Is this strictly film, or does TV count?
I notice people mentioning Daleks (which are definitely not Robots) but what about Kryten from Red Dwarf?
Posts by Alister
3265 posts • joined 19 May 2010
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Androids in celluloid – which machine deserves the ULTIMATE MOVIE ROBOT title?
NASA revisits Europa with modern image-processing software
UK's non-emergency police and NHS Vodafone systems go titsup NATIONWIDE
Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers
Friday 21st November 2014 15:36 GMT 
Re: I seem to remember
@AC
Yes but your anecdotal evidence doesn't translate well to most use cases. You couldn't power any useful industrial plant with what you do, and most people don't have the luxury of being able to install a heat pump and PV panels. The only way your solution would work country wide would be if nearly all roofing and spare ground in the UK was to be covered in PV panels, and that's not going to be acceptable to most people.
Human DNA 'will be found on moon' – Brian Cox
Quebec's latest bid to break away from Canada HALTED by a single dot
The Toyota Aygo is PARKtastic ... but it is very much a City slicker
Hey, you, PHONE-FACE! Kickstarter in-car mobe mount will EMBED your phone into your MUG
Rosetta probot drilling denied: Philae has its 'leg in the air'
Thursday 13th November 2014 15:53 GMT
After such a complex and magnificently executed journey, it's a great shame that the outcome was not as envisaged.
Just a side thought though, as the harpoons and thruster didn't fire, and they haven't yet used the drills on the landing pads (as I understand it) shouldn't that mean that they have more battery power left than originally planned for?
We don't NEED NO STEENKIN' DRONE RULES, peers told
German spies want millions of Euros to buy zero-day code holes
BrowserStack HACK ATTACK: Service still suspended after rogue email
Monday 10th November 2014 17:23 GMT
There are two different things to triage here - the system and the perception of the service
You still don't seem to understand what triage means.
Triage means assigning priorities to multiple things in the most effective manner, so yes you have two things, as you say: the (broken) system, and your users' perception.
So you assign a priority to each:
1/ fix the broken system
2/ manage users perceptions.
That is Triage.
I actually agree that maybe whilst the technical guys deal with the problem, some of the management and sales types could do a bit of communication. But, as others have said, if there is no information, how do you disseminate it?
Which is worse from a user perspective? No information from the company, or a tweet saying "Everything's broken and we don't know why yet"?
Reg mobile man: National roaming plan? Oh UK.gov, you've GOT to be joking
Monday 10th November 2014 16:55 GMT
Re: "No one looked at 4G before there were enough places where there was a signal."
Maybe it's beyond the UK networks though. They manage to do it fairly easily in other countries.
It depends where the masts are though, I'm sure you'll agree. If you start with a wooded hilltop, then fine, you build a pretend tree - and I've seen some and they're quite good, but if you have a bare hillside, with nothing but a few rock outcrops and maybe some heather, there's nothing there that you can disguise a mast as, that won't look out of place.
Monday 10th November 2014 15:35 GMT
Re: "No one looked at 4G before there were enough places where there was a signal."
The BBC reported in April of this year that around 25% of Scotland barely gets a 2G signal.
Whilst this is true, and I have some sympathy for the residents, the geographical constraints mean that the only viable alternative is that nearly every hill top gets decorated with a phone mast. Is that really what people in the area, as well as visiting tourists, want to see?
Monday 10th November 2014 15:30 GMT
Re: Grammar
There should be a comma after the "Oh" and a semicolon (instead of the comma) after "UK.gov", then a fullstop at the end of the sentence.
No, because then you've changed the meaning of the paragraph. As it stands, it is fine, in my view. It is two separate sentences, the first a question, the second a rhetorical question used as a statement, and addressed specifically to UK.gov.
National roaming plan?
Oh UK.gov, you've got to be joking!
Brussels' transport chief demands a single European sky to end 'air traffic gridlock'
FUTURE ROBOTS will EXTERMINATE UK jobs – study
Amazon: Put our ALWAYS ON MICROPHONE in your house, please. WHAT?
Would you recognise the Vans shoes logo? Neither would Euro trademark bods
Hungary PM ditches internet tax plans after mass protests
Trolls pop malformed heads above bridge to sling abuse at Tim Cook
Friday 31st October 2014 13:57 GMT
Maybe all those commentards who yesterday were posting "iYawn" and "Why is this news" on Reg's story about this should take note.
Unfortunately, although I agree it shouldn't be newsworthy when someone mentions their sexual orientation, this is the reality: a large part of the world's population are still bigoted homophobes.
So long, thanks for all the ...er, FISH BRIGHTER than boffins thought
Friday 31st October 2014 13:02 GMT
I don't know why we assume fish and other species have less mental processing ability.
Visual acuity is surely the absolute overriding method of self preservation from predators, particularly for fish, and therefore evolutionary pressure would obviously mean that fish nowadays are very good at it.
This is not, however, what I would call a convincing yard stick for measuring "intelligence", which to me is more about abstract thought.
DR LIPS warns: DON'T KISS that NEWT - it's got FLESH-EATING PLAGUE
Seth Rogen bags Woz role in Sorkin's Steve Jobs biopic
Friday 31st October 2014 12:52 GMT
How many bio-pics do we really need of the same person?
He's not (despite El-Reg's editorial team) a saint, or a famous general or politician, he didn't (despite popular perception) invent anything, he was just a successful business man, occasionally. He was also spectacularly unsuccessful on occasion.
Free government-penned crypto can swipe identities
The ULTIMATE CRUELTY: Sandworm uses PowerPoint against Swiss bank customers
Microsoft fitness bands slapped on wrists: All YOUR HEALTH DATA are BELONG TO US
Sporty in all but name: Peugeot 308 e-THP 110
CATACLYSMIC Sun BELCH causes hour-long RADIO BLACKOUT in SPAAACE
Now: The REAL APPLE NEWS you need to know
FATTIES: Boffins say their miracle sunshine skin cream 'prevents obesity'
Monday 27th October 2014 11:09 GMT 
Our findings are important as they suggest that casual skin exposure to sunlight, together with plenty of exercise and a healthy diet, may help prevent the development of obesity,
A-Huh...
And if they had a control group who just did the "plenty of exercise and a healthy diet" bit, without the sunlight?
I wonder if they would have lost weight?
Reg hacks see the woods or the trees In the Forest of the Night
Monday 27th October 2014 10:54 GMT
We all know what caused Tunguska, and it wasn't a coronal mass ejection
That's not at all how I interpreted it, I understood that as meaning that the trees were there to minimize the damage to the planet from the air-burst (which they did by absorbing the energy of the explosion).
The examples given were all extinction level events which were averted by the trees, not all CMEs.
The actual premise of the episode was quite interesting, I thought, although the execution was awful and the ending was abysmal.
Boffins who stare at goats: I do believe they’re shrinking
Thursday 23rd October 2014 10:29 GMT
Re: Seriously?
Where's the causation? Have they really eliminated any other factors or is it purely the "must be climate change" meme?
It's quite obvious that they've put the cart before the horse (goat) here, and that in fact the local climate is changing in response to the size of the goats. It's a well known fact that goat size is critical to the formation of Capricornicus molecules, which in turn directly affect cloud formation, and therefore the average temperatures of the region.
(@fading, just in case you're wondering, I agree with you)
RUMPY PUMPY: Bone says humans BONED Neanderthals 50,000 years B.C.
Migrate to the cloud and watch your business take flight
Wednesday 22nd October 2014 16:04 GMT
If a business can afford a leased line, perhaps they can spend that money on multiple low grade ADSL/Cable links instead, combined reliability should be better...
Yep, except where there is only one choice of provider, so all the broadband links go over the same cable, through the same exchange, to the same backhaul. This is the UK, there's a lot of places where BT is still the only choice.
Oh and at least a leased line gives you a decent upload speed, ADSL round here means 300Kbs at the most. Not much use for putting things in the cloud.
Wednesday 22nd October 2014 12:55 GMT
Migrate to the cloud... and watch it rain on your parade...
Seriously, how many small businesses have multiple diverse internet connections?
Without that, in the UK, you can expect an outage every month or so, and that's not counting the downtime of the various cloud providers.
It's great, as a techie, to be able to shrug, and go "leased line's down again, there's a ticket been raised".
Google+ goes TITSUP. But WHO knew? How long? Anyone ... Hello ...
Wednesday 22nd October 2014 12:50 GMT
Re: Hadn't noticed, don't care.
What's with people these days expecting everything to always by up and running?
Unrealistic expectations, and stupid SLAs...
<rant>
Who the hell told people that email was either secure or guaranteed? I'm fed up of explaining to clients that just 'cos they pressed the send button doesn't mean there is 100% chance of the recipient ever receiving it. Email is a "Best Effort" service, just like the rest of the Internet. And if the client insists on making their "important" email look like a marketing flyer, the chances of anyone receiving it are getting slimmer every day.
</rant>
Will we ever can the spam monster?
Wednesday 22nd October 2014 12:40 GMT
Re: Block port 25 by default
I'm not sure this would persist if text-mode were the norm...
Yes, but one of the main things about HTML mail is that you can obfuscate an incorrect URL in a link by writing what appears to be a legitimate address as the displayed text. Unless you view it in text mode it is not obvious.
In a text email, you can't do that, any links in the text have to have the actual URL displayed, so are immediately obvious.
