Posts by Robert E A Harvey

Bumpkin?

Oxford bloody shire?

Where Clarkson lives? And Cameron?

That's not Bumpkin territory, that's Knobshire.

Bumpkins live in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Somerset. (no, not Devon. That's full of UCTs as well)

What about the wheels?

Are they throwing in the trucks to convert them to something useful?

Me!

I'm Spartacus!

Microwave light bulb

No, there will be a market soon for a continuous microwave source, so that battery-less devices can be powered parasitically.

Pubs and hotels will display a special logo (I was going to say "black power", but that;s been used. "dark energy"? nope - also spoken for). "Stray energy" perhaps?

Then the foil-hatters can sell allyhats to thousands of people to wear in their own rooms.

I like the look of that.

Now we need a star-trek(kirk) style mesh flip-up to protect the external screen and I will get my wallet out!

Biggest question

Should be adapted to the home, and the most frequently asked question of all time: "where are my glasses?"

does not work

>It's so slow and buggy, in fact, that editors have

>voted not to use it.

Even worse, it has huge chunks missing. The editing of citation templates etc. is missing, and most wikinazi editors get apoplectic if you do them even slightly wrong.

I know one editor who spends his whole life taking out spaces before | delimiters. He must be going Vesuvius by now.

killing the music industry

Can I quote again Mitch Benn from the now show:

"Downloading isn't destorying music. Simon Cowell is destroying music."

Plan B

>If that happens, Michael Dell will be out of a job – but with $12bn in assets in his equity

>firm, there are worse things that could happen to him

Plan B: buy Nokia and Nokia-Siemens Networks

Wake up, corporations!

People have got houses full of devices that work well enough.

And no money.

You can't keep selling them tiny variations on what they already have. It's not like the 1980s, when new was very much better than old.

You want people's money? Think up something they need rather than just want!

The other lesson

People seem to have missed the other lesson.

According to the Reg story figures Microsoft spent over a thousand dollars in advertising to earn each $600 sale.

Just remember that next time an ad agency is making a pitch for their attempt to sell your product, and ask them how come they can be so clever when they weren't even clever enough to get the Surface RT account.

Advertising pays? pah! No such thing as bad publicity? Pshaw!

Heisenburg

I'd have thought that a successful teleport would require the position, energy, and velocity of every subatomic particle. Something the uncertainty principle says we can never know.

Wrong again

I thought it was self-evident that he had been 'aiding the enemy'.

Does not the US government regard most of its own people as 'the enemy'?

The company is betting big on television with its sports channel

Puts me right off.

They sent me a brochure. No technical info, no channel listings, no service level targets. Just a load of drivel about futba'

So that went in the tub.

Bob Mansfield

Reuters say that Mr Mansfield postponed retirement last year, and is going to be on the Special Projects team.

Are they going to deliver my talking computer soon, then?

Powerful stuff

I remember the final Quatermass as more powerful than it seems now, even though we are rapidly heading toward a world not unlike the one he portrayed. I think the Planet People seem less likely than they did, but that's about it. But there is no doubting the complexity of the vision and the depth of detail that went into creating the world in which the story took place, far more than in the earlier stories where it was somehow not necessary: they had a contemporary setting, this last one was near-future.

Ringstone Round is a thoroughly clever British invention. It sounds right. It sounds like it really exists, and there are some people who claim the children's chant is traditional.

OK, there is something of 'Midwich cuckoos' in the denouement, and some of the acting is a little perfunctory. But the story remains tight, faithful to the Genre, and has that same sort of 'that would explain a lot' quality of the The Pit . I thought in that the Hobs Lane and medieval mythology was handled with a light enough touch to be realistic, or at least not break the disbelief, and the idea of finding a rational explanation for stone circles in the last story has that same deftness of touch.

Yes. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed them all, and this was part of the set. The whole series had some of the qualities of Britishness that makes doctor Who interesting, while still being proper, serious, story telling. I'd put them up there with Day of the Triffids and War of the Worlds, as fine quality SF on our own turf.

Out of interest, who is writing SF with a British background now? Is there a hole in the market?