'S'bloody obvious, innit

The squirrel was working for Al Quaeda and it got the instructions for the whole thing off the Internet.

I have never smoked in my life

But that idiot just gave me the urge to start.

He'll never suggest Govt should tax stupidity, it'd cost him too much.

Correlary of 2nd rule

No-one posting as an Anonymous Coward may be reasonable and/or correct.

I know bugger all about real physics

But at least it goes some way to explaining why - in the classic 'for idiots' model of the atom - neutrons and protons huddle up together.

The only other explanation I could find was that they were scared of the surrounding electrons.

How times change

Fifty years ago - possibly less - one of the options would have been a Typical British Landlady.

And she would have won.

Never let a good subtitle go unused

A once in a lifetime opportunity, congratulations on grabbing it with both hands. Sod the IT angle.

Another song springs to mind

"My Old Flame"

Far more appropriate, as three years on she's still carrying a torch for him. How romantic ^^

igmc

3rd vote for non-story

Unless the article sells the theory sadly short, all that the guy has discovered is a mathematical way to describe the effects of total immersion on language learning at an age when the brain is still growing and - very importantly - neural connections are being extensively rewired.

Without major input from neurologists and psychologists, not to mention real linguists, the idea isn't going very far.

Re: Surface Computing

*I* think it's the perfect description: Microsoft sold XP and now sells Vista to a great extent on how pretty the interface looks.

Since recourse to alcohol is apparently a standard male reaction to stress

I can only assume that NASA is too stingy to provide proper stress management counselling to their employees.

Clarification

"Conditions are not met to open bookmaking to all sports games, such as the Tour de France for example, since there is no market yet"

There probably *is* a market, given the amount of excitement events like the Tour de France, football matches, Rugby championships and so on produce. It's just that the French government doesn't allow betting on them to any major extent and certainly doesn't go out of its way to advertise what it does allow.

Oh how sweet: bigots

The French consider Lafesse to be the epitome of comedy the way the British consider Mr Bean to be the epitome of comedy. I can only assume that those who think the French (or Germans, or any other culture) have no sense of humour are - as usual - those who know nothing about the country and even less about the language.

The guy makes his living from sketches, and it's more than likely that what's up on the Net has been ripped from supposedly-DRMed DVDs. So it's an interesting case.

Personally, I suspect that in the end the online video sites will find themselves in a similar pickle to the P2P sites a few years ago: sooner or later the illegally-distributed stuff is going to cause major problems.

@ Daniel

"As for being a 31 university student and a WoW player I find the combination very hard to believe!!!"

As a 49-year-old Dofus player, I don't.

Not .basq

More like .eus for Euskal-Herri, the name of the Basque country in basque.

As for Catalonia, like the Basque country it spans both France and Spain, so there is no justification for making a language-linked domain a subdomain for any single country.

However, I suspect the usual narrow-minded politics will prevent this sort of thing happening, especially for the Kurds, who should never have been partitioned in the first place.

I can't believe no one's said this yet.

"Hazmat divers, while highly qualified, don't normally think of themselves as being involved in scientific endeavour"

Of course not. They only go through the motions.

igmc

Re: To the know it alls who posted above

Ah, the classic reaction of a programmer (who almost certainly *does* have a horrifically impossible job) blaming the failure of a tool on the users, whose work he - to quote his own ewpression - knows "jack nor squatl about".

"Bookings are created/cancelled/updated/moved constantly." - yes, that's why a decently-run database system is required. If a national - hell, even a regional or county - IT system can't cope with this, then it's a white elephant. No-one says it's the fault of the code slaves; however the same cannot be said of those who decided the whole thing could and should be done, and are pouring taxpayers' money at something which according to your own description may never work because of the technical constraints.

I lve in a country where 14% of deaths among GPs are by suicide due to depression or burnout caused to a great extent by too much red tape and administrative pressure, plus being treated like dirt. Don't make doctors' lives worse.

If it ain't mentioned on the invoice...

... then VAT isn't deductible.

That's what you get when you don't let your accountants look at a contract before you sign it.

Never look things up, never surrender

http://www.nisd.net/spedww/PSD/doc/NatureandMeasurementofIntelligence.pdf

In any case, considering that MENSA finds it necessary to stipulate that "1 in 50 people have an IQ in the top 2%..." (we'll pass on the bad grammar and formulation), I continue to have serious doubts about the value of their test, over and above the rude things my psychology tutors said about it when I was at Uni. How many years out of date is it?

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20031025/fob1.asp

Re: iPlayer would be better off being and using open standards

Well yes, very true, but if they want to shoot themselves in the foot, let them.

I rather suspect that's Ofcom's attitude as well. I certainly won't change my OS just to play Beeb videos over the web.

Well, look at old South Africa

where they used measurements like thickness of hair to determine an individual's "race" classification. Clearly a great idea that worked really well.

Obviously Triesman thinks ethics is an English county.

No doubt with my blood group I'd get shipped off to Afghanistan, where it's far more common than in the UK.

re : New Versions of Office

"familiar (to the workers) MS Office platform"

Office 2007 is a far bigger shock to seasoned Office users, especially Word - which is a real PIA to get the hang of - than OpenOffice.org. I personally find Word 2007 so unintuitive as to be nigh unusable and no, I am not going to pay ridiculous amounts of money for "retraining". I can't afford it.

There's also the problem of all the gagdets that Microsoft now includes in the Office suite (of which there are 7 different versions), most of which *aren't actually file-compatible with each other*. Again, I speak from experience, having discovered that Publisher doesn't like Word files, and vice versa.

Openoffice.org is far from perfect, but for basic use it's quite acceptable. There will be those who switch, or refuse to upgrade.

re: Looked good until I dug a little further.....

"Sorry to spoil this one for all you "I believe in zombie's" folk!!"

Oh dear. A dual sense of humour AND grammar failure.

For those who didn't pay attention at school

... it may be a comfort to learn that Nicolas Sarkozy didn't either. His marks for the baccalaureat school leaving exam were frankly abysmal, and he just scraped through on the last-chance oral exams.

It may interest some to learn he only got 40% for Economics.

Doesn't usually drink

but he has been known to accept a glass for diplomatic purposes (agricultural shows while campaigning and so on). Possibly just a combination of a diplomatically-advisable snifter (not necessarily with Putin) and low alcohol tolerance.

Makes a change from his usual stuffed-frog façade anyway.

Wodger mean, let it go?

Hem below the knee and concertina socks?

Must be a skirt, that's not how a kilt is worn. Sort of the Celtic equivalent of torn jeans and a T-shirt, I suppose.

Re: applied physics

"High school physics should not be heavy on math - it is more important that students develop a FEEL and understanding for it."

Now there's a woolly (or considering you wrote 'math' I should probably say 'wooly') approach if ever there was one. How on eath can anyone develop a feel for anything if practical work isn't backed up by theory and vice versa?

Incidentally, for the guy raving about his French education, ten years earlier English lang & lit classes would has been just as rigourous in the UK. And the French pay more attention to learning English than most Brits to learning French because of the cultural (film, music) and economic hegemony our blessed tongue enjoys.

In 1976, first-year physics students at my university had to have remedial maths lectures because their maths wasn't good enough to let them follow the physics course.

Muttermutter inmyday etc etc

If I understand this correctly

... these lunatics have found a way to run Java on brewer's yeast?

I suppose in a few years' time we'll have the cops breaking down pensioners' doors to charge them with IP theft because they kept some of their yeast from a brewing/baking session to make a second batch.

us.theregister.co.uk

Well, it would make a change from the UK being considered an extension of US territory :)

Plus, if you say it with a Yorkshire accent, it sounds just right.

(PS if you decide to use dot com, then why not use us.theregister.com *as well as* uk.theregister.com? Many big companies already use this system)

At last!

Boffins admit what we women have known for years: lager-and-curry is a particularly nasty form of biochemical warfare.

re: oceans as carbon sinks

Also, a recent Reg article stated that scientists have discovered that the oceanic carbon-sinks are almost saturated.

What would interest me in addition to this project, apart from extending it to SE Asia, which needs all the help it can currently get, would be a similar scheme to preserve the bits of the Sahara which provide the wind-blown nutrients that fertilise the Latin American rainforest. I discovered this recently, can't remember how, and it doesn't seem to be widespread knowledge as yet.

£35 for a half-acre, eh? That's not even €50. I'm game.

How can email be free

... if it's explicitly stated that "sending and receiving emails with large attachments" is included in the publicity blurb? Either (a) it's included in the offer, and therefore not free, or (b) email isn't included and we're looking at misleading advertising (Trade Descriptions Act, etc etc).

To be honest, the non-respect of their own T&Cs, plus the unbelievable excuses used to justify their failure to provide a vital service to their subscribers, shows all the hallmarks of a cowboy outfit. Don't buy their double-glazing whatever you do.

Re: Music of the Spheres

I didn't know William Shakespeare and Pythagorus were '50s SF authors.

Re: Don't use your ISP's mail service

Setting up your own domain to handle email is only going to work if you also have your own mailserver and the technical knowhow to run it.

Only the geeks among us are in a position to do this at home. Even most small companies don't have the resources for it. (Mind you, on this latter part I hope to be proved wrong and paid handsomely for setting up and running several such systems for SMEs in my area.)

Gotta be careful

I hope no-one in the search party is wearing a red jumper...

Impressive demand

Even some of the mirrors were struggling a bit yesterday. Fortunately I decided to upgrade to Feisty 3 days beforehand, so no problems here.

I've been using Ubuntu for about a month and I've got to admit I like it. It installs out of the box, even on older machines; I've had no more problems with drivers than with Windows; there are tons of apps and utilities available at the click of a mouse... and best of all, it's rock stable. No apps suddenly going belly-up after Patch Tuesday, something that's become tiresomely frequent on my other machines.

Restraint?

Dave, for older, noisier, children, restraint is what parents are expected to have *taught* them.