Currently about as useful/dangerous

As carrying about a bagful of bullets without a gun to use them in. I can't help but picture Wile E. Coyote holding a little clown umbrella over his head and a sign saying 'Oh, no' as our protection model for the foreseeable future.

detect and prevent attacks before they hit

Soooo...precogs then. But what about the minority reports?

Mine's the one with the spare eyeballs in the pocket.

FINE

Ok, they blew away every ST movie and episode by screwing up the timelines in the last movie so it's now possible for the Borg to get a run at Kirk. And yes, the Borg were probably the best set of nasties in the ST universe.

BUT, I'm bored/sick/filled with loathing of seeing the damn BORG and all the bizarre tweaks they keep pulling in scripting. Pretty soon we'll see little Borg dogs and cats running around the cubes.

Can't someone come up with a decent Federation vs. Klingon script? They were supposedly the biggest ongoing problem in the original ST, but they've always gotten the third-rate villian treatment.

You young folks

and your skynets and frickin' sharks. What I want to know is ... how effective will this be against giant bipedal radioactive lizards coming out of the sea?

No comment really

Just getting a good chuckle out of this one. After all the hype, look who really listened.

All I know is...

The Vogons are going to be pissed when they find their work done for them. Think of all the extra paperwork!

Thanks to this article I've developed precognition!

I predict a late night coding session in my near future.

So looking for info on The Prisoner

Eye, sun, anubis, falcon, cat, rover?

Sigh..

Here in the Great White North we get Big Bird for Sesame Streets 40th, would've preferred W&G. The Wrong Trousers is my fav. Still get a shiver everytime I see a penguin looking around with cold, black eyes, creepy little buggers.

Not a problem

Just start broadcasting, 'I COTZ H1N1 FROM TEH INTERWEBZ' and watch usage go down.

@Adam

It's a joke, son. Get over it.

(I run Fedora at home, by the way).

This article got me thinking

About Linux's three phases of support:

self help, self help, and self help.

Finally...

A chance to use this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKib6XKJNJQ

black and white leather jacket

Nice to know...

We're still on track for being a minor footnote in the universe.

Humanity-Mostly harmless.

Made it into space, decided they didn't like it. Had digital watches. Planet destroyed for hyperspace bypass. Current Status: EXTINCT

Blu-ray and 3D

Anyone else picture them going from discs to spheres? Piss off a bunch of early adopters. Wonder what the player would look like... Mine's the one with the buckyballs in the pocket.

Erm...

"Memorable creations have included techno trousers..."

Weren't the techno-trousers purchased second-hand from the space program and not a Wallace creation? He could get in legal trouble claiming them as his own.

@AC

Forgetting about atmospheric pressure. The planet is less than two times in diameter, assuming the same density as us would make it under eight times the mass. It only takes about 30 atmospheres to raise the boiling point to 1000 degrees C and we already know of a planet about our size with a pressure above that (Venus).

I suppose we'll have to hire the movers to put it in a larger orbit before putting up the wallpaper.

Just as well...

"Plans to manufacture the Wilting Flower haven’t been announced yet."

Why pay for the gizmo when I can get the same effect by rooting through the local florist's garbage?

Mine's the one with the extension cord octopus in the pocket.

Finally a chance to use the quote!

Customer: Are you sure this place is honest?

Carl: Honest? As honest as the day is long!

Oh, you probably came for this:

Yes!!

Bravo

So now we have a theoretical solution to a theoretical problem. We still don't have anything close to a shed hiding cloak, scaling up to that level will likely be somewhat troublesome. So I'll believe it when I don't see it.

@Moz

The major problem with the space elevator is the amount of destruction it can cause if something goes wrong. Convincing a country to host one is probably less of a problem than getting their downwind neighbours to accept it. Construction-wise, the 'easiest' method to build one is from geosynchronous orbit so it can be kept balanced while it's being built, but who wants a few kilometers of cable flapping about over their heads? Best bet is to build them in other gravity wells first where the effect on the solar systems population won't suffer as much should something go wrong. (Yeah, I know, NASA's never made a mistook) But that means getting to another planet first and getting the raw materials there.

Needs contols for the elbow

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

(The one with the big foot on the back)

Bah

The only problem with free speech is that you get what you pay for.

Unanswered questions

Maybe it's just me, but...

1. Once the probes find Lunar mini-moles, how do we transport them back?

2. Will they breed in captivity, or only on the wilds of the dark side of the moon?

Re: I have not had problems

I'm quickly losing the remaining dregs of my belief in human intelligence.

Here's a new cut-and-paste comment for the Reg:

I haven't had any problems installing/running/removing/configuring the software/hardware/update on N systems. Since I do/don't/didn't overclock/interrupt the process/drink coffee/own a cat/believe in Xenu, it's obvious everyone who has had problems should/shouldn't overclock/sit on their hands/drink Jolt/[kill their/get a] cat/join Scientology. Problem solved.

SHEESH!

While we're griping

Let's not forget Google, I keep seeing pre-selected options for installing either the browser search toolbar or the desktop search program popping up in the strangest places, during both download and CD-based installs of unrelated software.

@ Richard, AC

Wrong arrangement, I'll take a Licko-ma-neo-battery, pleeeese.

Oh, c'mon Reg

April Fool's was yesterday, you can't really expect us to believe a story like this...

Coming next...?

Cubicle farm call centres, minimum wage in Linden bucks

My job was outsourced to Sadville and all I got was this lousy virtual t-shirt.

STILL a fan...

*Hmmph* Yet Another Language War. Programmers are religious fanatics when it comes to language selection.

What was that old chestnut? Oh yeah, "When C is your hammer, every problem looks like a thumb."

I use Common Lisp for most of my prototyping and proof-of-concept code regardless of what the final code is written in. It's a large language that supports most programming styles: functional, object oriented, etc. With a REPL, it's fairly quick to develop and debug with and being able to edit and compile individual functions on the fly while the code is running avoids a lot of the edit-save-compile-link-run that comes with other languages.

And no, I have no problem reading Lisp. Like any other bloody computer language it's just a matter of practice. Forth is more usually the one mislabeled 'write-only'.

The only problem maintainability-wise is finding Lisp programmers in a world of VB script kiddies.

Arc is more of a concept language right now, like the cars of the future you only see at conventions. It may go somewhere, who knows? It just seems to be lacking a lot right now...

Wouldn't be complete without...

The flipside...

http://artists.letssingit.com/arrogant-worms-lyrics-carrot-juice-is-murder-sdnfw88

Can't see it

I've seen the total worldwide units graph from the report. He has the number of PS3s sold tied or exceeding XBox360s before the end of 2007, and the PS3's consistently outselling Wii's for the next four years.

But currently, the sales of Xboxes and Playstations are almost running in lockstep on worldwide basis, with the Xbox having a year advantage, and the Wii still outselling them both by a wide margin.

@Matthew

Arrgh! Not this old chestnut again...

http://www.snopes.com/movies/films/goldfinger.asp

2nd paragraph in origins section.

Torches and pitchforks!

This is ridiculous.

I have a pipe cutter in my *real* toolbox. I don't use it often (twice, actually), but it's there when I need it. Same with multiple exits and gotos, most of the time they don't get used.

But when not using them creates a plethora of meaningless boolean flags and nested if-clauses that start taking up more room than the code that does the actual work in the code, out they come...

One of my uni profs sent out a problem to his classes he was having trouble with, a simple data parsing problem, took about half an hour to write and debug, wrote it with about 8 gotos. He wrote back that the idea of using gotos never occured to him, he was getting mired in working out the logic of a more structured approach. It was also the only fully working solution he had received.

Multiple exits, like gotos are part of a programmer's toolbox. It doesn't mean they should be used all the time, but saying they should never be used is just as moronic.