* Posts by Maty

714 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2007

Brit pair deported from US for 'destroy America' tweet

Maty

"As if I needed another reason to confirm why I stay off social media."

And what exactly do you think the Reg's comment board is? Or did you come on to a social media platform for the specific purpose of telling us that you stay off it?

Just asking.

Climategate ruling: FOIA requests cover backup servers too

Maty

Agreed. The correct answer to the question

"Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

is "For precisely that reason."

Until data has been given a hostile scrutiny which is unable to find anything wrong with it, it might not be data at all. It could be wishful thinking.

E. coli turns seaweed into ethanol

Maty
Facepalm

what? no seriously, what?

'Sure it may take a thousand years of solar energy hitting a rainforest of one acre size to capture the energy required to power my motor car for 2 minutes down the road.'

A rain forest gets about 438 kilowatt hours per square foot of sunlight - that's per foot, not per acre - and that's per year - not per millennium. Gasoline packs about 33.5 kilowatt hours per gallon. Whatever are you are driving?

I mean, really. Go on and tell us how to run the ecosystem, please do. Just don't let facts get in your way.

Teen net addicts pee in bottles to stay glued to WoW

Maty

But if a kid is doing this on a school night, the issue is bad parenting, not computer games.

If the kid is doing is business into bottles, the issue is a lousy guild, not a lousy game. A guild that can't organize a bathroom break should not be expected to organize a decent raid or anything else.

Still, this article does give a new meaning to playing computer games until the wee hours of the morning.

McDonald's punters offered sex in exchange for Chicken McNuggets

Maty
Headmaster

Golden arches ....

Arch in Latin is 'fornix'. The habit of prostitutes in Rome of, um, entertaining customers under these arches gave rise to the word 'fornicate' .

So dodgy deeds under arches, golden or otherwise, simply maintains an age-old tradition.

'Mobiles bake men's balls' bog ad is cobblers - new ruling

Maty

Have that 'radiation research' bunch yet figured out that radio waves from the BBC do not in fact make the milk go sour?

Study finds piracy withering against legal alternatives

Maty

another thing...

A couple of times recently I've had to go back to the store and point out that the DVD they sold me is totally borked. Obviously quality control on the copying process is poor to non-existent - and these are fully legit DVDs I'm talking about.

Not to mention that Windows will simply refuse to play some legitimately-purchased DVDs on our computer. In each case a quick visit to a torrent site has produced a clean copy that ran perfectly.

So when legitimate sources provide an unusable product, I get a quick, free and convenient 'pirate' copy of the same material. But the stupidity of it riles me.

Christmas headaches? We prescribe a year long course of BOFH

Maty
Pint

'So, unless you want to spend the rest of the year avoiding lift shafts - '

Whew! I knew there was a reason for moving to a small country town. Nearest lift-shaft is approx 260km away. I reckon it's safe to spend the money on beer ...

Stonehenge finds hint at rituals far more ancient than the stones

Maty

The Colossus was not a religious undertaking. It was a victory monument with a religious theme.There's a difference.

Exoplanet ranking suggests INTERSTELLAR WAR imminent

Maty
Headmaster

'Fewer users' shurely?

World population's appetite TO DOUBLE by 2050, boffin warns

Maty

Indeed

And once we have worked out how to feed the world population in 2050, it will double again.

The world does not need better agriculture as much as it needs better birth control.

No chance now to save Phobos-Grunt Mars mission

Maty

No surprise there. I used to drive a Lada (company car). The engine of that thing frequently failed to start as well.

If world war III had started on a cold winter's morning, I reckon most Russian rockets wouldn't have got out of their silos :/

Mexican drug runners torture and decapitate blogger

Maty

The real killers ...

Are the people in the USA who are buying the cocaine and indirectly paying the Zetas and similar scumbags to commit atrocities such as this.

Pictures of the murdered victims should be shown in clubs and other 'trendy' places where those who think snorting cocaine is just a bit of naughty fun.

Can the iPad save newspapers?

Maty

The Economist

You can get the news almost anywhere these days. I like the Economist for its thoughtful and very well-informed opinions of what the news is going to be. (I still remember reading in 2008 'Three reasons why the euro might fail -'Greece, Greece, and Greece.')

The Economist was hard to find in the Canadian backwoods - now it's literally on tap .

Works for me.

Crap alchemist jailed for poo-into-gold experiment

Maty

What a Moran.

Collapsing cranes and cantankerous cars

Maty

About as fast as the rest of the traffic, if its a normal day on the Gardiner expressway.

Seattle superhero arrested for assault

Maty

Hard to tell. The story was slanted.

Ecclesiastical judge tells church: Let there be Wi-Fi

Maty

Didn't the reg report a case a while back of a mast going up and many local kiddies came down with 'radiation sickness'?

Turned out that the mast hadn't been powered up yet ... .

People with this mentality were burning witches a few generations ago.

Veggies tricked into dating meat-gobbling escorts

Maty

... and if its the species you expect, you'll call it a draw?

Maty

Omnivore ...?

Given that this is a dating website, some clarification might be needed here.

Neil Armstrong: US space program 'embarrassing'

Maty

'Without the discipline of the Cold War the US appears to have as much future as the Roman Empire.'

That's pretty optimistic, when you think about it. The Roman state lasted from the foundation c. 750 BC until the fall of Constantinople in AD 1453 - or well over 2000 years. The US gained independence in 1776 and so is 235 years old.

Even if we take the most pessimistic view, ignore the Byzantine empire and assume the Roman empire only started in 146 BC (after the third Punic War, when it was undoubtedly an empire) and finished in AD 470 that's 616 years.

Which gives the USA another 381 years to go.

Got a non-iPad tablet? Weirdo

Maty

And I use a stylus with a triangular tip to make cuneiform characters on clay. It's easier than it used to be because now I've got an app for it ...

9/11: The day we lost our privacy and power

Maty

Assuming sanity ever returns to the west, our generation will be known as the turkeys who voted for Christmas.

And to make it worse, the motive has been a mixture of stupidity and cowardice. Don't blame the government for our surveillance society. Blame the people who voted for it, no, who demanded it.

Hey Commentards! [This title is optional]

Maty

>>'Who writes mentor with a capital m?'

Those people who are referring to the original Greek hero Mentor in Homer's epic poem The Iliad.

Obviously.

Apple girds loins for 'obscene iPad sales surge'

Maty

both are too expensive, but ...

Without getting into the tablet v laptop debate, I'll suggest one reason why the iPad is beating the competition.

I have an iPad. My wife was using it more than 50% of the time (try mounting a laptop on a music stand to show sheet music) so we went to get her one of her own.

She's no Apple fan, so asked to see some Android devices at the shop. The first app she tried on the store demo model crashed. So did the second, though it lasted longer. The iPad apps just worked and were faster and smoother. Add a bigger screen and both devices at the same price point, and guess what we went home with?

Here's a hint for the haters. If you want to criticise Apple's iPad, ignore the device and go for the iTunes interface on the PC. This is a user-hating (forget 'unfriendly') counter-intuitive pile of steaming weasel turds.

Tribunal: ICO was wrong to bin angry man's FOI request

Maty

The request was denied ...

Because it was a 'transparent attempt to gain evidence ...which could be used to prove discrimination'.

This is no reason to deny the request.

If such evidence exists and if it does prove discrimination, then it should be revealed. If the evidence proves that there was no discrimination, why not reveal it?

This story gives the impression that someone is very keen to hide incriminating facts.

Here lies /^v.+b$/i

Maty

And since someone will want to know

Ore stabit fortis arare placet ore stat

Literally

'It will stand away from the mouth, the strong love to plough, it stands away from the mouth.'

Maty

I'll go for

if

life=0

wait X

run 'system_reboot.exe'

end

Shagbook won't take Facebook thrust lying down

Maty

don't forget

Windows (TM)

Google points finger at human after robo car accident

Maty
Stop

So ...

Here's a scenario ...

Googly vehicle develops a software glitch (these things happen, believe it or not) and starts to drive straight down the tailpipe of the car ahead.

Human sees the problem, disconnects auto-driver and slams on the brakes - too late to stop the impact, but enough to turn a full-scale collision into a minor fender-bender.

Google PR does much the same sort of damage reduction by pointing out that a human was driving 'at the time of the collision'.

So a highly relevant question should have been 'For how long before the collision was the human in control?'

Chinese lecturer demands his students acquire iPads

Maty
Headmaster

Not the point ...

If you are teaching a course based on what you know, and you've already put that into a book, using that book as course material saves a lot of repetition.

And the publishers don't take a cut. They take the lot, and give the author a cut.

BOFH: Axe handles - occasionally quite slippery

Maty

no, no

Who says just the chair was in the box.

The only way to be sure is to nuke the site from orbit.

'There's too much climate change denial on the BBC'

Maty

Some easy questions ...

Has anyone correlated the heat signatures of Mars and Venus with Earth? Is solar activity warming other planets?

How much has the average global temperature risen in the past two decades?

All the articles I've read on the BBC and elsewhere don't seem to have the answer, yet it is hard to discuss AGW without this basic information.

iPhone plunges 13,500 ft from skydiver's pocket - and lives

Maty

case?

Looking at the case - flat one side, rounded edges on the other - it is probable that falling a considerable distance actually helped.

A longer fall would give the phone time to stabilize from a tumble, and the shape suggests that it would have completed the fall face up in something between a spin and a spiral. Given the amount of surface area involved I doubt air resistance allowed anything like full terminal velocity to be reached.

Segway death blamed on good manners

Maty
Headmaster

wot?

"In so doing he's attempted to reverse the Segway back. "

So, using a present perfect to describe a past situation, and a superfluous 'back'. Two errors in one short sentence.

It gives one a lot of faith in the investigation when the officer conducting it has the literacy of a third former.

Microsoft COO: Our greatest enemy is old Windows

Maty

How about ...?

Working with their users instead of trying to corral them into an OS they don't want?

Were I Microsoft, I'd be working on XP2, and advertising it as an operating system that incorporates many of the background improvements of win 7 (e.g. better security, thread handling etc) but keeps the XP front end.

Official: Pastafarian strainer titfer is religious headgear

Maty
Headmaster

ummm

Bronze Age scribbling (and quite a bit of Iron Age too ...)

MS to WinXP diehards: Just under 3 more years' support

Maty

It's an operating system, see?

And because it is an OS, I don't want to do anything with it. That's not what it's for. I do things with a web browser, word processor, games and my graphics suite. The job of the OS is to host these applications securely and without crashing and otherwise to stay out of my face.

As long as the OS can do that - and my highly customized version of XP does it very nicely thank you - why do I want to 'upgrade'?

Let's face it, there's been no killer app for the desktop in the past ten years. Only a few people do anything with the latest version of Photoshop or Word that they didn't do a decade ago (apart from using the despicable .docx format).

I've used vista and win 7 and get the feeling that the changes to the interface are mostly dumbing down the system so noobs can't screw it up. And if you've been using XP for a decade as many XP users have, a more 'intuitive' interface don't cut it. By now most XP users can operate their system blindfold.

Don't run it in admin mode, use good security software and a hardware firewall, and really there should be no need to change XP until a real paradigm shift comes along - and then win 7 will be obsolete as well.

Canada buys Obama's reject Brit choppers for spare parts

Maty

ah yes ...

"ashore a pilot must taxi forward rapidly to get airborne fully loaded."

Reminds me of those overloaded choppers we used to have in Africa bouncing down the runway trying to grab enough still air to get airborne.

We used to say they only took off eventually due to the curvature of the earth's surface.

Faking reviews? You should fret about more than illegality

Maty
FAIL

Sona si latine...?

Would you buy a used Latin textbook from this man?

O tempora, o mores, o Google translator!

Maty

yup

There's also a long and dishonourable history in publishing of writers of rival books rubbishing someone else's work so as to promote their own sales. So I guess it balances out.

As someone who has written the occasional book, I'm always happy to give a glowing review to someone from the same publishing house - if the book merits it. Otherwise I politely decline to do the review at all.

Does a flash motor make a man more desirable?

Maty

Easy ...

Want to attract women with your car? In my town just let the parking meter run down for .005 of a second.

Most of the traffic wardens are female.

Refusal to unveil scuppers French refusal-to-unveil trial

Maty

take a deep breath now ...

Gordon 10 didn't say that anyone anywhere can't be a Muslim. He said that you had to be a nutbag to wear a burqua for religious reasons. And, um, you can be a Muslim without wearing a burqua. Oh, and being anti-burqua does not equal being racist. Also, there wasn't a lot wrong with Gordon's English.

I'd go easy on calling people 'morons' . You might be risking jail for highly offensive language about the mentally challenged - though one defence does spring instantly to mind ...

A cloud hangs over the sysadmin

Maty

aim for the clouds

But when a local router goes down, or the local network gets hacked there's nothing like having a sysadmin on the ground.

Cloud computing is great until something stops you from getting on to the net in the first place.

RIM PlayBook strikes back at Jobsian internet dream

Maty

Business device?

If a device uses Adobe it will be hacked. Sooner rather than later.

Not a good idea for a business machine.

Go Daddy 'negligent' in handing over ownership of accounts

Maty

So ...

how stupid do you have to be to still have GoDaddy as your domain registrar?

Billionaire Zuckerberg kills to eat

Maty

Of course!

I should only eat what I personally kill. Ummm... looking around at a suburban environment, there seems to be a shortage of deer, cattle or even goats.

Menu options are:

A rather ill-looking pigeon

The neighbour's cat

The incredibly annoying kids from down the street.

I believe the latter go well with onions and a good Chianti?

Sarko to Schmidt & co: 'You can't escape' net regulation

Maty

Nope

The will of the people is not always the will of the government. As demonstrated by the unfulfilled will of the French people in recent opinion polls. I.e. that Sarkozy should flush himself down the nearest latrine and get out of their lives.

If he really, really, wanted to know the 'will of the people' it would not be that hard to discover it.

Set up a website with one question on the poll 'Are you in favour of a French-led initiative to regulate the internet? Yes/No'

'Without fair dealing, what are governments but huge robberies?' (Tacitus, Roman historian 1st century AD.)

PC rental store hid secret spy hardware in laptop, suit says

Maty

thank you

After reading the story, I too went to the Rental Agent site. The service described there in no way resembles the stuff described in the article.

There's a total disconnect between what this company says it does and what it is alleged to have done. If I were a lawyer, I'd be sharpening my writs.

Save the planet: Stop the Greens

Maty
Pint

I think they mean ...

'Save the planet as it is now.' In a few million years the earth will still be spinning merrily along, and humans will be forgotten.

Since you are the 'Beer Monster' here's a totally unrelated fact. Beer is brewed from yeast which turns the malt sugars to alcohol. Alcohol is toxic to yeast, so the yeast multiplies rapidly at the start but is eventually killed by its own waste products ...

Make your own metaphor