Re: It would be a better companion
You mean you could pay for your latte by just waving the robot past the terminal instead of entering your PIN? I think it's easier to use your Mastercard...
Posts by Phil E Succour
103 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2012
World's FIRST TALKING SPACE ROBO-CHUM BLASTS OFF to the ISS
French boffins: Regard, our record-breaking long, fat, wet pipe
Decade to 2010 was hottest, wettest: WMO
Thursday 4th July 2013 08:37 GMT 
Overdramatising?
>> It was the wettest decade since 1901, except for the 1950s...
Doesn't that just mean it was the wettest decade since the 1950s?? Why do they even mention 1901 if that decade was not as wet as the 1950s?? Seems to be a poor attempt to make it sound more dramatic than it actually is.
Voyager 1 'close' to breaking through to DEEP SPACE - boffins
Thinktank: 'Lab-smashing' Stuxnet helped Iran's nuke effort
Boffins plan to drop €250,000 TEST-TUBE BURGER on London
Quid-a-day nosh challenge hack enters the final furlong
Outback geothermal plant goes live
Weary quid-a-day nosh hack fears colonal mass ejection
Yahoo! thanks! Asian! equity! for! 36! PERCENT! income! boost!
Smart metering will disrupt weather forecasts, warns Met Office
Mali to give away .ML domains for free
Rise Of The Machines: What will become of box-watchers, delivery drivers?
Apple and world HACKED by Facebook plunderers
'Bah, this Apple Shop is full of APPLES'
Spanish boffins increase GPS accuracy by 90%
Michael Dell to buy himself on Monday?
Google denies smacking Botswanan ass
Amazon-bashed HMV calls in administrators, seeks buyer
Tuesday 15th January 2013 11:43 GMT 
What a shame
I feel for the employees whose jobs are under threat from this development, I hope they are able to find new work.
Sadly though the writing has been on the wall for some time. High street retailers who concentrate on one are of the market like HMV and Jessops have really had the rug pulled from under their feet over the past few years. Locked into long leases on some of the stores with no flexibility when times are hard has meant they are just not agile enough.
The strongest high street retailers seem to be those who have product lines crossing many categories such as department stores - perhaps that model is the best hope for the future?
Vibrator guru on pleasure tech: 'Of all the places you'd want a quality UI....'
A pre-ticked box in web forms should NOT mean consent - EU report
Adobe offers free trip to PowerPC era
Polaroid plans retail Fotobars to print out your pics
Friday 4th January 2013 10:41 GMT
Re: Printed copies of photos are pointless...
That might be true of prints knocked out on a colour laser or cheap inkjet, but if you use one of the high end printers from Epson or Canon that use pigment inks, and then look after the prints properly (as you need to do with chemical prints), their lifespan will be comparable to chemical prints.
iPhone 'Do Not Disturb' bug to self-destruct on Monday
Boffins cook raw numbers, hope to bake PERFECT kilogram
Cassini spots Titan ‘mini-Nile’
Sleepy North Yorkshire village is first to get gov-subsidised BT fibre
North Korean rocket works, puts something into orbit
Last moon landing was 40 years ago today
Tuesday 11th December 2012 11:12 GMT 
Pedant Alert
"the fact remains that as of today it's 40 years since a human set foot on the moon."
The article says they spent 75 hours on the moon, so I guess that would mean the last time a human set foot on the moon was the 14th December 1972, not quite 40 years ago.
Article's title is accurate though!
LOL: Twitter faces fines for late UK financial filings
Hero Playmonaut lost at sea as SPEARS ditches in Channel
Wednesday 5th December 2012 16:13 GMT
Re: Next Launch Site
>>>Next launch site....obviously Meriden in the Midlands. traditionally known as the center of England therefore very far from the sea.
Well, no actually, that doesn't really help. On the UK mainland the furthest you can be from a coastline is about 70 miles and the LOHAN balloon went further than that, so you could still be in trouble, it all depends on where the wind takes it. If the wind had been from the south LOHAN could have gone over 200 miles due north before crossing the coast somewhere near Hartlepool. As it was the predicted path showed the flight returning to the ground well short of the south coast, so launching from that site wasn't a rash decision, but there's always a risk the wind forecasts are wrong.
Tuesday 4th December 2012 23:58 GMT
Re: Coincidence?
>>>I was in Newbury at around the time the balloon burst and saw something that looked on fire falling out the sky. Could it have been a part of this?
Nope, the balloon was released near Newbury, it travelled a fair distance south east before it burst, and it landed in the sea 70 odd miles away, so if you saw something fall from the sky in Newbury it's just a coincidence...
Tuesday 4th December 2012 14:00 GMT
Probably wouldn't help much...
>>>Can I suggest that the next test be launched from Coton in the Elms, Derbyshire? Just to be on the safe side...
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coton_in_the_Elms
That reference says Coton in the Elms is 70 miles from water, and my estimate of the straight line distance from launch to splashdown is around 72 to 73 miles.
But it's all irrelevant anyway, you could go much more than 70 miles from both Brightwalton and Coton in the Elms and still be over dry land, it just depends which direction you go. The prediction based on a wind forecast was that it would travel south but fall well short of the coast. It didn't. Shit happens.
LOHAN's mighty orb launch live NOW
Monday 3rd December 2012 09:48 GMT
Re: Always "Late Delivery" !!
Whilst waiting for Lester to distil the events into a Reg article, there's a write up here...
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/ukhas/Rfx1Jnv9hZU
and pictures here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveake/sets/72157632136764003/
and a video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jcnJmj0l9I&feature=g-upl
Saturday 1st December 2012 20:27 GMT 
Beer From Me Too!
Not 100% successful, but it's unreasonable to expect that it would be, this was a test flight after all.
Fingers crossed the payload washes ashore or another boat trip tomorrow hauls our plucky playmonaut from the water.
I guess the A-Team are drowning their sorrows in a south coast pub right now...
Watch live! Crack LOHAN team to send SPEARS to stratosphere
Extreme teleworking: A Reg hack reports from the internet's frontier
Thursday 22nd November 2012 12:56 GMT
Lasers
Ah - is this the reason for those high power lasers? Are you planning to modulate their beams with your internet traffic and get a decent connection that way? That would be _real_ broadband!
There's always a risk you might fry a Telefonica operative in the process though...
And if I might just add, You lucky, lucky bastard Lester
LOHAN to slip in sexy little black number
Omnishambles beats off mummy-porn, becomes English word of 2012
LOHAN slips BRA over BOOBIES in ballocket backronym buffoonery
A bitter spill to swallow, or 'how to smeg up your keyboard'
Medical scan record that the NHS says will cost £2k to retrieve: Detail
Thursday 8th November 2012 13:37 GMT 
This is just the tip of the iceberg...
...as far as digital data preservation goes.
The US Library of Congress has some good guidance at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/, but the proliferation of propriatary data formats across multiple industires doesn't bode well for future accessibility of data.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
