* Posts by fawlty

39 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2012

ESA sends back PRE-LANDING COMET CLOSE-UPS

fawlty

Re: then touch down seven hours later at about 4pm

What are those measurements in Reg Standard units please?

Dr Hurricane unleashes FUSION POWER at Livermore nuke lab

fawlty
Mushroom

Dr Hurricane

As condition of your sentence I forbid you to return to Death Mountain.

Aww, but all my stuff is there.

Qatar whips covers off giant footballing vagina

fawlty
Coat

How are they...

gonna stop sand getting in there?

Facebook Frankenphoto morgue will store your cold, dead selfies FOREVER

fawlty
Joke

FB is just like my parents attic

Full of pointless, badly shot photos, correspondence and newspapers/magazines. Someones going to have to either sort through it all at some stage and decide what to keep, or bung the whole lot on a bonfire in the garden in exasperation.

Anyhow, whats next - will FB be keeping all those games of farmville and thrown sheep *in case the kids ever want to play with them*...

We should just change the name to Oldladybook.com now and be done with it.

Ha.

British LulzSec hackers hear jail doors slam shut for years

fawlty
Facepalm

exactly

and they'll get 30 years each. Who's doing it for the lulz now?

Drone to deliver beer-as-a-service

fawlty
Pint

Imagining...

The effect of a 500ml tinnie attached to a failed parachute system descending into the face of the recipient from 50ft above ground...

Maybe some redundancy in the system needed? Blanket bomb the area with pretzels first?

f

Twenty classic arcade games

fawlty
Pint

+1

Oh my.. Outrun, Streetfighter, R Type, Super Mario, Afterburner, DK, Mortal Kombat..

I think I know what I'm doing with my weekend - goodbye 'alcove shelves', 'new fence', 'MOT', hello 'Arcade Cabinet'...

Just what does BT have planned for its 4G licence: We drill into UK LTE

fawlty
Paris Hilton

Am I missing something?

"BT could offer in-home LTE, backhauled over broadband whenever one was near a BT Broadband customer or OpenZone spot, and roaming to one of the operators the rest of the time"

Complete punter in this area however, why would you want in home LTE piggybacked from an existing broadband router, as any mobile device in or near your home sporting LTE is likely to be WiFi capable anyway?

Paris because I'm probably being spectacularly dim about this.

Traceroute reveals Star Wars Episode IV 'crawl' text

fawlty
Pint

Bravo

Ale away.

Iran develops working ICBM: Intercontinental Ballistic Monkey

fawlty
Thumb Up

2 Things

a) X37B probably handed the hirsuite hero a yellow crescent shaped source of potassium while it was up there, pretty sure the US would as a minimum have clocked the i/r signal from the launch (or was that COD4? ;-))

b) Intercontinental Ballistic Monkey: cracking tagline, that cheered me up on day where the tea and day nurse are being deployed liberally. you have my thanks.

Apple rubbishes rumours of iPhone for the masses

fawlty
Holmes

We aren't making that...

Ergo, they are. Aha.

<< Sherlock, obvious.

Why mergers LOSE money, but are GOOD for the economy

fawlty

What's a merger?

Isn't that just where one company purchases another using its own stock as payment?

I think you hit the nail on the head with Thumpety Thump, often these things are 'suggested' to top guys by M&A banker types as a way of doing something big and newsworthy when there's no cash around,or at least there's only enough cash to pay $100m to the bank/lawyer to organise it, not $10bn to acquire outright.

What fun!

First rigid airship since the Hindenburg enters trials

fawlty
Thumb Up

Moffat Field?

Are those the hangars at Moffat Field in the valley? Used to go past those every now and again on the way to a client in Sunnyvale, weirdest looking things and so big.

Tiny Brit island stranded after £10m undersea fibre plea sunk

fawlty

Re: Fancy clarifying what...

Perhaps 'Commercial' aspirations would be closer / in clarification?

Also I think it unfair to suggest that the govt 'aspire' to military action in Southern Atlantic.

HTH.

fawlty
Mushroom

Fancy clarifying what...

"our military aspirations" means?

What "military aspirations" do 'we' have in the Southern Atlantic?

Major new science: Women more nude, more often online

fawlty
Thumb Down

Great work everybody...

Is it fair to assume that funding for this would have been less forthcoming if the title had been 'Virtual Environment Reveals Sex-Dependent Nature of Skin Disclosure'?

Also this smacks of a researcher who was supposed to be working having spent a year messing about on the internet and suddenly getting an ultimatum to publish something.

Glad I'm not paying Canadian taxes.

Linux HTPC <£300

fawlty
Thumb Up

Just did something like this but overspent. Learning points were:

M350 case is great (see lin-itx.com), very 'customisable' ie. with a drill if necessary, and has mount points for 'vesa' compatible tv brackets.

Also a good idea to look at picoPSU from a power perspective (just make sure you add all your components uptake requirements together correctly so you get the right model...)

OpenElec currently getting my vote as OS, based on XBMC but stripped back, boots from tiny usb stick in no time.

PCTV 290e USB tuner works well with linux -support is baked into the latest kernels so no need for 3rd party drivers, and has dual DVB-T2 tuners so watch and record in HD/SD as you like.

I wasted my money on processing power / main board (intel z68) which was a mistake. I've had to spend money on cooling / 'customising' my case since to keep it running quiet ish, and didn't really need all the extra oomph.

Last piece of advice: hide it from any children you may have. Mine have tried to assassinate the creation several times so far since I built it.

Good luck.

Dead Steve Jobs' mega yacht seized by testy Philippe Starck

fawlty

No contract?

No contract + dead customer (generally) = loss.

oops.

Apple said to be testing 46, 55-inch big-screen TVs

fawlty
Gimp

I for one...

Am really looking forward to watching fanbois queue round the block overnight for a 46in TV, especially the show offs who insist on buying more than one.

Just saying.

Cassini spots Titan ‘mini-Nile’

fawlty
Joke

Liquid Hydrocarbons eh?

uh-oh Titan, look out, you're next on the axis of evil...

Apple loses iPhone patent lawsuit

fawlty
Pint

Re: Mutually assured destruction is now assured

Beer and upvote for this, starve the patent world of oxygen. Regardless of the result of this one case, patents are clearly no longer serving real, original creators of novel ideas in the way they should.

Ever since companies started counting number of patents registered as a marketing tool has this been broken.

Is this the sleek new BlackBerry mobe that will save RIM jobs?

fawlty
Childcatcher

can't wait for the ip lawyers to ride out...

death to the infidel they scream as they ride their steeds out of cupertino...

At least the journos will have something to talk about now that samsung v apple has gone (a bit) quieter.

FCC urges rethink of aircraft personal-electronics blackout

fawlty
Big Brother

?Ban

Is that the same rules that say airlines shouldn't force pilots to work up to the max of their capability to stay awake, or that say pilots shouldn't have a dram for courage once every now and then before a flight?

Probably also the ones that say I'm not allowed to take 125ml of deoderant into the cabin in case I'm a lunatic hell bent on destruction.

None of the Russians on my last trip to Moscow paid any attention to a mobile phone ban so what's the point of having one? Better to invest the money spent on a ban on better shielding, or a better idea I like from a previous commentard of putting a cell on every plane. Then, even if you didn't want to sell air time you could play a message back to anyone using the network that said you're flouting the ban, and you won't get through.

Stallman: Ubuntu spyware makes it JUST AS BAD as Windows

fawlty
Meh

Meh.

it can be disabled, or better yet removed easily (and Unity is a better reason for using another variant of buntu).

Whilst Canonical are taking a different tack from previously, and that might annoy current ubuntu users, its their distribution to publish - if they put something unpopular in the build that's their lookout.

I don't recall anyone forcing me to use Ubuntu - if you don't like what they've done, use another distribution (there are plenty of people out there happy to recommend one ;-)

Musk's SpaceX gets foot in door of US secret 'black' space program

fawlty
Flame

Perspective

We have politicians exerting themselves over how to make sure their value system / social mechanism stays the way it is and at the same time they spaz bazillions of dollars on helicopters and stealth planes.

My humble opinion is that those in control of such budgets (our appointed leaders) need to get a little perspective on what they're doing, which is wasting time and money on maintaining the status quo of state and nationality (as opposed to human advancement and all that good stuff).

Actually thinking about it, this may be exactly what they're all up to.

I for one am getting my coat and heading to Mars.

Hero Playmonaut lost at sea as SPEARS ditches in Channel

fawlty
Coat

fitting

Fitting that a boatload of Seamen was used in the recovery process.

I'll get my coat.

Saucy Star Wars strip show - sorry, burlesque - to tour Down Under

fawlty
Stop

Ye Gods...

What next? Mondays are getting worse.

Big Bang bashing boffins ‘Big Bounce’ back to BIRTH OF TIME

fawlty

Is this...

anything to do with this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/26/german_incident/ ?

if not you lost me at "quantum fluctuations might have created the pre-inflationary structures which, after the universe's inflationary phase, formed the kernels for the universe we know see".

Global warming still stalled since 1998, WMO Doha figures show

fawlty
Facepalm

You can prove anything with statistics/graphs etc etc

"ninth hottest globally since records began" - isn't this a bit like saying the cheerio that I ate just now at breakfast appears to be the 9th largest cheerio of all cheerios in my bowl that morning, therefore we may have observed a long term trend of cheerios getting larger?

My wife had frosties by the way, WTF is that all about?

Amazon makes BEELLIONS from British customers, pays pennies in tax

fawlty
Devil

Transfer Pricing...

Almost any International co with multiple sales-generating geographies will be thinking about doing something similar because their Big4 accountants tell them its a good idea (part of the value-add service you see).

Then the accountants hand the work to organise the necessary compliance documentation to make it fly to their in house Tax Team & generate a fee. Easy Peasy. Pretty creative to get it down so low from such large revenues in this case...

Ref @Jediben you're right, doesn't pass the smell test does it...

LOHAN cooks up tempting Raspberry Pi spiced with Iridium

fawlty
Thumb Up

Excellent...

All thats left is to bounce the signal directly into Mr Bigs limo somewhere near Aurora, Illinois...

In all 'seriousness' - keep up the good work! - E Musk esq must be quaking in his boots, his plans for Mars are increasingly threatened by the next generation off the SPB drawing-board (surely playmonauts could be genetically engineered to colonise the red planet via crowd-sourced garden sheddery?)

Cheers cheers cheers.

Elon Musk envisions small town of vegetarians on Mars

fawlty
Alien

Re: Optional

Surely if you lack in volunteers a quick round up of standard issue tv-wannabes with the old 'its a reality show' ploy would generate a hefty queue of volunteers and a couple of presenters as well. Unfortunately suitability of the applicants for establishing a sustainable and well run colony of humans somewhere else in the galaxy would probably be low

Come to think of it, the whole idea sounds a bit Douglas Adams to me...

Sinclair BASIC comes to Raspberry Pi

fawlty
Thumb Up

Re: Just for fun

Upvoted. Hurrah for hobbying. Boo to naysayers.

Sorority girls gone wild: '1 to 3' casual sex 'hookups' every month

fawlty
Coffee/keyboard

"quite frankly our glasses fogged up and we couldn't follow it"

You sir owe me a new keyboard and a replacement coffee.

LOHAN slips BRA over BOOBIES in ballocket backronym buffoonery

fawlty
Paris Hilton

V. Tempting to upvote all of the inappropriativity above however...

Satellite-

Instigated

LOHAN

Ignition

Circuit

Organised (by)

Neil (and Anthony)

<< Paris, to help encourage further NSFW interpretations.

ALIEN DETECTION was SUPPRESSED by the BBC - top boffin

fawlty
Facepalm

Re: And another thing...

Fair point.

He most definitely outranks me in the boffinry stakes by some distance. And I can't play keyboard either...

fawlty
Black Helicopters

Er...

Maybe the Beeb had recently had a D-Notice in the post on the subject of aforementioned planet. Its probably where they've got Dick Cheney and Osama BL holed up (or maybe thats Texas ;-).

The lady doth protest too much?

<< Black Helicopters because... aaarrgh they're on the roof....

fawlty

And another thing...

Since when was Brian Cox a 'Top Boffin'?

Better luck next time Blofeld! Five Bond plot myths busted

fawlty
Coat

Aaargh! too much information!

Some things man is not meant to know... Its like finding out how they do those magic tricks on tv.