relentless fuckwittery a bit demoralising , especially when they're self employed designers and the like. They're under enough stress creating stuff to sell in order to eat and pay rent, without having to deal with deluded cockwranglers, and failed Model Mayhem wannabes with chips on both shoulders..

Most of the aforementioned designers have built their pages into the thousands by word of mouth, and zero spamming, so I don't mind playing Tex Avery troll bingo on their behalf. With lemmings and miniguns. If you don't take trolls seriously, they have no power to shock or intimidate, which denies them the psychotic validation they crave.

On the other hand, monolithic entities who exist only to spam their glorious corporate charisma into socmedia from every angle, probably deserve an occasional shitstorm, as demonstrated by the kerfuffle over the "Keep Calm and Rape" T-shirts, which Amazon "didn't know" were being flogged through its UK site. A gentle reminder for them that talking ain't walking. And not for the first time.

No doubt the usual suspects will turn up here, and trot out their standard "I don't use it , so i hate it" shpiel, but for people who have extended social and commercial circles, it's a useful medium. And no matter how often FB tries to churn it in favour of advertisers, there'll always be large groups of clued-up users running adblock and purity on it (with apps turned off globally) to keep the noise to a minimum.

I thought Turing invented a type of car. Imagine my surprise when I found out that he was a tech boffin. And that nice Mr Fry, busy though he was, selling those delicious Apple pies, saw fit to share his wit and wisdom with a mere plebian such as I. He even found time to enlighten me, after a fashion, about something or other which has now exceeded my attention span. Trebles all round!

As for that Twittersite business, it's all a bit too new fangly for me. First you beg people to follow you and admire your jolly goodness, then you get upset when they disagree over the specific gravity of cheese, and then you throw one of those there hissyfits and stomp off in a huff. Good thing it has a revolving door, I reckon.