I guess you were planning on buying a Volkswagen?
Posts by bharq
48 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2010
Microsoft keeps schtum as more battery woes hit Surface sufferers
Password reset: 45 million creds leak from popular .com forums
Silent Nork satellite tumbling in orbit
Behold the mighty Swiss SPACE JUNK NOSHER PODULE
Unions call for strike action over 'unusable' Universal Credit IT
Tuesday 7th July 2015 15:09 GMT 
byline
While I'm all for the creative use of bylines by the Reg, as a non-native English speaker, the present one got me slightly confused
"Getting it off the ground is like kicking a dead dog"
What am I to make of this?
- that it's dead easy? (pardon the pun)
- that it smells and flies come out?
- that it's quite useless? (getting it off the ground, that is, not the system per se)
- that it's something you generally want to avoid?
Please, noble English speakers, El Reg commentards and other know-it-alls, I would be much obliged if you could enlighten me on this subject
Glass door to the ancient past FOUND ON MARS
Every billionaire needs a PANZER TANK, right? STOP THERE, Paul Allen
Tuesday 16th September 2014 07:54 GMT
Pedants beware!
Panzer = armour
Kampf = combat
Wagen = vehicle
so Panzerkampfwagen = tank
and Panzer tank = armoured tank - so while somewhat pleonastic, it's by no means two words with the same meaning.
Nothing attracts pedantry like an error in a pedantic post...
At least I hope the River Avon tasted good when you bit it!
That Panzerregenmantel is mine, thanks.
HAMR time for Google's MapReduce, says not-so-startup
Spanish village of 'Kill the Jews' votes for rebrand
That NSA denial in full: As of right now, we're not pretending to be Facebook or Twitter
Friday 14th March 2014 10:21 GMT
forgot a big one
the use of the word 'inaccurate' in the first sentence, as opposed to 'false' in other sentences.
When I spy on hundreds of millions of computers, if you say I spy on millions, that's not false - after all, millions are a subset of hundreds of millions. However, it is inaccurate.
Or if I spy on millions of PC's, laptops, mainframes and smartphones, then saying 'millions of computers' would be inaccurate. Although they all contain processors and do some computing and as such might be classified as 'computers', so the statement is definitely not 'false', colloquially they are not classified under this general name and as such you can get away with 'inaccurate'.
Oh how we love pedantry... and reading this statement, we're clearly not the only ones!
Euro satellite to count a billion stars, find origin of Milky Way
Sueball-happy patent biz slaps lawsuits on 14 tech firms
Thursday 24th October 2013 12:10 GMT
Re: @ skelband Here's a thought
"I know it makes patent licensing impossible, but I believe that licensing should not be permitted in the law either."
Stupidest thing I've heard in all this patent babble: licensing is what patents were created for. Or do you expect all inventors to be great managers and great salesmen? And even if they were, if I have a fantastic product (i.e. "car") that requires your invention to work (i.e. "wheel"), I would have no choice but to buy it from you. Can't supply enough? Tough luck. Quality assurance issues? Tough luck. Want some small modification? No, can't be bothered with that. Now, if I take a license on your invention, I can use it in my product, adjust it, all while funding your research for improving the invention.
Let's also not forget that without licensing, there'd be practically no standards (a lot of technology in e.g. DRAM-standards is licensed on FRAND terms) - the only way to make an invention into a standard would be to make a monopoly out of it. And we all love monopoly's, don't we.
11m Chinese engulfed by 'Airpocalypse' at 4000% of safe pollution levels
Curiosity drills into Mars
Thursday 21st February 2013 08:52 GMT 
those damned metric measurements
you got them mixed up again! A 2.3mm drill bit making a 6.4cm hole in hard rock without breaking the bit? Quite an achievement, indeed. According to NASA, it's a 1.6cm drill bit (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20130209.html), quite a bit sturdier and - more importantly - doing a lot more damage! BWOUHAHAHAHAAAA
Do we have a Reg unit for small lengths? centiLinguine or something?
Taiwan's Polytron promises see-through phones
Friday 8th February 2013 08:51 GMT
need a mirror!
"an ever-optimistic spokesperson for the firm told Miss Asia"
Why would she be interested? The most beautiful person in her neighbourhood would, per definition, be herself, so she probably needs something that turns into a mirror instead of getting transparent.
Paris, because... well, you know!
Boffins spot planet that could support life... just 12 light years away
WIMP-seeking detector flooded
Friday 23rd November 2012 09:09 GMT
Re: OY! Units!
IIRC: NYDRC (No, You Don't Recall Correctly) - the standardisation was solely for the El Reg's Special Projects Bureau. The only agreement made for the Reg as a whole was the inclusion of some proper Vulture units (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/), but there was no unit included for temperature.
Maybe the Vulture Board should comtemplate including a unit for 'hotness' - so which one ranks higher, the Paris or the Lohan?
Curiosity latest: MARTIAN DUST DEVILS assail prowling robot rover
Foxconn: Worker who lost half his brain in accident must leave hospital
Friday 12th October 2012 08:46 GMT
I wonder
with half your brain removed - do you need to keep your head tilted at all times? If you shake your head, does the brain flop around inside? Or do they put in some dummy place-filler? (could be the new rage: look at my silicon implants! no, not there, higher!)
Maybe Paris can share here experience...
Japanese cubesat to flash Earth with Morse message
AI game bot HUNTS DOWN ENEMIES, passes Turing Test
Scientists: 'Castration is the key to a longer life'
MoD to become even more top-heavy as a result of personnel cuts
Behold: China's robot noodle army!
Cloud engineering could save humantiy, suggests boffin
Surfing ROBO-shark hunter stalks great whites along US coast
The touchscreens that push back, thanks to Brit hi-fi boffinry
Star Trek's Scotty boldly goes where he always wanted to
Samsung boss vows siblings won't see a penny of inheritance
Corny conversations prove plants 'talk'
Wednesday 4th April 2012 11:22 GMT
Re: Accept it
"But what is the purpose? What can the plant do to defend itself?"
some plants are known to increase the level of toxins in their leaves when they receive such signals - I believe this was observed in oak trees when one of them emitted signals that he (she?) was infected by a certain beatle
Scientists refine smart self-assembling building blocks
Foreign sabotage suspected in Phobos-Grunt meltdown
British garbage worms survive in space without human help
Boffin bothers frogs until they spill super power secrets
Feds probe naked Scarlett Johansson outrage
More transistors, Moore’s Law, less juice
LOHAN to suck mighty thruster as it goes off, in a shed
Natalie Portman slaps John Galliano
Mac daddy predicts all-knowing, all-seeing UI
Thursday 27th January 2011 09:53 GMT 
welcome!
and of course "in the cloud" = controlled by some megacorp, be it Googlintosh or Macrosoft or whatever. And anyone not wearing their personal monitoring device is suspect, because "if you don't want the whole world to know what you're doing, perhaps you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"!
Seagate sees big drive capacity jump coming
Indonesian smut vid star's arse hauled into court
Oz journo pokes PARIS
PARIS unveils impressive box
Facebook Places - why, and why not
Google remarkets behavioral ad eyeball creep
Friday 26th March 2010 10:45 GMT
aha
aha, that explains it!
I got slammed with this for the first time yesterday, when I visited an online store and some hours later saw the banner of this store staring at me in a completely unrelated site. I thought it was so creepy, I felt naked in front of my pc! (no I wasn't, I was at work and my work at the moment doesn't involve getting naked). I immediately destroyed all the cookies on my machine, which solved it (temporarily).
Good to know you can opt out of it - but seriously, how many people have any clue that it's Google doing this, and if they do, know that there is a possibility to opt out of it?
Yes, Internet Explorer is on the wane in Europe
Wednesday 24th March 2010 09:43 GMT
work vs home
The StatCounter graph shows a clear weekly pattern: Internet Explorer peaks during weekdays, Firefox in the weekend. So there are quite some people that (have to) use IE at work, but when they can choose freely, prefer the Open Source way.
So I guess the choice is clear - sys admins, please follow!
Penalty for silent calling goes sky high
Tuesday 23rd March 2010 15:50 GMT
the Dutch way
in the news yesterday: in the Netherlands, they have a database that you can enter if you don't want sales calls. It's been extremely successfull: 4 milion people have already subscribed.
However, the flip side: when marketing firms realised they cannot reach their public by phone any more, they switched to door-to-door sales tactics - which are, in my opinion, a lot more pain in the donkey.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
