Posts by steven kraft

Looking forward to the return

of my role model--Zap Brannigan!

"Stop dying, you cowards!!"

So let me get this straight....

An epidemic of a flu variant hits, it gets covered in the mass media, a certain amount of panic sets in, people start googling "swine flu" and that somehow aquaints to a statistically valid method of tracking the spread of the disease?

That's ridiculous. If this reasoning was true, then I somehow missed seeing the herds of baby polar bears named "Knute" that must have been wandering the planet a couple years back.....

Fearless predictions

1. Resourceful USAF technicians will soon find a way to make popcorn and reheat leftover pizza with these things.

2. During testing, microwave burst will take out some Senator or defense industry exec who happens to have a pacemaker.

3. All of this electronics-frying weaponry means that in about 50 years (when the gear has spread throughout the 3rd world) warfare is much going to be back to musketry and cavalry charges.

Thank goodness we still have the Maxim gun, and they have none....

Relax, solutions are already in the works

1) Small parties of D&D players/Society for Creative Anachronism nerds will come from around the world to cull "The Glacier of the Spider Lords"--especially if these arachnids can be looted for the occasional couple of gold pieces or magic cape.

2) The Reg is being selective about their futurism here. Surely the Reg's military desk knows that by 2060 the current jumbo jet-mounted megawatt lasers will have been perfected to the point that in a certain unnamed North American country you will be able to buy over the counter and without a waiting period your very own constitutionally protected, NRA-supported handheld multi-gigawatt deathray capable of being used for hunting rabbits or eviscerating any wayward ocean liners that ruin your beachfront view. Never fear world, us Yanks have your back!!

3) Isn't Greenland still part of Denmark, and therefore the EU? I am sure that these arachnids will be found to be non-metric or disrespectful of cultural diversity and then will be buried under a glacier of paperwork from Brussels that makes the Greenland icepack look like a snow cone by comparison.

(I would like to see one of these bad boys with a seal or polar bear in its mouth though......)

The "shock jock" in American context

You have to view someone like Savage in the American context. I can guarantee you that he knows that he can get the all the high-powered constituional lawyers he wants, but its not going to do him any good in the UK, because the U.S. constituion doesn't apply there.

What Savage is doing (and why some of his past statements look so looney) is throwing a little red meat to his listeners. Basically these shock jocks are in the entertainment business with a little political commentary thrown in. If Savage just lied down and took Jacqui Smith's ban without comment, then he would loose some credibility with his listenership over backing down meekly to a lefty Euro-pol.

Still, I have to say he has something of a point about how he ended up on this list considering how many genuinely dangerous people there are in the world. If Britain let in Savage, they would probably find that the average Tyra Banks/Madonna visit causes a lot more real disruption to society than this guy ever would.

Paris--either because she would also cause more commotion in the UK than Savage would, or because she would make a better Home Secretary than Jacqui Smith. Take your pick of which.

So this is how WW III starts

History will record that it all began on the fateful day when the squirrel-lovers squared off against the tree-huggers. Throw in a few crazy Islamists and Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper and you've got yourself the makings of a future History Channel documentary.

Actually

It's overcast today here in Silicon Valley, so I have yet to see this mythical, fiery "sun" of which you write....

Alien icon, because the cable-cutting is just the first step in their fiendish plan to conquer the earth and to serve us all up a nice chianti. Keep your eyes on the skies!!!

This fits in with various revenge truisms

The fewer friend bit works in tandem with "Revenge is a dish best served cold" in a world (or galaxy, given the Star Trek origin of this cliche) where most people like to sit down to hot meals.

"Resentment is someone using your mind for free" reinforces both the fewer friends and less employment prospects angle

Mines the oilskin coat with the white whale fish-finder in the pocket...

Adios Sun....

I agree with those who say that getting Cisco to buy Sun would shake up the IT industry more and be a much better corporate culture match, but I am not sure that Cisco wants to take on that workload on top of entering the virtualized server market.

So I guess Sun is in play right now, and I don't think HP or Cisco will go after it--so IBM (or JUST maybe Fujitsu) wins by default. Farewell to what was once a terrific innovator in the server and software fields which never found a good business model to compete with the post-dotcom X86 Wintel/Lintel behemoth :(

Would this be the pondlife that....

Built the giant window defroster thing found beneath Olympus Mons in Total Recall and now the "much-anticipated" remake of Total Recall?

The stars are almost literally aligning and the Reg is there to report on this epochal confluence of events. All that is needed now is Richard Branson to announce that famous Hollywood actor Dennis Quaid has elected to become the first passenger on Virgin Galactic's new passenger service to Mars....

While we are updating late 80s/early 90s films

How about remaking "Die Hard" as the saga of honest mortgage holder/taxpayer John McClain cleaning evil bankers/derivatives traders out of the Citibank building! The UK version could have him exterminating financiers out RBS' headquarters with the finale being McClain dropping that "Fred the Shred" guy out of a window from 30 stories up!

Or Lindsay Lohan/Amy Winehouse starring as a drug-addled former celebutante trying to resurrect her once-promising career in a new run at "Less Than Zero".

As a taxpayer I would like to know why...

We need TWENTY-EIGHT of these?!? Why?! Does the Obama's new dog get a personal chopper? And $400 million each!!!??? Let me see, "Mr. President, we can buy you 6 new helicopters, or we can buy the navy a new aircraft carrier--your choice."

Holy cost overruns, Batman!!!

How about like 10 of these helos? That should be plenty for the President, his family, the cabinet, their immediate security detail and still have 3-4 left over to constantly rotate helicopters through maintenance.

The math behind this story....

Is at least as good as that used in the models employed by our esteemed global financial industry!!!

Wait a second....

Everyday I have to remind myself....

That "1984" and "V for Vendetta" are (currently) fiction.......

Civilian personal EMP crossover applications

You can make a mint selling EMP grenades to civvies! Think of all the applications:

-Quieting annoying mobile phone conversations in public spaces.

-Next door neighbor's stereo keeping you up at night? Not anymore!!

-Phone calls interrupting you at work? Light off an EMP grenade next to your router/PBX!

-No more high speed chases once police cruisers come with a built-in grenade launcher

Sounds like an investment opportunity!

Definition of "too hard to investigate" crimes

and therefore not prosecutable under the Crown....

Bribery, extortion, murder, muggings, drug dealing, burglary, petty theft, assault, rape, public exposure, vandalism, manslaughter, littering

"easy to investigate" crimes--requiring the application of the full force of the law....

Gun ownership, default on BBC license payments, force used in self-defense, exceeding your rubbish allowance, complaints (other than meek ones) to your local council/MP/police, raising your kids as you see fit, having religious beliefs (other than militant Islam), paying taxes, overwatering your garden, fox hunting....

We know where this is going to end up...

Prophetic first step to the Earth ending up as portrayed in "Wall-E", where it is encased in a shroud of worn out satellites and space debris?

Linux Penguin, because I am sure that in the enlightened future the Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth class runs on open source.....

I'm still waiting...

for "Saucy Jack" to open on the West End and Broadway.

And as I leave you, I would like to say "Stone--enge!!"

Maybe viewers were disappointed....

That they tuned in to BBC Alba and instead of Jessica Alba they got a couple Scots yammering away in some language that manages to use the same vowel twice in each word?

Paris, because if we can't have Alba we will always have Paris....

Boooooooooooo!!!!!!

And I don't mean "boo!" as in scary, I mean boooooooooooo!!! as in "it will probably suck".

So I guess this means that we are about due for a remake of Blade Runner and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan?

How long until we have those...

flying cyber-dealybobs (used a technical term there) from "The Terminator" movies? Those would seem to be useful enough that we can disband our militaries and put the robots in charge...wait a second......

This is almost as bad as the old story

About the lady who called tech support because she couldnt get her recipes onto her PC. Supposedly she was stuffing the recipe cards into the floppy drive or the air vents in the case.....

Hey, great!!

So the watchlist that you can be placed on simply because you share the same name as an alias or actual name of a terrorist (who may even be a SUSPECTED terrorist)--the same watchlist that takes hours to get on and years to get off of--that watchlist's security is now based on whether you can read detective Joe Blow's handwriting on a Post-It?

And now your inclusion on this list might be used to help take your kids from you in a custody case (assuming you know a crooked co-worker of detective Blow)? This would be besides being held up in airports or train stations, potentially having your email or phone calls go in for extra surveillance by the NSA/FBI, and potentially complicating or obviating your recruitment for certain jobs?

I for one am delighted to hear this! I welcome our freedom-protecting, Post-It note password recording overlords!! Personally I think that everyone should go on the watchlist!!! This is especially true of those devoted public servants who cooked up the wathclist in the first place. Obviously, their freedom is more important for society that humble lil' old me, so they deserve to be "protected" more than I do!

Wonderful!!!!

Resolution?

These kids in New Jersey don't know anything about product messaging do they? Would you really want to live in a shelter that conjures up a need for "resolution"? How about "comfort" or at least something homey like "hearthstone"?

Posted from my home at 1111 Underwater Lane in the prestigious Foreclosure Estates development.....

The obvious answer....

The rotating windmill hit a pocket of floating swamp gas which then ignited and blew up the turbine!

Either that, or Ethan Hunt (otherwise known by his cover name of conveniently globe-trotting actor Tom Cruise) was holding another death-defying) helicopter chase through a wind farm ala "Mission Impossible III" and this is just HMG cleaning up the evidence of U.S. black ops agents conducting paramilitary operations in Blighty!!

That's the way the cookie crumbles

You attract companies to Ireland with lots of tax breaks and low costs, and then you are surprised when those companies move to other countries where they can get new tax breaks and low costs?

Maybe there was a time when Ireland was a lot like what you see in John Ford's "The Quiet Man", but Ireland is a developed economy now. The fact is that unless you are a highly qualified machinist or manufacturing technician, you can't expect to keep reliably employed in a developed-economy factory anymore. Between automation and low-cost/low-regulation Asian and Eastern European countries, the days when the manufacturing working class was the major constituency in a developed economy are done and gone. The only thing that I see changing this is if carbon taxes become so universal and strict that it starts to become uneconomical to manufacture in low-wage companies and then ship the resulting products thousands of miles to their ultimate markets.

At least 6 week of severance per year of service is pretty generous.

Good luck to the ex-Dell employees in Limerick!

Paris--because I am sure that given their new-found free time, laid-off Dell employees will have a chance to follow her adventures on the various TV shows she's involved in.....

OK, I'm surprised nobody has said it yet.....

That would be "only two blokes" today????

To be fair, she was busy with her brief presidential run in 08.

I think Montezuma said it best...

"I for one welcome our Western European overlords!"

What WoW gets right...

As an MMO veteran (read: nerd) I have to say that Blizzard did a lot of things right:

1. instanced dungeons so that you don't have 1000 players all trying to kill the exact same dungeon boss that spawns every hour or so

2. Quests design and fulfillment is very user-friendly

3. MMO customer service is like airline customer service in that you seldom find someone who has actually had a truly good experience. However, Blizzard does a better job than past MMOs I have been in.

4. The two factions in the game are fairly well balanced (since both sides have the exact same classes, even if the background story/lore of WoW got a tortured a little in order to pull it off)

And WoW is a bit like most social endeavors. It retains in success in large part because it built so much early success that it has built a critical mass of people, so people are hesitant to leave because there are so many people in WoW. Few things are more depressing to play than an MMO where nobody else is ever online.

Paris--because all WoW players know and love her "alleged" namesake Haris Pilton in the bar in Shattrath City. Haris sells uber gear like designer sunglasses that cost 2000 gold pieces and do nothing for your character but are "guaranteed to make you the center of attnetion"

Nothing to see here?

Unless the ISPs are prioritizing Google's/Youtube's packets over packets coming from Joe Schmo's search and bait shop, it's not really a violation of net neutrality. I'm not a huge Google fan, but last I checked just about anyone could buy a content delivery service.

Oddly enough.....

I bet people at Yahoo! thought that accepting MS's offer would result in layoffs at Yahoo!.

So what, so far that's two layoffs this year without getting the benefit of taking Bill Gates' billions? Good work, Jerry!!

In other news....

Peaceful farmer knocked stiff by toolbag falling from out of a clear sky!!

As for the space spiders--well, I'm afraid there's no stopping them now. I would just like to remind them that as a respected member of the business community, I can be instrumental in recruiting slave labor for work in their breeding caves.....

Depressing....

Guess it's time for a 3G phone or to remove the battery from my phone whenever I am not using it.....

Do they make tinfoil hats in extra large?

Tom Friedman is a windbag...

In love with the sound of his own voice. If he's so green, why doesn't he do his interviews and data gathering via a telephone instead of wracking up the greenhouse gas-friendly air miles?

For the love of God....

Somebody please fire Jerry Yang before he completely devalues Yahoo!'s shares!

Schwartz is a crafty one.....

He figures that if the Feds are going to bail out the banks, insurance companies and GM he might as well get Sun on the gravy train as well.....

Maybe Google is doing low-level photo recon...

In communities that don't want those fleets of Google Map cars driving around photographing people's front lawns.

Next step....equipping their car and air fleet with advanced wall-penetrating infrared imaging systems so that you (and of course Google advertisers) can see what your neighbors are doing at all times. That way Google can serve up relevant advertising for condoms and toilet paper on your mobile when you are in various compromising positions.

Better get your resumes in shape

Before C&W's "Titanic" bandwidth sale is announced....

Goths are easy to take care of

You can drive them off by placing a Celine Dion CD in your stereo and turning the volume up to 10

The good news is...

that the trains in Italy are running on time again :)