Posts by Anomalous Cowshed

Believe everything anyone says, provided it's relayed by a media outlet

See title

blimey

Until now I thought a ukulele was some kind of wind instrument - looking a bit like a cross between a potato and a flute. Now I know it's a string instrument. Thanks Register for unexpected side-benefits!

The problem with BT's attempts to buff up their brand...

...is that many people don't think much of their brand.

Maybe it's time they changed their name again, and chose something bold and daring and ever so slightly plasticky like so many other big, anonymous corporations. For instance:

Norwich Union -> Aviva

British Gas -> Centrica

What kind of name could BT go for?

What about something celestial, like the name of a star or planet...for instance: "Uranus"?

Or how about 'Bolloxa'? That surely sounds exotic and foreign, and in a somewhat strangely smelly way, remotely sexy. Or: ConArt? That name will have the advantage of being immediately recognisable across the channel.

No disrespect here - just a bit of fun.

Not easy to 'comment'

One the one hand, some might say that the alternative for the cockroach would most likely be to be squashed by a slipper, i.e. killed, so it doesn't matter.

On the other hand, there is a difference between killing a pest and doing things to it which might be seen as showing a lack of respect and humanity to a living thing. It is perhaps not merely what is being done to the insect that is of concern, but also the impact on the mind of the person who is doing it. Since these experiments are not in any way scientific, the real reason for people conducting them, which may include likely varying degrees of sadism, may not be something that should be encouraged.

If many people are enabled or encouraged to conduct such experiments on insects, a small proportion of them might also eventually graduate to bigger subjects.

Doctor Mengele used to conduct vivisection experiments on death camp inmates and could surely have used the argument that they were up for the chop anyway, so it didn't matter - what with the people in question being non-Aryans and thus equivalent to rats and cockroaches in his country's mindset at the time.

80-90 million years ago, the Western part of North America was called Laramidia...and there was a huge inner sea channel and Utah had beach-front properties. This is an advert from an estate agent of the era (which was recently discovered fossilised, the advert, not the estate agent): "Beach-front property in Laramidia for sale - outstanding sea views. 50 metre high, 10 metre thick walls, no less than ten remotely operated 20mm, multiple-barrel Gatling guns and military grade steel nets overhead for guaranteed safety from the local wildlife. just around the corner from massive shopping mall with McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken (expected in a few millionyears).

I'm proud of the legacy

When I behold the brave new world in the making at Stratford, with the magnificent concrete blocks, the windswept concrete plazas, and the romantic mountains of rubble, when I remember how proud we Londoners were to give up our main roads to exclusive VIP traffic, to give up some of our favourite parks for over a year to what at first glance looked like a campaign of unprecedented state-sponsored vandalism but was in fact definitely done in our interest, I am proud of the legacy of these Olympic games, which gave so many companiespeople so much cashhope and aspiration, and finally put London on the map, whereas of course it hadn't been there before.

Not only that, but the terrorist threats were kept at bay by cleverly positioned missile batteries, at a time when the average person, ever so trivial, was mainly concerned about laptop batteries, and no attacks took place, which is absolutely wonderful. Spare a minute, will you, raise your consciousness above your humdrum day-to-day concerns, and marvel at the tremendous efforts of the brave people and corporations that made all this possible!

All this is a testament to this great Lord and his generous corporate backers, and I wonder why the people of London haven't voted to erect any statues to their memory yet...

...And with this thought, I awoke from one of my weirdest ever LSD trips, feeling rather confused.

Bloke says - if anyone needs to get something to Mars, talk to me

Oy! I want in on this bandwagon, before it's too late.

I plan to send a lander to Alpha Centauri come 2020. It won't get there in 2020. But the plan is to launch it in 2020.

I will need 10 billion pounds to fund this amazing mission, a first for mankind. So if anybody wants to get some stuff up to the stars, talk to me.

I know some governments have been interested in stars in the past, we could accommodate them. Toddlers also like stars - twinkle, twinkle! - so there are lots of parents out there who will be well advised to contribute a nominal donation, say £1000 per toddler, in return for which we will offer their sprogs a slither of immortality by entering their names in our Star Exploration Contributors database, a copy of which will be carried aboard the lander on a radiation-shielded USB dongle, hand-crafted in an exclusive workshop in Shenzhen, China. Entries in the "Premium Star Exploration Contributors Hall of Fame", an exclusive table in the database, will be available to rich mugsdiscerning philanthropists for £1,000,000 and above. For this you will not only have your name and status up in the stars, forever, but you will get your own copy of the entire database on a gold-plated USB stick, so you can see which of your mates have also contributed. Get in quick, before space runs out: the database we use is a super-secure, NSA and virus proof one-off edition from a leading software house called 'Maocrosoft' in Guangzhou and is specially designed to only hold up to 1 billion records.

To contribute, head to your local Western Union branch...

"allowing the user to move and object about wherever their finger goes"

I, too, dream of moving and objecting just about wherever my finger goes. It is a surreal way of expressing my freedom of speech and movement in a world where liberty appears increasingly constrained by legislation and wiretapping...

Money v people

In today's world, the things that matter are money, fun, entertainment, 'respect', status, being in the newspapers, money, and...money. People, relatives, friends especially, community, live and let live, these things are no longer very relevant.

I pay 38 million dollars for a huge property near the beach. People have been using one of the paths for years before I came here to access their public amenity, the beach. I don't want this. I find a way to prevent them. I'm happy. They're not happy? Screw them. I have millions. I'm OK. They should work hard and make millions and do the same as I did, the lazy @!$?.

Outsold every other smartphone maker combined? The figures quoted don't add up then...

What's the big deal?

Mice have been working as spies and superheroes on TV for decades and have been scaring women and elephants for millions of years. What's the big deal about a scorpion or two?

Dashed hopes

There were once hopes that the paperless digital world would save a lot of trees, ink, processing and transportation. But the fact that new machines come up every year, tempting owners of the old ones to upgrade, and the fact that the machines in general are not practical to upgrade or repair, probably means that the digital world has had a negative environmental impact in terms of resources, hazardous materials and landfill use.

Fine

Isn't recursiveness fun? Case in point: the government fining itself...They must really hate getting a fine from themselves...and having to shift the taxpayer's money from the left pocket to the right pocket!

oh the outrage!

NSA spies on France, recording millions of phone calls.

How? With the connivance of whom?

Reaction of the French government - which we are being led to believe only found out about this outrage from a newspaper article (they would of course have no means of their own to find out about, aid or abet such activities): it is unacceptable"

A bit of history

The year is 2113 and Earth is still desperately trying to cling to Moore's law.

Intel yesterday unveiled its new wafer, far out in deep space, where the 100 km2 monster, which weighs 30000 tons, was apparently grown from a single crystal of silicon. A big one, admittedly. "The things we do so that people can continue playing Crysys on their Win 877.5 computers" sighed the Chairman of the company, wearing a space suit and wielding a pair of scissors with which he was about to start cutting the wafer into tiny silicon chips...

This is a piffle

Messiah, Princess, King - these seem to you extreme?

It is nothing when compared with Brazil.

There are people there called Ricardo Nixon, Adolfo Hitler, Lynneeker, Disney Landia, e-mail, James Bond...

Asda v Apple planning applications

There is a difference between the two.

Most of the plasticky supermarkets and rubbish new mass-produced apartment / office buildings being put up in crowded Blighty are completely out of scale their surroundings and blight communities with their ugliness. Whereas this is looks like top quality stuff being proposed for a run-down lot in an office/light industrial zone in a small town which is the home town of one of the biggest companies in the world. So normally I couldn't see what anyone would have to complain about it.

However, since The Register requires a complaint, here you are:

The design is over-simplistic and a negation of intellectual architecture, being designed to appeal to the ignorant masses. The inclusion of trees is a clear attempt to pander to outdated populist mores that are out of step with the modern architectural canon. The lack of sharp angles and deterministic cantilevering shows a distinct lack of imagination which condemns this as an outrage to anyone with a cultured sense of intellectual aesthetics. It is, put simply, an abomination, a blot on the purity of the architectural profession.

What's all this talk about Turkeys and boobies

Is it because Christmas is around the corner, so to speak? Or did I catch the wrong end of the stick?

Cool

Extrapolating from this announcement: One day we may see small portable devices with unfolding plastic screen or many little screens superimposed and opening up like a fan, with no bezels. That would be a nice step forward. And then we will maybe find a way to produce amorphous devices capable of flowing into almost any shape. Then mind-machine interface. After that, Bob's your Uncle. Exciting but strange times beckon!

I would like to post a controversial opinion. It's not the truth...

...It's just conjecture. Please therefore do not take it to heart or hold it against me:

One of the things that the 'intelligence community' is supposedly particularly good at is 'non-linear' behaviour. What I mean is: devious schemes, e.g. playing games. Yet in recent months it seems this NSA has been completely laid bare by a single, brave young man, now hiding in Russia after a highly publicised jaunt around the world, during which he successfully ran the gauntlet of all the naughty acronyms - NSA, FBI, CIA, MI6, GCHQ.

He's been telling us all about the NSA. Thanks to him, we know exactly what they are up to. Every day, there's something new. Some things, we now know, they can do (shock horror, better watch our step). Other things, we've found out, they cannot do (so it's safe for us to do these things with total peace of mind). It helps that the young man is able to leak to us PowerPoint presentations in which NSA operatives candidly inform one another about what they can and cannot do about this or that technology. These fall into our lap and we smirk, knowing that we've found their weakness.

But doesn't it sound strange to you that it's so straight-forward, even a teenager could outfox these guys? Or rather: that now, thanks to this young man they failed to catch and to shut up, anybody can find easy solutions to keep the NSA at bay?

Even we at the NSA are not whiter than white

Even we sometimes make mistakes, and there are people who work for us who have misbehaved in the past - 3 of them to be precise; but now it's OK: they've left the service. Now we're completely clean. What we do, we do for your own good. We need to catch the terrorists. That's all of youMohammed over there, the ugly looking shifty character in the photograph, the one with the funny turban and the massive bomb ready to blow you up in your homes. You're out to get usHe's out to get you and we must remain vigilant. So we need to understand how this Interstuff and all these mobile phoneys work, to get youMohammed right where we want you...ooops, I mean 'him'. And to make sure we understand all this technology, and can neutralise youMohammed over there, we're set up an amazing series of operations with fancy names based on your tax dollars and on these cool things called acronyms. Over here at the NSA, we love acronyms. We love America, tax dollars and acronyms. It means you can trust us.

I once worked in an office in Paris...

There were 6 of us there, all IT pros, except for me, I was kind of an impostor, being more of an amateur. We worked in a small room, with desks strewn around, several smokers puffing away at will with the windows closed. 6 men, all rather unkempt and with relatively poor social skills, but getting on with the work. It was a web advertising agency. Very few people used to come into this particular room, which was not glamorous like the rest of the agency. However, for some reason, two women regularly came in for work-related reasons. One of them was a stunning, short brunette with an icy temperament, who used to enter the room briefly only because she had to, and would wear a sneer throughout making it clear that she didn't appreciate the experience, and woe to whoever might try to talk to her.

The other was a tall, beautiful, dusky brunette with long curly hair. She was the complete opposite in terms of character. She used to come in, say hello left and right, flash crafty smiles at us, and then she would head for one particular desk, whose owner worked facing the door, and she would lean low and seductively over it, so everybody could admire what an amazing creature she was, and all work and all talk would then stop dead.

All of us were watching. She knew it, of course. As for the one whose desk she was leaning on, he was so put out of sorts, he could barely stammer answers to her questions. He was utterly and hopelessly smitten, and completely in her power. All the other men meanwhile were wishing she would pick on us for a change, but she never did.

She needed to get or deliver a report to this guy, I don't remember which it was, but she made sure to turn this mundane obligation into such a seductive event, that it was the highlight of the day. She flirted shamelessly with the poor bloke while he desperately tried to flirt back clumsily...

It's rather surreal, especially when you realise the seemingly kind, naïve and emotional weirdo onstage is a multibillionaire, one of the richest men in the world, that everything about this performance is completely stage-managed, that his very departure from the company, years early and unexpected by many, led to the stock price of Microsoft rising significantly, i.e. may well have also been stage-managed to that end specifically...even the yellow T-shirt worn by the apparently kindly freak is designed to make him more visible on stage and on camera. It's a well-made piece of theatre for people who are within the Microsoft distortion field (employees) and of course completely ineffective on anyone else.

Let's take the idea of the drone one step further.

Let's say it were possible to create miniature autonomous flying drones, the size of a wasp - maybe even looking like a wasp. And let's say that once this became possible, it were possible to mass-produce them until the cost became insignificant, something which nature manages to do, so why not us.

Which of the following is most likely to survive a head-on collision:

1. An F-whatever aircraft costing £ 100 million, equipped with high tech air-to-air missiles, massive bombs and deadly cannon and controlled by a top pilot.

2. A huge swarm of 100 million tiny wasp-size drones with basic AI functionality and a variety of small and fiendish weapons such as self-destruct explosive charges at the rear, razor sharp saws at the front, radar antennae, communications jamming facilities...

Deus ex Machina

Amino acids are boring, we get a headache trying to work out how evolution might have happened that way, and it completely contradicts our literal reading of the bible. This won't do.

We must find an easier, more straight-forward explanation.

So instead, we propose the following:

- Earth was created by God 5 or 6000 years ago, we are descended from Adam and Eve, the sun turns around the earth, the fossils were planted by angels to test our faith.

For those of you who find that old hat and too conservative and non-scientific, how about this:

- Earth was seeded by aliens or by bacteria from outer space. We can just about imagine how the bacteria from outer space might have evolved into us and we don't need to worry about how they themselves came into being.

No offence to the Scots, and I mean it

Good luck to them, they're great people, but it is also true that bullshit thrives even in Scotland, so:

April 1, 2015. His Whiskeyness' Scottish Government yesterday introduced its new, revolutionary GazL computer system, which will eventually outrun the entire Scottish government.

Unveiling the new wonder, which happens to be made in Africa, and is said to be highly sustainable, the Scottish Minister for Truth and Progress (SMTP), who had come suitably equipped with a dustpan and shovel to deal with unforeseen contingencies (known as 'incontinencies' in the Scottish New IT Sector), described it as "adaptable, secure and agile". "It runs faster than anything we've ever had up here in Scotland, and it has four legs, so if one fails, there's lots of backups. In tests carried out recently, it outran all civil servants and welfare claimants, so we're confident that it will do a great job, at a minimal cost."

Another anecdote about my rich friend

I was staying (quite happily) at a youth hostel, when my multimillionaire friend came over and insisted on me coming over to stay with him at his massive apartment on street X of city Y in country Z.

When I arrived, I saw a computer open on the table, and he asked me to get stuck in immediately writing essays for him as part of his application form to go to Harvard. So I understood the purpose of the invitation. My friend could hardly string two words together on paper. His father had donated money to Harvard during his lifetime, to pave the way for his son to study there. But Harvard required an application form to be filled. And part of the form involved writing 10 essays about various things one had done in life. I sat down at the computer and began working immediately. I did string out the essay writing over a number of days, though. To make it worth my while. But that was a mistake.

There were 3 bed sheets in the house: 2 for my friend, and one for me. I could choose whether to have it on the mattress or use it as a cover. This was not really an improvement over the last time I had stayed in one of his other houses (a building with some 20 apartments, many empty, and his apartment itself had half a dozen bedrooms and bathrooms), when I was offered the sofa and a blanket. On that occasion, the cleaning lady had muttered something rude about my friend and had brought me a pair of sheets and a pillow with a pillowcase.

For five days, I could not have a shower. The weather was cold, and for some reason, there was no hot water. It didn't seem to bother my friend, though. I was young so I decided to tough it out and just wash the bits that absolutely had to be washed. Until one day, when, having had enough of freezing, I found out that there was a secret water heating on/off button which he would switch on for himself, and then turn off after he'd had a shower.

The huge kitchen contained no cutlery. The only food and drink in the house consisted of around a fifty to a hundred bottles of mineral water, which I was told were reserved for him. Whenever I bought something to eat, and put it in the kitchen, I often found it finished behind my back.

One day, after the essays were finished, my friend invited me to the restaurant. I was amazed. I was careful to eat very little, to avoid him having the burden of paying too much for me. At the end of the meal, he paid for his share, and then, when I had realised that the invitation was only to enjoy his presence, not for a free lunch, and had accordingly paid for my share, he took 2 sweets from the plate where the restaurant kept sweets to offer to its patrons after meals, and he handed them to me. He swiped all the other sweets into his pockets.

Other anecdotes available on demand!

Tech quango predicts the future

It's amazing what you can get up to in guise of working when the taxpayer is footing the bill...I wish I were getting paid for doing similar work!

bit fiddlers

A very funny way of referring to these massive, state of the art machines!

Forgive me if I am missing something here

But this kind of thing, even if really 'impossible to forge', is still vulnerable to a man in the middle attack, no? As in: someone manufactures alternative labels which are made available to product forgers, and fake readers which follow a different principle internally, but which look the same, and which are infiltrated into the supply chain, stores, etc., and the end-users / checkers / customers don't know the difference, since everything appears to be following the right procedure from the outside...

Wow

A man decides not to use mobile phones for his family; why is this sensational news?

How come a newspaper is so interested in such a mundane story?

What next: a man decides NOT TO HAVE A TV IN HIS HOME...will that become national news?

It seems they have quite a knack for publicising their stunt - for it is surely a stunt, since they only plan to do it for one year, and will then presumably revert to what is, after all, the 'right way of living'. As such, it seems to me more of a media stunt than a family genuinely deciding to eschew 21st century technology - of which there are many, many examples, both in the developed world, and of course, across the rest of the world, none of whom consider this to be worthy of attention by the press.

This is very common these days

Companies claim that their "web site" has run out of stock.

How can a web site run out of stock? Indeed how can a web site have stock to begin with? And why should people have to go around phoning "another department" to see if they have stock? If someone is selling goods, surely that means you don't have to start phoning his entire family or all his employees just in case they are holding back on some stock?

DARWIN

Detrimental Activity Retrieval Without Interfering with Nature

This is most confusing

There are stories about ICANN and stories about Icahn, and I keep getting them mixed up and thinking that the one is the other, with rather silly misunderstandings resulting...

The cloud

Everything that is free tends to have hidden costs.

Deliberately surrendering control over one's data to a service hosted in a foreign country, whose government is one of the most powerful on the planed, and has ambitions (easily realised) of expanding that power, when the service in question is moreover provided free of charge, with an almost incredible enticement to use it (virtually limitless storage), is really folly. Relying on encryption when a Trojan or whatever it is called might be used to considerably shorten the odds on discovering the key used is not a reliable defence.

Once the data is in place, under the jurisdiction of the Chinese government should they choose to avail themselves of it, then given the lack of any enforceable contractual confidentiality terms on account of the lack of consideration for the provision of the service (not that such [Western] capitalist concepts would impede the Chinese authorities), what is to stop them from helping themselves?

For example: the idea would not be to look at everybody's holiday snaps. But once one of the users of the free cloud service was identified as being in a key position and/or having access to sensitive information, a government service might focus on that person and use all means at their disposal to get to their data. As such, the offer of 10 Terabytes of storage could be seen as a fishing exercise, designed to attract as many people as possible, especially young and careless ones, who one day might come to have responsible jobs and whose past indiscretions may be stored in archives in China, ready to be used as a bargaining chip to secure a "more cooperative attitude".

Of course all this may be wrong and Ten Cents may merely be engaging in a huge exercise in philanthropy towards the population of Earth. Why not? Anything is possible.

The year is 2050

In the face of apathy, greed and incompetence among its main competitors in the space race, China has colonised the moon and established de facto sovereignty over it. Huge Chinese bases are dotted across the bleak landscape. Chinese satellites, fitted with high-tech kinetic impact missiles, orbit around it, lest any minor Earth power dare wander too close. The two Chinese characters representing China have even been inscribed across the surface of the moon in letters a thousand miles across, and are now visible from earth. The price of genuine moon rocks is now so low that fakes are no longer for sale on ebay.

So established is China's hegemony over the moon, that in dens all over the world, mama cats have a new way of scaring their offspring into eating their food. They point to the moon and say "If you don't eat your mouse, the bad, bad Chinaman is going to come down and eat you!".