Posts by Ian Yates

"codifying"

At which point, he was promptly assassinated by guerilla Grammar combatants.

@chris

But you would complain if you needed to buy specially designed fuel or components (tyres, etc) to keep your car running, that only the manufacturer could... oh, wait

Very clever

@Tim Greenwood

It should be interesting when they get to the *cross* examination. [emphasis mine]

Not sure you meant it the way I read it, but very clever ;)

I'm sorry?!

"Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,"

He "doesn't think" there will be.... anybody else concerned by this?

@Tim J

Surely they didn't know what "hacker" meant until the media started using the word?

@I knew a girl called Mercedes

The originally Mercedes engine was named after the chief engineer's daughter, I believe.

So, chicken and egg all round.

I don't understand...

just how many times the speed of a sheep in a vacuum is that?

I love it

But one criticism: which "trillion" are we referring to for number of Brontosaurus' (Brontosauri?)?

Personally, I use "million", "billion", and "trillion" to read "mono", "bi", and "tri" respectively. Hence, "1e6", "1e12", and "1e18" (also called long-scale); however, the media have a distressing tendency to take the USA short-scale usage and use "1e6", "1e9", "1e12"...

Just need to make sure that I am quoting the length across the known universe accurately.

Err...

Didn't they just describe Lithium-ion Polymer (LiPo) batteries?

Online?

Any chance they'll spin-off the online branch?

There's only one store I know of near me, but I've always bought loads from them online - one of the cheapest places for DVDs, at times.

Google

You actually echo a lot of the fears I've had about Google over the last few years.

I started to use Google way back when they still powered Yahoo's search engine, but I became more and more uneasy with their services as they grew. (And when I felt their search results were becoming less relevant to me.)

The fact that people blindly use them for all of their Internet life (mail, docs, search, etc) is as scary as people who use News Corp services as their only source of information... (or Wikipedia, I suppose).

I don't believe Google are doing anything "evil", but they are not the good guys people make them out to be.

But maybe I'm just a paranoid cynic, eh?

Anyway, I was just glad to read I'm not the only one who feels nervous about Google's rise and power ;)

Darwin

He's already bred you say?

Does that put him out of the running for a Darwin Award?

Poor Guy

I met Shayler a few years back when he gave a talk on what the government was doing to shut him up.

He seemed like a pretty normal guy who was just very enthusiastic about outing the wrongs of our government.

Biggest load of rubbish

I'm not a major Sony fan, but how can anyone sue claiming "irreparable harm and monetary damage"?

If I was a judge on a case like this, I'd throw it out for two reasons

1) They've waited how long after Cell was announced to claim?

2) They've claimed the damage is "irreparable"...

Is this company even using their own patent for anything? I've never heard of them and wouldn't be surprised if they're just a patent-holding corporation.

Patent laws in the USA need some rethinking.

Printer Cables

Interesting. I can't remember the last time I bought a printer that came with the required cable... would have been back in the parallel days as I know none of my USB ones did.

I'm not a Dell fan, but why were they singled out for this when HP/Lexmark/Canon/et al don't (as far as I've ever seen) state on their printer boxes that the cables are not included?

Football/Soccer

Can I kindly disagree with Dave and state that the agreed etymology of the word "football" is actually because the game is played on your feet (as opposed to the noble sports that were played mostly on horseback).

http://www.icons.org.uk/theicons/collection/fa-cup/biography/history-of-football

In that sense, Association (Soccer), the Rugbies, American, Austrialian, Gaelic, etc are all football.

/pedant

Re: Duplicate story...

Perhaps they're trying to make the Slashdot readers feel more at home ;)

Not asinine(ish)

Rick, if you reread your quoted text, uTube.com opened in 1996, YouTube.com in 2005.

The "After YouTube's launch" text is in relation to the increase of hits to uTube.com and not its launch.

That aside, uTube's approach is still asinine. I find it doubtful that shutting down YouTube.com will decrease the number of hits to uTube.com for quite some time.

Their best bet is to request that GooTube pay for the increase to their hosting bills.

Re: What really annoys me...

While I agree there is a huge price difference, isn't the third option that Vista cost more to develop than OS X?