Posts by Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Can it please replace...

Can it please replace the useless bar staff at All Bar One in Gunwharf Quays. A more inept customer un-oriented set of staff I have never come across.

"Capita has also been collecting license fees on behalf of the broadcasting house"

Not from my house it hasn't. And it won't.

It's all very odd...

This seems to be going two ways now... yes I'm sure that accounting irregularities could be found in any large / enterprise level business, which is the tack the prosecution is seemingly now taking. But surely for a deal of this magnitude, the responsibility still stops with the purchaser and the auditors to uncover all of this stuff prior to point of sale?

Anyone know whom the auditors were? I have my suspicions.

F1 is shit.

I didn't even like it when I worked for Mclaren in Woking. I've always loved the Paris - Dakar rally raid type motorsport though. Always fancied doing it in a high powered dustcart.

Oh, I thought we were talking about serious threats...

"Including changing the thermostats and lighting, or getting the smart TV to control the home's audio."

Crikey. Call the cops...

Donkey Kong...

Completed it mate. Yeah, no, cool... two million points on Legendary mode. Got some likes on Facetube.

Keep it dense, yeah? Trashbat.co.ck.

Retro computing...

Approval this end for the mention of the venerable Commodore plus 4.

BigTrak

I'm sure Bigtrak and his trusty trailer was doing this in the early eighties. You'd just need to adapt the trailer to carry more than one pint.

The Carolina reaper...

I bought one last year at the annual Chilli festival at West Dean Gardens near Chichester. I can attest to it being the hottest thing I have ever had the misfortune of adding to a tomato sauce. Even a tiny bit made the whole meal inedible.

Nothing will change...

Depressing as it is, I do feel that when all of the dust settles on this current drama, I have the sinking feeling that nothing will change in their behaviour. On both sides of the argument there are too many snouts in the trough, and no real political will to make it happen. Whilst GDPR is a good thing, this will be outmanoeuvred by the tech companies somehow and once again we will all be playing catchup to re-take control of our online presence.

So the only way to protect yourself online is to either (A) not play the game, which is both hard and easy to do at the same time as we all want to use the internet right? or (B) minimise as far as possible your online engagement with any of these major companies or related apps, or use as many privacy enhancing tools as you can.

There is one consolation in all of this, and that is that ALL empires fall - eventually. It may take decades or centuries - but they do fall.

It's a crying shame...

It's a crying shame it all came back up so quickly. There I was having a nice unexpected Friday morning catching up on El Reg news stories from across the week... and then at about 12:30 it all comes back online. Outrageous.

Totally inconsiderate to the needs of the *cough* hard working *cough* IT chap this Microsoft lot are.

Not surprising really...

Not surprising really when you consider it's all new infrastructure in Armenia so they don't have the hassle of trying to bolt it on and and integrate it into years of legacy comms infrastructure, as well as keeping all of the network providers happy. The same is true in the Azores; a tiny cluster of islands in middle of the Atlantic, and still faster 4g on the remoter ones than here in the South of tropical Hampshire.

Erm...

Sorry, just had to do a double take at a few of those tweets... having to sit an 'A' level on an empty stomach due to an internet outage? How the f**k does that work then?

If you have reached the age of 17 or 18 and you are unable to feed yourself by ANY means due to an internet outage, then you really do have more problems than an internet outage.

Re : "described Wylie as a charlatan"

I'm interested to see how this will play out, and I'm not sure about the rest of you Reg commentards, but as soon as you resort to name calling in a public forum or debate then you've already kinda' lost the argument.

Re : “I am being dumped on the scrap heap"

But but but, you've known about this for months... years even. Why have you done nothing about it?

Being placed on the scrap heap by IBM is still a better place to be than being dumped on the scrap heap by your corner shop or local branch of the Co-Op.

Unfortunately...

My laptop seems to be running a version of Windows 10 where I seem unable to prevent these updates from installing. Last time it happened it completely fucked my WiFi adapter and/or drivers and I've not been able to find a fix to that issue as of yet.

My next O/S will not be Windows. I may have to bite the bullet and get back to a secure Linux derivative. I'll have a look on Distrowatch but if anyone can recommend one that is designed with security and to help prevent this sort data tracking and leakage then I'd appreciate the advice.

Thanks.

Nail hit on head...

"Perhaps we should be less concerned with which firms the government is spending taxpayer money on, and instead ask what it is spending our money on – and what we are getting in return."

Absolutely this. We are supposedly the 5th largest economy in the world but have a government that pleads poverty at every turn. We either have the most utterly useless accountants and management, or it's not all joined up in terms of thinking. So just where is all of that money going? It's certainly not going on making anything better...

It'll be interesting...

It'll be interesting as I don't believe Google in any way should be labelled as a "journalistic enterprise" in the same way that the good ship El Reg or the Sunday Times is; so I do kind of think that anyone should have the to right for any aggregated links to be removed from their search engine. As long as the original published source material stays intact so I can go search for any particular reportage should I have the burning desire to do so.

The danger is that this precedent is extended to the actual publishers of those articles having to remove them from their editorial history (not that this case is actually trying to achieve that).

Trying to erasing history from the record is dangerous thing.

Ugh...

Any chance we now stop calling Shrekli by his sobriquet of "Pharma bro" please? In know he gave it to himself to pump his own ego, but basically the guy is a sad twat who is now entirely caught in a web of his own making. I just get the feeling that continuing to use this term when referencing him is pandering to his own over inflated sense of worth whereas I think most of us would be happy if he just disappeared up his own rear end until the end of time.

If we can't dispense with it, can we at least apply another more fitting? I'd like to start the bidding with "jailed fuckstick".

Who knew...

Who knew eh? It's not like we've seen this before with err... desktop PCs, laptop devices, and tablets...

Quite right too.

Google doesn't do journalism. They are a parasite that leeches off of the work of proper journalists.

Let us not forget...

Let us not forget that this is America. The land of the *cough* free *cough* and where there are an awful lot of people with no morals or ethics, or indeed... any clue about much at all. They'll do anything for a quick buck and not have the sense to question why they are doing it*.

* - I'm not tarring every American with this brush though. I know quite a few of them and they are mostly a fine bunch of people who just want to get on with life. On the other hand...

Why would anybody who wants to use a VPN use this?

I just don't get it. I guess it's free? But in VPN an security terms that should be an alarm bell from the outset.

I use an AirVPN config via the OpenVPN client on my iPhone. I prefer it that way.

It's now a two-horse race – three if you're generous

No it's not. You are forgetting Garmin, Suunto and TomTom whom all provide products in exactly the same space as FitBit - so why so obviously exclude those three?

Tigers

If I release 100 Tigers into my local country park then I would naturally expect a significant uptick in the amount of people being injured or killed by Tigers. That's why we don't allow Tigers to be released into the wild in the UK.

Same logic applies to guns. The answer to the question of guns is not more guns. It's less guns combined with making it MUCH MUCH harder to get one.

PEBFAD...

Problem Exists Between Floor And Device.

Ummm...

What does 30% of a 3.4GHz band actually equate to in real terms anyway? Is there a maximum limit of how much traffic can be sent over this frequency - and therefore we can ascertain how much of that pie each operator gets?

Lollin'...

"However, millions of Europeans are still prevented from using apps like ours."

And we are all quite thankful for that.

Ummm...

So why is there similarly no legal entitlement to Gas or Electricity then, as I see these as being much more useful to people whom live remotely than Broadband. If I decided to move to deepest darkest Cornwall and want a gas connection to my property then it's universally accepted that I as the customer would need to pay for it. Also, I have no love for BT, but they have been given an absolute fuckton of cash already by the Public to solve this problem, yet they still want to hike bills?

Satellite broadband is now very reliable and available up to around 30Mbps - why can't that be used more prevalently; other than the obvious problems when the weather is anything but sunny or marginally cloudy?

*cough* Yes, sure EE... *cough*

"We’re pleased that the court has reached a decision so quickly and are now looking ahead to investing in the best mobile experience across the UK.”

If that's the corporate mantra, then why is your existing 3G and 4G so shit?

Oh, wow...

And there was I mistakenly thinking it was the parents role to educate the children, both morally and intellectually.