Ok so this is all about Bond...
...but I'm surprised you don't mention Le Carré, as his books gave a much closer representation of the real SIS (although still with a lot of artistic licence).
Posts by Alister
3265 posts • joined 19 May 2010
Page:
Inside the real-world Double-O section of Her Majesty's Secret Service
From Dr No to Skyfall: The Reg's one month of Bond
Europe UNDER ATTACK in simulated cyber security test
HTC outs Jelly Bean running One X revamp
Better pay your taxes: The world's NOT going to end this year
McFlurry McMisdemeanour costs Welsh lass McJob
Tesla drops veil on top secret solar Superchargers
Climate sceptic? You're probably a 'Birther', don't vaccinate your kids
Friday 21st September 2012 13:51 GMT 
Re: You count engineer as a scientist?
@Mog0
>>>>"As usual, we would advance our preferred term, "boffin", for an actual real scientist (physicist, engineer, archaeologist etc) to differentiate from the trick-cyclists, sociologists and other marginal eggheads."
>>Engineers are not scientists, they are a whole different stream of profession in their own right. I am personally a software engineer and am proud of the term, which means that companies like BT calling their techs who come round to your house with a screwdriver "engineers" annoys me after I spent 4 years at a top university studying to become an engineer.
From the passage that you quoted, Lewis is saying that the term "boffin" should be used to describe scientists and engineers, etc, rather than those of the alleged sciences like phsychology. He is not, to my mind, suggesting that you call engineers scientists, anymore than you would normally call archeologists scientists.
And I find it laughable that you think that four years at Uni makes you a better "engineer" than someone who works on hardware using real tools...
Friday 21st September 2012 09:23 GMT 
I think you "Full Disclosure" should be twice the size and in bold - it sums up how I feel as well:
"Full Disclosure: Your correspondent is quite OK with the idea that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and further that global temperatures appear to have risen noticeably at the back end of the 20th century - though there is a lot of uncertainty about how much, what they did before records began, etc etc. Nonetheless, I'm personally sceptical - only sceptical, I deny nothing - regarding the accuracy of forecasts and models which predict massively accelerated further warming this century; and also sceptical that anyone knows at all well what the likely consequences of this possible warming would be in terms of sea levels, crop yields etc.
All that said, it is quite possible that the alarmists are right and the coming decades could see serious sea-level rises, crop failures etc. Unfortunately I'm really, really sceptical about the idea that the human race can support any reasonably advanced and wealthy modern civilisation using only or mostly renewable power. The proposed cure seems likely to be worse than the disease. Furthermore it isn't actually on the table - most of the world's governments don't even offer a serious pretence of trying to achieve it, though they are happy to encourage others to choke their economies to death.
So I'm a sceptic."
Hapless Kate topless, toothless law useless
Swiss railways ticked off at iOS clock knock-off
Fans rap Apple's 'crap' Map app
Thursday 20th September 2012 11:55 GMT
It's my understanding
...that the underlying map data for the new Apple Maps was supplied by Tom Tom.
Any navigation errors, or, as reported elsewhere, missing or incorrectly named towns, are therefore Tom Tom's errors, not Apple's.
This may help explain the continued reporting of drivers blindly following their sat-nav into rivers, off the edges of cliffs etc, if Tom Tom's data is so flawed.
Twitter to UK.gov: Web super-snoop law will trample twits' rights
Ten USB 3.0 HDD enclosures
Why lock your digits to a phone? Telefonica to flog cloudy numbers
Space Station 'nauts touch down on Kazakh steppe
Reg hack uncovers perfect antidote to internet
Friday 14th September 2012 13:28 GMT
Re: Safer idea?
Brunel used a similar idea, I believe, for the Thames Tunnel although on a slightly larger scale:
"The shaft, from whence the Tunnel works are carried on, was built at Rotherhithe in the form of a tower, 50 feet in diameter, 42 feet in height, and 3 feet thick, at about 150 feet from the edge of the wharf, and it was sunk into its position by excavating the earth within."
"From An explanation of the works of the tunnel under the Thames from Rotherhithe to Wapping (1836)."
HGST floats helium for low power, MASSIVE capacity HDDs
Ding dong, the Ping is dead! Apple brings in Facebook for iTunes
Dreaded redback spider's NEMESIS: Forgotten Captain Cook wasps
LOHAN straps on satellite comms capability
Yahoo! bureau! chief! sacked! for! Mitt Romney! racism! jibe!
Want to avoid another cookie law mess? Talk to EU bods next time
Tuesday 11th September 2012 09:04 GMT
Wouldn't it be better
to spend some money and time educating web users about what cookies are used for, instead of trying to impose legislation which penalizes most legitimate site owners and developers, and is completely ignored by most of the companies it was supposed to stop.
In my experience, talking to lusers, they all have this "Why is some one writing data to /My/ hard drive - it shouldn't be allowed!" attitude which has been fostered by the EU bureaucrats and privacy advocates, despite the fact that the majority of the time it is completely harmless and indeed beneficial to the user.
What nobody in authority, or average user on the street seems to understand is that the alternative would be for each and every web server on the internet to store each visitor's preferences in some sort of massive database, which, in order to work effectively would have to keep track of IP and MAC addresses, and probably local hostnames, and the logged on user, in order to correctly identify and remember a user's preferences.
Is that not more of an invasion of privacy, and more likely to be abused, than writing a text file into your user profile?
Was Russia Today hacked - or did it just forget to renew rt.com?
Titans of tech: Why I'll never trust 'em
Friday 7th September 2012 09:00 GMT
This.
"If you're a large enough company, you can afford to adopt the attitude that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Cisco/Microsoft/Oracle/VMware/etc." A goof in IT spend is a small wobble in the share price; it is not an upset that could cost you the entire company. Small businesses, start-ups and SMEs don't have that buffer. An IT cock-up can be the difference between making a slim profit and going broke. In this space there is no room for "faith"."
This. Exactly.
I wish I could add several "pint" icons as well as a thumbs up...
Voyager's 35th birthday gift: One-way INTERSTELLAR ticket
Wednesday 5th September 2012 13:52 GMT
Build quality
My mother has a refrigerator that she bought new in 1968, still working fine...
Okay, so admittedly it wasn't stuck on top of a massive firework and shot into space, and it isn't currently floating in a vacuum at a temperature of -470C
On balance, It probably wouldn't work so well if it had been through all that - and besides, where would you plug it in?
Wednesday 5th September 2012 12:23 GMT
Re: Serious question...
Thanks for that, when I said the Earth, I suppose I really meant the Sun.
So, in order to visit the outer planets, both these vehicles must have originally been launched in the plane of the ecliptic, is that correct? But they have now changed direction so that they are traveling at ninety degrees to it?
Wednesday 5th September 2012 11:31 GMT 
Serious question...
...if that is possible.
The article makes reference to "north" and "south" in a number of places, eg
...the direction of the magnetic fields, which will change from running east-west to running north-south.
Right now, Voyager 1 is heading north while Voyager 2, at least 9 billion miles from the Sun, is moving south.
Are these directions with respect to Earth - and therefore does this mean the two craft are traveling up from, and down from the plane of the ecliptic, respectively?
Thecus chucks 2 new NAS boxes at SOHO punters
Thursday 6th September 2012 15:23 GMT
My experience has been that at the price point the Thecus N8800pro for just less than £2000.00 is cheaper than we could manage building it ourselves.
it comes with 8 x 2TB drives (giving 11TB useable in Raid 5) and supports iSCSI, as well as all the usual protocols.
We use quite a few of them dotted around branch offices for backup storage.
(I am not employed by or otherwise associated with Thecus)
The Register flicks switch on Data Centre channel
GCHQ spooks give biz chiefs crash course in thwarting hackers
Wednesday 5th September 2012 14:33 GMT
"Separately, a survey of 320 UK IT professionals by Check Point, published today, found that a third said their primary focus was on stopping external assaults - such as hacking, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on websites, and malware - while 26 per cent said their main challenge was preventing inadvertent data losses by employees"
So, a third concentrate on external attacks, nearly a further third concentrate on preventing data loss, and the rest think it won't ever happen.
NASA captures mind-bogglingly gorgeous solar video
'Nutjob' serves half-baked Raspberry PI scam
China mutates plants ... IN SPAAAAAACE
Second LulzSec suspect charged over Sony Pictures hack
Wednesday 29th August 2012 13:20 GMT
>>Sony Pictures maintained that only 38,000 accounts were actually compromised.
Oh, well that's fine then, if it was only that many, especially since they were compromised by a thing called a "SQL injection attack" which no-one has ever heard of or learnt how to protect against...
</sarcasm> (just in case someone takes this seriously)
Mars rover harangues empty landscape with loudhailer
Tuesday 28th August 2012 12:43 GMT
Re: at that very moment...
But you forgot the outcome:
"After millennia of battle the surviving Martians realised what had actually happened, and joined forces to attack the Milky Way in retaliation. They crossed vast reaches of space in a journey lasting thousands of years before reaching their target where they attacked the first planet they encountered, Earth. Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog. "
So, quick, deploy the small dog brigade...
It's Lego's 80th birthday party, but only the boys are invited
Monday 27th August 2012 12:19 GMT
My daughter will sit and play with my old Lego for hours, building all manner of things, from houses to cars, without any prompting from me. But then she is also quite happy to get covered in oil helping me fix my Land Rover, so maybe the environment she grew up in was against her :-)
She is, however, definitely not a "tomboy", as she has the usual fascination for all the pink tat that is nowadays thrown at young girls, and the usual clothes, makeup etc that is "normal" for a girl of her age.
On another note, when I was young I used to have some lego-like construction bricks which belonged to my dad, which were made of a type of rubber, rather than hard plastic. Anyone else have anything similar?
