* Posts by ratfox

3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007

Angels can't fly: Official

ratfox
FAIL

In related news

God cannot exist because He would break the second law of thermodynamics.

...But apparently, the good professor's research is full of cr*p anyway, so...

Closeted lesbian sues Netflix for privacy invasion

ratfox
FAIL

Like anyone would bother...

It reminds me of the people who very publicly sued Google for publishing pictures of their house in Google street.

Google accused of scrubbing bloody Berlusconi pics

ratfox

Who knows?

Those who complain might have found the pictures on Google news before, where they are very easy indeed to find...

UK judges reject Lucas' appeal in Star Wars helmet case

ratfox
WTF?

Surprising

Honestly, I don't really understand the decision of the UK court. Without undue love for Lucas, it does seem to me that nobody would buy these costumes if they were not part of the movies... Are the toys based on Star Wars and, say, Transformers movies, works of art? I am pretty certain you are not allowed to copy them... Is it just that they are expressing their independence from US courts?

El Reg uncovers Tiger Woods tech angle

ratfox
FAIL

Actually, the guardian seems to have slipped

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/dec/11/tiger-woods-law-injunction-media

Maybe they think they are allowed to report that the US media are reporting that the UK high court has blocked the publication of XXXX XXXXXXXX of XXXXX (almost slipped there). It is true that at some point, not talking about the subject sounds like sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "la la la not listening"...

Anyway, one more victim of the Streisand effect. You have to admire the futility of it all. Who gave the order? Are they actually trying to ramp up the attention on the case? I would have thought Woods would want to keep out of sight for a bit...

Pompidou turns to NFC, Facebook to attract teens

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Just Googled it

Just googled teen gallery...

I have to say these french people know what they are doing. I don't know art, but i know what i like, yessir!

PH, she's into art, apparently...

Webmasters fume as Google profiles signed-out searchers

ratfox
Go

There is a big difference between Google and SEO

Google wants to give me search results I want to click on, and sponsored links are clearly marked..

SEO want to give me search results THEY want me to click on. And considering how little I want to visit commercial web sites, what I want and what they want rarely coincide.

FCC questions Verizon's early termination fees

ratfox
Flame

How does the FCC dare?

Verizon has a fiduciary duty towards its stockholders to rip off its customers! Why do you think they have a button whose main purpose is to charge the user $2 every time it is pushed?

'Whales can't even hear naval sonar' says Navy boffin

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Thumb Down

I have to doubt the thruthiness of this

I am not quite sure that science is to the point you can pretend to know what the whales hear or do not hear. And even if they do not hear, they can still be affected. How about studying the way whales react rather than making bold and unconvincing statements?

I agree that whale beaching is not a huge problem, but pseudoscience is.

Judge batters Bluebeat with injunction over Beatles downloads

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Thumb Down

You mean the law applies to me too?

Nobody paid attention to me before... How come suddenly they are?

Microsoft ordered to halt Win XP sales in China

ratfox
Happy

But does Microsoft care?

Last I checked, they are not exactly hot on selling XP anymore, right?

Next step: Microsoft gets sued because Zhongyi fonts are STILL used... in all these pesky pirates copies of XP you can find anywhere in China.

Taiwanese online hunk lures 20 women into bed

ratfox
Paris Hilton

There is one born every minute...

And this brings a whole new meaning to the sentence!

And yes, PH is needed for this story.

T-Mobile raises Sidekick from the dead

ratfox
Go

Ah, not that many people care

You would be surprised how few people that do not follow IT closely have heard about the crash.

And actually, I would still feel rather safe buying one. I'm not saying that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but I assume Microsoft/Danger/T-Mobile will be extra careful about everything now...

But anyway, my trusty ol' Treo (of pre-iPhone days) is still chugging along, so I won't be buying anything right now...

Hacktivists ransack Hitler defender's email

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Thumb Down

@Sean

I don't think your post has much point. So what if the internet is not a country?

It is still legal for the guy to say whatever he wants as long as he is doing it from a country where it is legal. The guy did end up in jail when he got caught in Austria, but as long as he stays in the US, he can publish whatever he wants on the web.

First ever supersonic stealth jumpjet starts hover tests at last

ratfox

Future Russians airplanes?

Are the US still worried about Russia?? It seems clear to me that Putin is more interested in oil than anything so mundane as wars...

US boffins build, test working 2-qubit quantum processor

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Great. How useful!

IIRC, about the only thing we can do with a quantum computer that we cannot do about as well with a normal one is to crack public key cryptography. That is, some of the systems only, and and of course a computer with around 3000 qubits would be needed.

"Quantum computing" sounds really good, but it is pretty much useless.

PH, because she looks good too, but...

Revealed: The amazing premise behind Ridley Scott's Monopoly

ratfox
Pint

heads or tails!

A movie about it! Brilliant. I'm copyrighting the idea, and I want $10 million for it

A beer will do, actually.

Microsoft admits Mac was Windows 7 muse

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Ouch

Steve Jobs must be so hard...

Legless woman falls onto Boston train tracks

ratfox

Poor woman

She was that close of getting a Darwin Award...

Though i guess that even being drunk and falling on the tracks does not even rate high enough in stupidity for a nomination.

On the plus side, she managed to have her fall recorded from three angles. Worth it to keep the video and show it to her grandchildren if she survives long enough to have them!

I vote to have PH be the standard Darwin Award icon...

ChiPhone fails to ignite consumer frenzy

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Thumb Up

@Nexox

Quite right, quite right. I was commenting on the article claim that the doubling of the Apple stock price meant they were doing well. Even though the stock of Palm gained more, there are few people who would claim it is doing better...

In this case, I guess the augmentation reflects more the near-death experience Palm's stock had before the launch of the Pré, than the success they have now...

ratfox
Paris Hilton

The wisdom of stock prices

"Cupertino's stock price doubled while the rest of the world slogged through the Meltdown mire."

Not so. The stock of a certain company was multiplied by SEVEN since last December. The name of that obviously incredibly successful company? Palm.

PH Icon... Palm... Ahem.

US gov warns banks on money mules

ratfox

You mean it is serious?

I did get such job offers, but I just dismissed it as being a Nigerian scam...

"you'll soon get your money, just pay the fee now", etc.

I did not think for a second that money offers coming from a spam could actually be serious, even if illegal.

Palm Pre evicted from iTunes (yet again)

ratfox
Flame

Will Apple block "foreign" computer mice from working with Mac OS X?

I mean, they wrote the program, built the computer, they have every right to decide what device can work with it, right? How come they accept to work with a Dell computer mouse, but not with a Palm Pre phone?

Still pissed off when anybody takes pain to stop something that works from working.

NASA to irradiate monkeys for science

ratfox
Joke

Monkeys do not go ook

Orang-utans do.

Now, apologize very slowly... The Librarian hasn't twisted your head off. Yet.

Shsssh! Google Voice has 1.4 million users

ratfox

1.4 million?

Less than I expected actually. There's what, 300 million people in the US? Then only 0.4% are using Google voice.

Even T-mobile has 25 million users... and each of Verizon, Sprint and AT&T double that.

Governator in acrostic 'f**k you' outrage

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Thumb Up

Nice

The governator gets less credits than he deserves. No matter what his ideas are, the California legislature ARE a bunch of morons.

Punked US Chamber sues faux press release pranksters

ratfox
Flame

Utter BS

Protection of trademark is meant to stop people from pretending to be the owner of the trademark and imitate their products. The Chamber are twats.

New York Times Editor drops Apple tablet in talk

ratfox
Jobs Halo

One thing Appl is good at...

Is free advertising. They haven't uttered a single word about their thingummy yet, and the world is tethered to their lips.

...a friend of mine works in the e-book industry. They say that it is useless to choose formats or readers now, because whatever Apple has in store is going to blow everything else out of the water...

Apple Magic Mouse

ratfox
Flame

Thank god we can use PC mice with macs

You never know, Apple might decide that hardware they did not sell should not work with their software... Like, say, a pré with iTunes...

WTF is this country called America?

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Thumb Up

Agree with commentard

While there is a reason to call citizens of the United States Americans (they don't have any other name), I find weird to speak of Virginia, America. Jerusalem, Asia anyone?

Child porn threat to airport's 'virtual strip search' scanners

ratfox
Unhappy

Good for the children

Now how do I, as an adult not protected by the law, stop these people from ogling me?

Are we allowed no privacy?

Not thrilled about this.

WikiReader feeds you factiness on the go

ratfox
Unhappy

I feel sad about the company

It looks like they're desperate

Greenpeace applauds Apple climate change flounce

ratfox
Happy

@Aron

It is sad to see that Apple's stance on the climate was enough

to overcome the obvious love you had for the company...

One in three kids believe Google measures truthiness

ratfox
WTF?

great

The weird thing is that Google MISquotes Wikipedia...

e.g (the correct e.g):

http://www.google.com/search?q=population+density+in+australia

The answer reads:

Australia — Population - Density: 2.6/km2 (235th)

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia

So Google quotes answers from Wikipedia... OR DOES IT??

If you go check the page itself, you find a different number of 2.833/km2 for the population density of Australia... And I precise, despite the mutating nature of Wikipedia, the number quoted has not changed for months. What gives?

Why would Google give a number and pretend it was found on a Wikipedia page? Cui bono?

Chinese media finger Swedish lesbian enclave

ratfox
Paris Hilton

FOUND IT!

Err.... The article in Xinhua news, I mean... Not the city...

...Sorry...

Here it is (Google translations is your friend):

http://jx.xinhuanet.com/travel/2009-08/06/content_17322231.htm

Not only it is still on the site, it can still be found using the search tool from the main site. This is from the site of the Jiangxi branch, Jiangxi being the local equivalent of Arkansas.

The Chinese Wikipedia does have a page on the city, but it is denying its existence:

http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B2%99%E7%A7%91%E4%BF%9D%E5%B8%82

But who are you going to believe, the glorious communist media, or a western fake encyclopedia?

By the way, a Google search for 沙科保 (the name of the city in Chinese) returns 61'000 sites, quite a few being news site. This is not a recent story.

Royal Mail lawyers demand closure of postcode lookup site

ratfox
WTF?

IP??

How can it be IP? Aren't people allowed to give their address with a postcode? Aren't other mail companies allowed to use postcodes? If they have to depend on that million £ to survive, they're screwed...

Apple tablet will 'redefine print,' says rumor mill

ratfox

the way it's going...

Apple stock will plummet if Apple does NOT produce a tablet...

Study: US web users reject behavioural advertising

ratfox
FAIL

Cognitive Dissonance

Most of the people who answered use Google and love it. And I bet they would even if they knew what Google is doing.

Facebook claims mail API less intrusive than Gmail

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Thumb Down

Facebook security

NOW that's an oxymoron

Swedish parents win right to name sprog 'Q'

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Thumb Down

Poor guy

Agree with Frank. In fact, he would better get used to using his second first name for any application on an electronic form... I bet he will get really tired of explaining the story to everybody who asks his name, too. To be filed under "stupid parents".

Montblanc punts £14k Mahatma Gandhi pen

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Thumb Down

In other news

A tornado appeared over the Ganges. It seemed to be created by some sort of ashes furiously spinning on themselves...

Google hits Android dev with cease-and-desist letter

ratfox
Thumb Down

It does remind of Apple/Palm

From my point of view of end user, exactly the same. Before it was cool and it worked, and now it does not, for roundabout reasons of "must stop other people profiting of the hard work we put into something we are offering for free."

I am not impressed with Google.

Blind one-legged man wins arse-kicking contest

ratfox

Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!

So that's were Long John went...

I hope for him his wife comes back soon, though she might have good reasons to stay away...

USB supreme court backs Apple in Palm Pre kerfuffle

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Thumb Down

What if...

What if Microsoft sold printers, and rigged Microsoft Word so that it would only print on Microsoft printers?

Microsoft does sell mice. What if they blocked Logitech USB mice using the vendor ID?

I understand that Apple wants people to buy iPods, but I hate it that they are, on purpose, blocking a functionality that it working.

Texas Instruments aims lawyers at calculator hackers

ratfox
Coat

"Me too"

Give me my trusty ol' HP48 any day...

Coat [enter] take

Linus calls Linux 'bloated and huge'

ratfox
Thumb Up

Good

I like it when people do not spam marketing on the world.

Facebook hack service smells fishy

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Thumb Down

Scam

There has been for years videos on youtube explaining how to find the password of another user. Every time, the method necessitated sending your own login and password to some weird e-mail address purported to be an official Blizzard account (say, wow-password-recovery@hotmail.com).

Ha, just found another one. The guy says he has found a way to generate codes for gamecards from unused codes. So just send him the code of a unused gamecard, and he'll send you back plenty of other codes that will work. He'll get right up to it, yessir!

Undead COBOL celebrates (another) 50th birthday

ratfox
Boffin

Fortran

Numerous computations libraries used by engineers have been written in Fortran long ago. They work so well that nobody wants to undertake the massive task of porting them to another language. And even if someone did, the result would likely be less efficient and contain more bugs, so...

Disney sued over Pixar lamp 'copy'

ratfox
Unhappy

I guess nobody checked where the name was coming from

I am kind of wondering why it is necessary to sue to get Disney to cough up a settlement. I guess lawyers are the only way to get a corporation to pay any kind of attention to you...

No wonder there are so many lawyers in US.

International hacker buried $1m in backyard

ratfox
Happy

@Munchausen

"So you say the million $ is buried in the front yard?"

"Yeah... NOI THE BACKYARD!! I said the backyard! There is nothing in the front yard. Nothing! Don't dig there! Please, please please oh please don't dig there..."