Posts by Andrew Tyler 1

Blob

Ah, so the unindentifiable blob's name is Cathy Cruz Marrero. Cathy Cruz Marrero ought to be terribly, terribly ashamed of herself. Mortified, even. If Cathy Cruz Marrero is so shy, she should have kept Cathy Cruz Marrero's identify a secret. If Cathy Cruz Marrero is just looking for a buck, Cathy Cruz Marrero is pretty foolish to do interviews for the news-media. Cathy Cruz Marrero's judge is going to say something or other about Barbara Streisand, and throw Cathy Cruz Marrero's case out of court.

Ion readies book scanner for e-book buffs

Looks like it would take about as much time to read the book as it would to scan it in.

Not that it isn't a useful gizmo (I've got some old manuals and references it might be worth the time to scan to have a digital copies of), but hardly practical for everyday kind of stuff.

Aw...

"If the Sun were located at the heart of this remarkable cluster, our night sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full Moon."

Now *that* would be awesome. Why can't earth be there? No rings, only one moon... damn this planet is boring. When I grow up, I'm moving to Westerlund 1. I'll find me a planet with big rings like Saturn, a few dozen moons, and I'll buy a beach chair. Probably listen to a lot of Pink Floyd.

Units

It comes up often enough that the "Library of Congress" ought to become an official metric. How big is a Library of Congress anyways?

Woah...

300,000 employees live and work there? Is 10 suicides a year actually all that unusual for such a large population? Stats in the US at large show about 20 suicides per 100,000 people per year. Not a great comparison, obviously, but realizing how big that place is puts this story in a totally different perspective.

That's a friggin' HUGE facility.

Best Buy

Best Buy is a fine store if you know what you're doing. They make their money exploiting the ignorance of customers, so most Reg readers would probably find it useful when looking for a quick pick-up of some specific product.

Typical example is they'll have a good price for some primary product (say a TV), and then try to screw you by charging $80 for an HDMI cable (they're big on Monster Cable), $150 for a wall mount, and $300 for a largely worthless extended warranty.

Really what the world needs is more Fry's Electronics. It's been years since I've lived by one, but that place was great.

Title and stuff.

Can't say I have much sympathy. It was Gizmodo's attitude that irked me the most about it.

If I found that phone and understood what it was, knowing that a fellow engineers career might be hanging on getting it back, I'd go to fairly great lengths to get it to him (if somehow I had already magically missed the easiest and most sensible option of just giving it to the bartender, of course). So I can't see the finder as having anything other than blatantly nefarious intentions.

Gizmodo's claim of anything resembling intelligence or professionalism went out with them bragging about how they bought it.

If the finder had said he made at least superficial attempts to return it himself and, failing that, handed it over to a Gizmodo "journalist" on the pretext he would be interested enough to use his industry contacts to get it back to its proper owner, and maybe get something to write about along the way, then everybody would have a reasonable claim at innocence (nobody has to know about the envelope of $50's). Instead, Gizmodo doesn't only come off as acting ethically dubious, but as being almost comically inept at it.

Laws and stuff...

Seems to me there were at least a couple felonies leading up to Gizmodo getting all proud of itself. Might be a future in mugging Apple engineers as they're leaving work. Anything for the story.

Foxit

Last time I went to install Foxit, it's installer was trying to sneak sketchy spyware by me. Its reputation is shot so far as I'm concerned. This doesn't imply I like Adobe, of course.

HP

Better off with HP calculators anyways. Those TI toys are garbage. It can be a nuisance sometimes not using what everyone else uses though.

Sticky

I have trouble seeing that thing actually sticking into somebody with those little prong things. Seems to me as though it would be more likely to bounce off, certainly in the case of a glancing blow which is probably the most likely scenario anyways.

I also can't imagine a lot of situations where you would be forced to incapacitate someone from 100 feet away unless that person had a gun themselves, in which case you've just started a gunfight. Certainly a shotgun firing a big, low-velocity projectile like that isn't going to be the most accurate weapon, so you've also just started a gunfight at a severe disadvantage--provided of course your intention wasn't just to make the fellow fire back at you so that your buddies can shoot him with proper guns and claim self defense.

The only scenario where I could see these things being genuinely effective is if you're trying to do one of those surprise breach entry things, where you'd be hitting people across the room and your options are limited to real shells, bean bags or these things. They'd probably stay lodged in someone at that range. Were it decided they could be used in only this scenario, I suppose that might perhaps be reasonable.

Give it here.

Let me control the radio, windows, AC, etc. in my car with it and I'd be well pleased, but leave the actual driving to me.

Real bike?

Anyone know a good time for the same course on a traditional racing bike?

Let me be the first to say...

cool!