Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Where do you think livestock feed comes from?

Depends on the livestock and where they live..

Or I could just eat a couple of hundred grams of beef or cheese

Or mushrooms and nuts - both of which contain lots of protein. Sure, it's not as much as meat does but it's certainly a lot more than quinoa..

(I'm neither vegan nor vegetarian - but I do try to cut down how much meat I eat.)

We've evolved to eat natural products

If you are going to wave the "we've evolved" flag you might as well do it properly - we evolved to eat whatever we could hunt or forage (and in past epochs that's varied widely between 'mostly plant' to 'mostly meat' and back again depending on where you lived and what the climate was at the time.

What we didn't evolve for was to sit for 8-10 hours in a fairly static position eating sugar-rich[1] foods while exerting very little energy to obtain said foods. Taken to absurdity - if you want a burger you should go out and forage all the bits that make up the non-meat bits and then hunt and kill an aurochs and butcher it yourself..

Also, if the vat-grown products contain the same nutrients in approximately equal amounts to real meat, do you think your body can tell? It doesn't have a magical "is it vat-grown" sensor..

So the "we've evolved" stchick is a pretty useless one.

[1] Given that industrial sugar production has only happened in the last 2-3 hundred years. Before that the main source was honey and that had it's own risks in gatering and was only available in small amounts.

What about those intolerant to plant proteins or worse allergic?

Oldest Brother is pretty severely allergic to soy protein (fortunately not to anaphylactic shock levels) and you have a pretty grim future in a meat-free world since the majority of the meat alternatives contain soya in one form or another. Except (maybe) quorn - good old mycoprotein.

Focused energy is the first step to a Star Trek-like transporter

I'll get out my magnifying glass then!

Re: Could be *very* interesting

entire software industry comes crashing down overnight

*In the US*.

Which means people like Microsoft/Google/Apple et. al. would need to change countries or get sued out of existence by each other..

Re: Without any sign of a nod toward irony

Time to ditch java any Oracle produce entirely?

FTFY..

I don't hold out much hope for this to go well.

Well - the US Supreme Court does have form for slapping down the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which has the remit of copyright cases and performs stunningly badly when their decisions go to the supreme court) so don't give up hope yet. The Court of Appeals appears to be stuffed with copyright maximalists and rules on that basis rather than on the basis of case precident and law..

As it stands there is a split precedence on this issue which is probably why the Supremes said that they would review it.

Re: Cheese bias

Modern, forward thinking mice have put all that cheese and cats business behind them long ago

The ones that survived anyway..

(Sounds of distant feline cheering when they realise that the mice won't be hiding any more)

Re: Selective deafness

While they have this fanatical obsession with THINNER THINNER THINNER

This new model is thicker than the one it replaces..

(It's essentially the same size, but thinner screen bezels means they can fit a slightly bigger screen. And it's physically thicker - maybe going back to the "built like a tank" vibe of the old 17" model)

Fault lies with Conservatives getting into scenario

Fault also lies with the fact that the principle of Brexit is utterly incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement.

One establishes a hard border (with attendent taxes and tarriffs) and the other forbids a hard border and requires free movement. I'm sure that the DUP would *love* to see the back of the GFA (it challenges their One World Order of NI and implies that NI and RoI should be on good terms).

but the quality is a lot better

Maybe at one point - not so much nowadays. It's not that we've improved - it's that Germany is now falling to the same minimum-price idea of manufacturing rather than over-engineering that prevails here.

Which is why the reliability of marques like Mercedes and BMW has fallen through the floor.

Cadbury's moved production from the UK to Poland

Lets not confuse the neo-liberal process of moving manufacturing to somewhere where labour and costs are cheap with 'lets not bother making anything in the UK since it'll cost a fortune to export".

Re: No, the UK was never in the running

That happens to be an area where the UK does (or did?) pretty well

And still does (especially in niche applications - like F1 - more F1 teams are based in the UK than anywhere else).

We no longer have a native mass-market automotive manufacturer though (JLR might beg to differ but they make a tiny amount of cars compared to people like Ford and they are also now owned by Tata) - all the big car factories are owned by non-UK companies (Honda (for the moment), BMW, Nissan et. al.)

If Brexit happens, we can expect those to fall to 0 - because (as someone has pointed out) better to pay tarrifs on the relatively few cars brought in rather than on the many cars exported to the EU.

Re: I can sympathise....

IBM offered to be your ISP for a very reasonable amount, along with an ibm.net email address

At the point I was using OS/2 on the desktop I had a Demon Internet address. I also had a linux box doing dial-on-demand (I picked Demon because they had some good FAQs at that point about how to configure such things - and SMTP/NNTP).

Since we were IBM-all-the-way at work, I dicovered that we were also connected to the IBM network and all had an IBMMAIL address which we could use to get internet email to and from our local PROFS system.

I think I used it a couple of times, realised what a faff it was and, instead, pushed for a proper SMTP connection via Pipex. Which, eventually, we got. It helped that very few other people realised about the IBMMAIL stuff. Yet another example why I was destined to not be a programmer for long - I was far more interested in exploring the nooks and crannies than coding..

Re: Dartford Crossing

Tamar bridge

My wifes' dad (who died in 1977 so I never knew him) was the British Rail structural engineer[1] responsible for all the bridges, viaducts and stations[1] from Exeter to the Penzance. One of his responsibilities was the Tamar rail bridge which needed repainting every year or so. He used to do random inspections in the works while painting was being done (to ensure that the workmen were not just painting over the rust but were actually cleaning off the rust *before* painting) and sometimes took my wife with him (she was 10-12 at the time). She distinctly remembers walking through the tubes on the top of the railway bridge..

So that bridge is forever known in our house as "Dads' bridge".

Me - you'd need to knock me out and carry me up there. I'm really, really not a fan of heights. Although I don't mind flying (and the couple of flights in a light aircraft where I've had a go at flying were great fun).

[1] He was, originally, a stonemason by trade. He orginally worked in his fathers' granite quarry in Cornwall then ended up working for the railways/

[2] Our[3] bed is made out of reclaimed timbers from Dawlish station - they were replacing one of the platforms and he managed to scavenge the usable parts (light oak) and had a carpenter freind of his make it. It's held together by cast-iron angle-brackets and 1" coachbolts. He thoroughly believed in overengineering.. The bed is really, really heavy - 4" solid oak beams are *not* light.

[3] Well - originally made for my wifes' half-sister (who is 18 years older than her). Her marriage fell apart just before we got married so she was quite happy for us to have the bed. Fortunately, you can take it apart (although the hand-cut oak struts that go from the side beams to the centre beam are all numbered because they only really fit on one place. Unfortunately, each side has numbering starting from 1 so we had to add L or R to denote which side it went)

firstname.lastname gmail account

Likewise. But since my surname really, really isn't common I've never had anyone elses' emails.

Am I missing out?

and we know what grief that can cause

You mean all the spam and blatant extortion attemps that arrive as the result of LinkedIn being brached a number of times?

Fortunately, because I run my own mail server and firewall, I can use -variants of my base email address and customise them to individual services. Then, if I get spam to a particular variant addess I can blacklist that variant of the firewall and never see any traffic using that variant again.

And since I've yet so see a useful email from LinkedIn, dropping the linkedin variant into the blacklist lost nothing of value.

get some work done!

This *is* work! Part of my job consists of "keeping up to date on IT trends" and I can (just about) justify using El Reg for that purpose..

Re: TV

DIVIDE BY CUCUMBER ERROR

Oi! Don't mention those things - innocent cats may be reading!

(No - I don't understand the 'cats are afraid of cucumbers meme either - none of my lot are. Flea treatments, fireworks and lack of instantly-available food frighten them, not oddly-shaped green watery vegetables..)

Re: TV

oddly shaped vegetables..

<Spitting Image Mode=On>

Yes, they'll have the steak too..

</SIM>

Re: "spaces won with 51 per cent of the vote"

Personally, I prefer spaces

In the Bad Old Days (when I had pretensions to being an IBM TPF programmer) using tabs was a Very Bad Thing.. the assembler was very column-specific and really, really didn't like tab characters. It's really annoying when it ignores a big chunk of your code because the lines don't start in the right palce (even though they look OK on the screen).

One of the many, many reasons why I switched to doing PC/server/networking support.

Re: He makes an intersting argument which is bogus.

stuck on railway crossings

Unlike motorbikes. Which was a Very Good Thing(TM) when I came across a barrier-less rail crossing in Germany. I wondered why all the cars were stopped..

Fortunately, the rails were at 90 degrees to my direction of travel so a hasty application of throttle didn't throw me off.

Re: Everyone likes to hate on Uber

I don't use Uber or Lyft in my town

I don't either. Because I have a car and don't live in a major conurbation..

(And, on the very rare occasion the I use a taxi, I use a black cab since they, at least, generally know where they are going and have some sort of background checks)

Re: It's not unexpected, though

Be conthithtent with the lithp!

Igor? That you?

Re: "marking the fourth reuse of a booster"

clarification is getting confusing!

It's more like ghee - delicious but fattening..

Re: 59 out of 60

blowing up one 500lb thing that can be tracked into thousands of smaller things that can't

But hey - it's a useful planetary shield for when the aliens turn up and try to invade. When they start losing landing craft to collisions maybe they'll think we were clever enough to plan it all and leave us alone..

(Mind you, 30 minutes of watching our vapid TV would pretty much convince them of the opposite. And, if they can tap into the Internet, 5 minutes would suffice)

Re: Surely decryption is possible...

merge, and then go supernova!

Or, when the black holes spawned at CERN combine, suck in the sun which then goes..

Oh - hang on..

Re: US Politics

Didn't the Aztecs have a game like that?

Yup. And the losers got to experience the sacrificial table up close and personal.