Re: Ascension

You've got to admit that Ascension is a great name for a place to put the space elevator.

In fifty years time people would think that the place was named after the technology.

Re: Great video

You're right. I emailed them to ask about this and got:

"As a newly launched company just coming out of stealth, we are not actively engaging business opportunities outside of the United States at the moment. Once we have expanded to a degree that allows us to deliver the quality, responsiveness and consistency that we know the international community expects, we will engage with partners and customers abroad."

Re: @ Matthew 3 - "Speed doesn't inherently kill"

OK, here's what I'm talking about:

Executive Summary

The act of travelling fast isn't of itself fatal.

Elaboration

As I pointed out, it's possible to travel in excess of 500mph in an aeroplane. This is the fastest possible current speed any average human can reach (ok, without joining a space agency). Many thousands of people do this every day without a single speed-induced death. Care to explain that for me? In case you'd forgotten, Concorde's passengers regularly (and safely) exceeded 1300mph for the best part of three decades. When Concorde did crash it wasn't speed that caused that accident either. If you were right then the fastest forms of travel would be the most dangerous, rather than the safest. With cars, motorways are the safest roads even though cars are travelling faster. Speed alone doesn't seem to be killing people there either.

I do accept that injuries are more likely to be serious if something goes wrong when travelling at a higher speed. The majority of such injuries are caused by abrupt deceleration and the effects of momentum on the body. I don't think that's in dispute here. Of course momentum has a relationship with speed but, sadly, that's not the message given out by the 'speed kills' lobby. It doesn't even seem to be your point.

You can only ever be right if you re-state your position as "inappropriate speed kills".

I do recall people saying, back when steam trains were a new idea, that to exceed a walking pace was likely to cause physical injuries and risk death. Is this what you have in mind? I'm pretty sure that to still be of that view (when it's been so comprehensively disproven) is where I'd be applying words like 'infantile' 'dumb' and 'fallacy'.

Just out of curiosity, what speed do you have in mind that will inherently kill someone?

Re: The whole speed "safety" industry is a money making con

"The reason those camera's are on the A40 / A23 are, as you said, because people think the speed limit is too slow and SPEED. Your own argument justifies the whole situation."

Not quite. A few years ago I might have agreed. But since councils started lowering the limits - and then put in cameras - it weakens this argument.

It used to be the case that speed limits were set based on the behaviour of a certain percentile of road users (i.e. the speed at which most sensible drivers had independently assessed as safe). Now it's all about risk avoidance: the limits come down and thus need more enforcement for the drivers who know it's safe to travel faster (and perhaps were allowed to go faster a few years previously on the same road). Parts of the A40 have been reduced to 40mph (down from 70).

I long for a return to the days when drivers' judgement was considered enough. The prosecutions happened to the drivers with the worst judgement.

"Speed doesn't inherently kill"

There's nothing wrong with that statement. If speed did kill then travelling on an airliner would be the most dangerous thing anyone could do.

There's a lot of silly stuff said by Clarkson but on this issue at least he speaks sense:

"Speed has never killed anyone, suddenly becoming stationary... That's what gets you."

Re: Exactly

Oxford's bus/cycle lanes have a pedestrian-crossing-style push button at the head of the queue. This allows cyclists to gain the advantage of the bus lane's priority traffic lights even when no bus is coming.

Re: Power requirements

Gravity is why a plummeting VW Beetle can beat a twin-turbo Porsche 911 over a mile.

TG Test

Re: point?

Would you really want to have two 55" tellies side by side? I can see me wanting this tech so that my missus can watch her bloody awful singing/dancing/voting programmes while I turn to the Dave channel.

No need to ponce about with recordings and we can both watch something we like in the same room at the same time. Makes sense to me.

"...why did I have to register here..."

Read the name of this website, pal.

Re: Double fail

"why not go all the way and get with the times, go metric? "

BMW tried this with wheels for certain models, I seem to recall, in the 90s. I guess proponents of Teutonic efficiency dislike the mixture of inches (wheel diameter) and mm (tyre width).

If you're adamant about keeping the original wheels on one of those models every new tyre you buy costs very silly amounts of money.

Thinking an idea is better idea doesn't mean it'll pan out the way you want. For another example take a look at Brunel's 'broad gauge'.

Re: Units

You could also cause confusion by using the Aussie word for flipflops.

Re: "is there much of a difference?"

"...often 15 or more years..."

I remember reading that the leading cause of death for Death Row inmates is actually old age.

Re: Today London lost Ceefax!

IIRC, Oracle was an acronym: Optical Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics.

Re: STILL at it

" If the seller has gone out of business in the second year onwards, then there's nothing you can do"

In the UK at least, buying it on a credit card makes the card company jointly liable for dodgy goods. Even if your supplier has gone out of business you're still able to get a refund from the card company. Here's a handy mnemonic for your (UK) rights:

Satisfactory Quality

As

Described

Fit for purpose

And last for a

Reasonable

Ttime.

And, yes, for quoting this, I am one.

Re: I don't think that this is a good idea.

Surely you'd claim work usage back through expenses? And if you're fired after two months it's no problem. Well, not for the employer, anyway.

You might find it's a bit more trouble getting your claims signed off though.

Re: With all respect to the late, great Douglas Adams.

With a name like Colin, you wouldn't be an artificially cheerful robot by any chance?

Re: Don't forget...

Yes, I got one of those. I had bought a TV with a built-in OnDigital decoder but they didn't bother tailoring the letters for people without separate receivers. I wrote back saying something like 'see you in court, pal' and never heard another peep.

On the plus side though, the aerial they fitted for free is still doing sterling service.

Re: Thoughts

"It's still backwards compatible with the full-size credit card style (unless there are networks that don't do that now)."

Somewhere in a cupboard I still have my old Motorola MR1 which takes a full credit-card-sized SIM. No need to unpick the SIM from the middle of the card. Ah, brings back happy memories of not even being able to compose those newfangled text messages.

Re: Not writting it off....

We've been meaning to talk to you about that cat.

RE: Faraday's mining lamp

"There are plenty of other British scientific superstars, though, and it's about time they were properly honoured, like the French do."

I had no idea that the French had a tradition of honouring British scientific superstars. If that's the case I'll take back what I may have said about the French in the past.

Re: Hmm.....

When you need to support that kind of legacy software isn't that where HyperV could step in?

It's sounding mature enough to consider and of course, as a bonus, any vulnerabilities or issues with the 'buggy software written in the 1990s' are kept under control in a virtual machine rather than messing up the nice clean host server.

Re: Idiotic date formats

is this because you're worrying about the year 2100 problem?

Frankly (and as long as I can escape from gun-toting date nazis to survive long enough) if I'm still around long enough for two-digit years to be an issue again I'll be delighted.

Re: And this is what sucks...

"inferior shit like Xbox and iPads"?

If a product came to market that was demonstrably (and undeniably) better I don't think any amount of budget would stop it from being a success. This is especially true now that 'the power of the internet' allows people to share their personal preferences so widely.

"Apple and Microsoft have so much money they can buy whoever they want"

Are you trying to say that these two companies are immune from criticism because of their budgets? Is this your first visit here by any chance? I think it's fair to say that El Reg has a fair few folk who haven't been brainwashed yet...

"If they designed and engineered their products correctly, they wouldn't need to fight"

Apple inparticular have quite a reputation for their design quality even if you disapprove of every other aspect. It's also quite hard to think of any product that came to market in a form which was unimprovable.

Re: Foreign lorries

I kind of see your point. But the problem is that we haven't yet stopped thinking in imperial for quite a few types of measurement.

For example: can you honestly say you already know your own height in metric units?

Re: How quaint

I always thought Sellotape was the 'sticky-backed plastic' they referred to. Was that something else?

Re: The issue is:

Isn't this why the higher-end 64bit versions include the capability of running a 32bit copy of XP as a virtual machine?

For devices which are only used occasionally it's adequate for the job. It's far from a perfect solution but it does offer a limited lifeline for otherwise unsupportably-old apps and devices.

I believe that Apple's architecture change caused similar issues...

Re: Windows 8 is being re-packaged

Would you have preferred it if the article stopped mid-sentence?

Re: Not the first time this has happened

...and they created a sound on the Mac called 'sosumi' as a way of showing their high regard for legal process.

Re: What is this "TV" people speak of?

Tony Blair was 'before the wars'?

Exactly which wars do you have in mind here?

Re: Re: Re: Aesthetics not part of the review?

I think it's probably more that people realise that in a sub-£100 category design isn't going to sway people's opinion as much as saving a few bob.

Re: Re: Re: @Daivd Kelly

Even more ironic? The car tax folk at the DVLA would still have it listed as a zero emission (and thus tax free) vehicle...

Re: Why not just insist less chance of failure.

Because the other week I had to use a supermarket's self-scanner chip-and-pin unit with one duff key. It was supplying two keypresses for each press (i.e. the PIN was being mis-entered even when the correct keys were pressed).

It took two goes for me to realise that it was the device at fault rather than my typo. I gather that dozens of people locked out their PINs before the store thought to close that particular terminal.