Re: Like a lava lamp for people with X ray vision

It must be endothermic, because the combustion of hydrogen and carbon separately releases more energy than the combustion of the same mass of methane. If methane decomposition was exothermic at room temperature, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn wouldn't have methane atmospheres (the methane would decompose and the hydrogen would escape into space, leaving a soot covered planetoid.)

I imagine they have a brilliant wheeze: burn all the carbon to generate the heat to fuel the process. Oh...

Re: Deja Jew

1. Jew != Israeli !== Binyamin Netanyahu.

2. Israel is not composed of a minority of fruitcakes and a majority of brainwashed serfs. There is, it is true, a minority of fruitcakes, but the majority is very vociferous.

Re: cough... Nitric Acid

No, I understood perfectly. You need a better class of reader who knows more chemical engineering.

Re: Missile fuels and testing

Well, Germany, the US and the UK didn't. According to Ignition! the Russians were far more cautious about experimenting with PhD killers once they had something that worked well enough.

Come on, the US even tried adding beryllium to rocket fuel.

Re: Be Prepared -Microsoft eventually succeed in most things that they do..

I can't think of an occasion before where they got up to 50% of market share only to see it slip away to almost nothing.

dwarf Linux

More to the point, does it run in one of the Windows 8 tiles that I've never seen since installing a start menu restore program? That would be interesting.

Re: Bullshit

The analyst forecasts are all sufficiently far in the future that they will have plenty of excuses about changes in the industry and the market by the time they are obviously backing the wrong horse. That's how analysts work.

Re: Not sure about the conclusion

I am an 'Oxbridge twat'. I've developed products that have earned millions from export, at least one because a Cambridge degree can give you the confidence to believe your own research and calculation and back it against the people who tell you something isn't possible. The thing is, there are lots of Oxbridge people much cleverer than me who are far too busy designing aircraft and revolutionising mobile phone technology. We are mostly too busy to get involved in politics. And probably just as well. We aren't all Clegg or Cameron.

Re: Breaking News

You mean 'when it is a finite resource'. Unfortunately, PPE is not as good as being a real economist, and since 2000, real economists have been subject to Gresham's Law, being driven out by 'bank economists and 'free market economists' - the kind of economist who knows what the answer is, now what was your question?

Re: "Northern Rock didn't gamble or speculate; it just issued mortgages."

If stupidity was a crime and half the country was in prison, the other half would be Switzerland. I could live with that.

Re: Face.

No Togo.

Re: Air Power

I was believing you right up to the bit about Fox News being comparatively reasonable.

Re: Its an Apple (tm) put up job

And Motorola. And Microsoft. And Nokia.And Huawei. And Acer, Asus, HTC,Sharp,Sony, Panasonic.

Probably Ford and General Motors as well, Hyundais really are getting too good these days.

Let's make our conspiracy theories sufficiently all-embracing.

I'd add RIM but since their original lawsuit many years ago they seem to have reverted to Canadian type and can't bring themselves to be beastly to anybody. They had to get a German in just to say something very mildly uncomplimentary about Apple.

Re: Continue to believe the Norks are stupid at your own peril:

I'm a little dubious. The Official IRA wasn't a Marxist offshoot of the IRA: they is the mainstream. The Provisional IRA were Trotskyites.

Reportedly visitors from Communist regimes to the IRA scratched their heads quite a bit when these avowed Marxists went off to Mass on Sundays.

Re: You'd be surprised

You mean he thinks it is all very tidy, people only park in the marked bays, there are an awful lot of banks and weapons companies, and it snows a lot in the high bits?

He needed to be educated in San Francisco.

Re: Props!

The Guardian lost all technical credibility with me when it referred to Florian Muleller as a "patent consultant". If he's a patent consultant, so am I. Unless "patent attorney" or the like has suddenly appeared in his cv.

Re: Perjury?

This is true. I was amazed to discover quite recently that the phone capability of the most basic BlackBerry is actually better than that of an iPhone. (This is not an advert; I suspect that the same is true of many lower cost phones that people actually use for making calls a lot).

However, a cheap Casio digital watch tells the time more accurately than most of those expensive mechanical things.

Once you get into the field of Designer (with a capital D) products, the desire to possess shiny object seems often to outweigh the "what am I actually going to do with it?" factor. What Apple has done, that is very clever indeed, is basically this: they have created an apparently affordable Designer object (apparently because the cost is largely hidden in mobile contracts) and then persuaded millions and millions of people that they will simultaneously (a) stand out from the crowd and (b) conform to desirable social mores - just by having one.

I'm not saying the basic product isn't good - it is - but they have basically found the trick of selling Mondeos on the basis that they are Porsches. Now that is worthy of a patent.

Meanwhile Samsung develops a truly extraordinary piece of technology - the S4 - which is ridiculously light for what it does. That's quite an achievement - but the reviewers (who obviously have never priced sailplanes or dinghys) announce it feels "cheap".

In short, Apple v Samsung is fought over trivial bits of UI, while the real product differentiators get ignored or aren't understood.

I would agree with your argument if your President had real power, but his power is limited. What matters is how many elected representatives are beholden to big business. So long as it is a majority, the people can elect who they like as President. Remember the closure of Guantanamo Bay?

Re: US Gov on over drive

I guess you have never been hounded by someone misusing the law. It can cause PTSD as well as poverty.

Re: They make...

Actually, yes. In our early days Quakers were imprisoned because they were seen as a threat to those in authority since they did not recognise official jurisdiction over matters of conscience. They were threatened with hugely disproportionate punishments to frighten them into obedience.

In this case someone was frightened in this way to avoid a trial which officials might well lose. It's the same abuse.

Just because Swartz wasn't 'good' in the US sense of social conformity doesn't justify his treatment. George Fox and James Naylor were right PITAs. So can Lindis Percy be. The land grab on IP is a similar abuse to church control of ideas and US attempts to control British foreign policy, and arises from the same root. As Quakers, although we disagree with one another a lot - goes with the territory - we endeavour to identify with people who share our concerns.

Re: You can see it now, Ives and Cook, in the boardroom ...

One rap for no, two for yes. Even the iHereafter UI is in bad need of a refresh.

Re: iPhone 6 and iPhone6s

Extra column- nah, too rad for Steve and not minimal enough for Jonathan.

Yes, a stupid reaction but borne out of frustration that ordinary people can no longer influence the political process.

Amusing that the US gets the aloof, elitist Miliband and the UK gets the next that wants to get back to doorstep democracy.

Re: They make...

The early Quakers went to prison because they could not live within the laws. Massachusetts even executed them. Now the POTUS sends his kids to a Quaker school. People like you abhor progress, but others don't see standing up for it as a 'bad life decision'.

Re: Two wrongs don't make a right

I don't know - there's a saying somewhere that the victor gradually turns into the vanquished, and the US legal system certainly seems to be adopting the techniques of Stalin.

There is something deeply wrong with the mindset of American lawyers, and there are too many people who would like to replicate it over here. The more their overbearing comes back to bite them the better. They should feel themselves lucky they did it to a technology geek and not an NRA member, because those guys probably don't stop at postcards.

Or perhaps the reason for the disproportionate response to computer "crime" versus gun misuse actually reflects the lawyers estimate of the different likely consequences?

Re: Actually ...

Actually, I've given up. Three years to retirement and I can't be bothered to try to explain things to the newbies any more. They know that bandwidth is unlimited, that code optimisation is a waste of time, that frameworks are Where It's At, and that we old farts don't know anything at all. On the other hand, the solution to their problem

posted on $random_website can be dropped straight in even though it has no protection against anything from SQL injection to simple webpage corruption.

I've just tried to explain to someone that a clustered server on one physical location is nowhere near as good a guarantee of high availability as having a fallback server in a different country, and had back mumbles which translate, I think, as "The manual tells me how to do clustering but what you're suggesting looks complicated".

I'm in favour of migrating some things to the cloud. I also come up with things like more efficient ways of replicating essential data back to the ground (the Microsoft replication solution is all inclusive but inefficient in storage). Use the cloud but do not turn your brain off, is my advice.

But of course that assumes you have enough experience of what can go wrong that your brain is capable of processing the risks.

Re: Hey, you, get on to my cloud

Farms had their own windmills prior to electrification. Here in Somerset, Wyke farms has its own windmill. Michael Eavis has 250kWpk of solar PV, and our local sawmill has a biomass generator. The trend is reversing again.

Re: Solutions...

Actually no, that wasn't what I was suggesting (and I withdrew the post because I can't edit it.) I am genuinely unqualified to fix desktop computer problems, and as a professional person I won't do work for other people, even for free, that I don't feel qualified to carry out. I make an exception only if I know people very well.

My own home computers are run on a maintain often, backup frequently and avoid dodgy website basis, so I have almost no experience of actually fixing problems.

Re: Surprisingly, This Is Serious:

The manual for the satnav etc. on my car runs to 300 pages, as long as a BlackBerry manual, but on paper.

Re: Apparently, we are special -people with no special skills.

They become managers or politicians.

Re: Apparently, we are special - law of the plug.

When I worked for AE in the late 70s the electrician's union controlled access to everything electrical (wait a week to get a lightbulb replaced, small bribe) but electronic engineers were allowed to work on anything with a three pin plug, and downstream.

So people would come along with a desk lamp or a new piece of equipment, and ask innocently why it wasn't working. No plug. We can fix this for you.

Apprentices got rather good at wiring plugs.

Re: A lot of my El Reg posts have come from a PB.

The question has been answered but I would add one thing; try the PB keyboard a bit before getting a BT keyboard. The predicted text is almost uncanny as it learns the words you use. The only better mobile keyboard I know is on the BB9900. (the Z10 keyboard may be better but I 'm not buying one to spend a week or two finding out. I can wait for the Q10.

Re: UKIP

But... UKIP wants to replace the power of the EU with the dominance of the US over the UK.

Re: So, the tariffs give the prosecutors a strong negotiating position...

This is a ridiculous ad hominem. Holder admits to abuse of the judicial system, your response is to argue that one person subjected to judicial abuse was guilty. You are the reincarnation of Sen. McCarthy and I claim my $5.

Re: Short sellers?

Don't know why you were downvoted; as far as I am aware there are two kinds of shorts, the ones who have borrowed shares to play with and the naked shorts. If you own the shares which you bought at price X, and you have a contract to sell them at a future date at price Y which is lower than market but higher than X, you are just "locking in your profit", probably for tax reasons.

Not directly relevant, but Michael Lewis's book The Big Short is actually quite an exciting read and tells you enough about the financial industry to make you want to go out and upset a banker.

Re: Z10

Earnings declaration said the estimate was around 2/3 sold.

Took a look on Debenhams website

Sort by lowest price up. You can get the 16G for £87, which is an absolute bargain. The 64G was an even better bargain at £129. I gave away an Asus Transformer to an offspring because in what they call real world use, I find the PB rather better and I found I just wasn't using the larger one.

A lot of my El Reg posts have come from a PB.

Re: Chaotic mess

I'm not totally sure of that. Thorsten Heins doesn't seem to have the RDF - but he has ruthlessly pruned their activities. It looks like the old BBs are being sold off without new manufacturing. The last old Blackberry model is the 9320, which is (a) very basic and (b) amazingly capable for the money - very obviously aimed at the developing world/teenager market and what the more expensive rest of the 9300 series should have been. Nokia seems to be selling the lowest spec Lumia at a price to compete with it, which tells you all you need to know about WP8 - it has to compete on price with a little black plastic box with a tiny screen and a keyboard. (The WP7.8 version actually undercuts the BB.)

The interesting question is, can they do without the US? The US is now a small fraction of their business, and a famously expensive market to crack. The really brave move would be to abandon all pretence of the US consumer market and sell purely to business, and spend all the consumer marketing money on new markets.

Why? Because BB does well in the Muslim world, and not selling visibly in the US market could score a lot of brownie points.

They may be doomed, but not I think for years to come. There will always be people like me who find small glass keyboards impossible and can semi-touch-type on a real one. We only have to be a few percent of the market to provide a niche, because with the exception of the HP Pre 3, everybody else's attempt at a phone keyboard has been pretty dire.

Re: How does the radio work?

Well, mine does. I spent years doing electronic engineering, and it never occurred to me that a low frequency sine wave drive to a charger would interfere with the 800MHz and up of the phone signal.