* Posts by Steve Glover

14 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2008

Home Office to keep innocent DNA samples

Steve Glover
Boffin

@Tim Spence

Well, if you go back and re-read the article, you'll see it's people arrested but innocent of major crimes get to have their DNA in the database for 12 years, while people arrested for minor crimes will have their DNA stored for 6 years if they're innocent....

(Chap with glasses for Mr Spence)

Steve Glover
Thumb Down

Wrong end of the telescope

AC says "Make your own decision, but if there's a guy who has a history of being arrested for bashing your car up with a baseball bat because he was drunk, he's arrested, his DNA is sampled, and then he's released and not charged - do you think they should keep his DNA?"

Say rather that someone has bashed up your car: no-one saw anything, but the police pick up an innocent person 'cos they don't like his looks or attitude. Now do you think they should keep his DNA?

(Pollice Verso 'cos Wacqui Jacqui seems to fancy herself as some kind of empress these days)

IPS misses its ID cards for foreigners target

Steve Glover
Coat

Chip'n Pin?

Wasn't All Fools' Day last week?

Police ad urges: 'Trust no one'

Steve Glover
Coat

Paranoia?

Isn't it "Stay Alert. Trust no-one. And keep your T^Hlaser handy"?

DARPA seeks spraycan wound-polyfilla* for injured troops

Steve Glover
Stop

Alliteration

Is nice, but it helps if the chosen words are relevant. The word "wingnut" - I don't think it means what you think it means....

Royal Navy won't fight pirates 'in case they claim asylum'

Steve Glover
Boffin

More hearsay, it sounds like....

And no-one seems to have read down to this bit yet: "the whole thing about human rights and asylum seeking sounds like some shamefaced naval officer making up bullshit excuses"?

(safety glasses icon because so many Reg readers seem to need them)

Has the war on terror scored a virtual victory?

Steve Glover

NOT so clever

Bit of a screw-up on the old tradecraft front, there: just like announcing they'd Osama bin Laden's satphone details, which lost a good source of info when it was dumped for another one.

I'd have thought it was obvious that if you'd info on a website where your enemies where likely to be discussing stuff, you'd want to keep it up and running so you could monitor it, and not visibly compromise it so the bad guys would go off and set up a new one elsewhere....

Royal Society: Schools should show creationism 'respect'

Steve Glover
Boffin

Why teach science at all when so many folk can't read?

Never mind 10% of kids having creationist leanings: look at the percentage of comments here from people who don't seem to be able to follow plain English!

Clue: KarlTh has the right of it....

NASA mulls nuclear Moon reactor

Steve Glover
Boffin

Harder than you'd think

@AC: it's not cheap, chucking stuff into the Sun: anything in the Earth-Moon system has an orbital velocity of about 107,000 km/hr which you need to lose before anything's going to simply fall into the Sun....

Academic wants to 'free up' English spelling

Steve Glover
Boffin

@AC - *not* Mark Twain

or even GB Shaw - the original version of the piece you're quoting was by Dolton Edwards, and is called "Meihem in ce klasrum": http://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html

Aussie has answer to save Earth from asteroid attack

Steve Glover

Who was that German again?

We could simply tell him Roy Orbison moved there....

Terry Pratchett donates £500k to Alzheimer's charity

Steve Glover

Match it for Pratchett

There's a campaign, started by Pat Cadigan, to try and double Pterry's donation.

See here: http://www.matchitforpratchett.org

El Reg decimates English language

Steve Glover
Boffin

@Anonymous Coward

Actually, it was good old Sir Humphrey Davy who named Aluminum (see also Tantalum, Platinum and Lanthanum)....

Steve Glover
Boffin

@Mark

Um, you're not going to like it, but "elivimate" would actually be "undecimate"....