* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

Jupiter takes a serious knock

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Coat

Oops.

My bad!

Researcher raids browser history for webmail login tokens

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FAIL

Re: Frozen?

Nah, most users'll just think that the site's trying to load a bit of Flash.

Note to e-tailers. Getting a blank screen with the word "loading" and a progress bar in the middle does not leave me breathlessly awaiting the mind-numbingly fantastic multimeeja UI experience I am about to receive*. It does make me piss off sharpish to spend my money elsewhere. You know who you are.....

*However much your CV-polishing web monkey may tell you it does.

Metallica sticksman gloats over Napster downfall

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FAIL

@lukewarmdog

Re: drummer theory.

I have two words for you: "Phil Collins"*.

Another theory goes down in flames, ho hum.

*Now I realise that some may think that Phil Collins is actually the musical equivalent of the antichrist, but even you have to admit that he doesn't only sit at the back and drum and that he is actually fairly erudite when interviewed.

US tactical bot has no taste for humans

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Thumb Up

Re: Only stands to reason.

In the light of that, now explain why it's trendy these days to hook your crem to the grid as you get more out of the process than you put in, as it were.

So fleshies can make good fuel, but you have to get 'em good 'n hot first.

Presumably this is the fat rendering down and then burning so, since yer average army ain't exactly representative of the population as a whole when it comes to the percentage of lardy bastards, EATR is going to be on slim pickings with military corpses. So if they ever do run short on vegetation and come over all omniverous on us, I don't think they'll be hoovering up the battlefield corpses when a quick trip to the nearest town and a minor expenditure of ammunition can yield a corpse more lavishly upholstered with furnace-friendly blubber.

Still, on the bright side, running yourself to the point of death in what might seem a pointless attempt to avoid a merciless, tireless, corpse-feeding killbot may actually serve a purpose. With a bit of luck, by the time it catches you you might just have shed enough poundage to be rejected as unsuitable for fuel.

Kingston's thumb drive is tiny Tardis

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Joke

That's nowt!

My old 256Mb stick were dropped from 'airplane over t'Himalayas, fell into t'snow, were eaten by t'Yeti and shat out two weeks later, fell down t'mountain in avalanche, landed in t'middle o' road, were run over by a Tibetan truck and t'pieces were tarmacced over by a Chinese road team.

After that I dug it oop wi' jackhammer, stuck it back t'gether with cold porridge and grit and my S Club 7 collection were still there.

Memory sticks these days? Don't know they're born......

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Stop

ReadyBoost?

Since fister will use any attached USB stick as ReadyBoost (if it's fast enough - and you can get that from the performance figures), presumably "comes with ReadyBoost" actually means "comes with extra words printed on the box".

Also, since ReadyBoost supports a maximum of 4Gb, we're beyond sledgehammer territory here and off into the lala land of using piledrivers to crack nuts.

German bomber crashes on Moon Google Earth

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Go

I favour

55 55'59.10" N x 4 46'47.12" W meself.

Sort of more aeroplane shaped in a "very blurred something in the water" kind of way. About the right sort of size too.

Actually, looking again and squinting at it.............could that be Jesus?

Would you leave your child alone with a cabinet minister?

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FAIL

@EvilGav 1

I won't dignify that with a response, save to say that you might want to look up what Huntley's job was at the time.

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Grenade

Er, I call bollocks on this.

Vetting is for "people with access in their work"?

Now explain how this applies to an author, whose work involves writing books, but does not apparently apply to the minister for children, families and schools.

What a complete load of utter bullshit.

This a typical result of kneejerk legislation which was introduced for two and only two reasons. The first, to be Seen To Be Doing Something and the second to distract attention from the inconvenient fact that the subsequent enquiry showed that the existing systems *should* have prevented the problem being addressed (Huntley / Soham), had not they been both crap and used by incompetant fuckwits.

Philip Pullman is whatever the atheistic equivalent of a saint is for shining a bright light into the murky corners of this classic nuLabour, stateist cockup.

It shouldn't happen to a vetting database

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Flame

Here's a cost saving idea.

Why don't we sack all the MPs and disband all the Whitehall departments.

As a suitable substitute, we can photocopy the op ed and letters pages of the Scum and the Daily Heil, tipp-ex out the titles and write "Hansard" on it in biro. It'll save time too as the vitriolic kneejerk bullshit can go straight to law without all that tedious debate that's such an important part of the rubber-stamping process now.

We'll lose the Parliament channel, but I reckon that continous reruns of "The Muppet Show" should serve as an adequate replacement.

Nobody will ever know the difference.

Google Docs to get 'shiny new' interface

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@Phil 33

".....flocking to Office in droves...."

Er, they've already flocked there and I think we're beyond droves and well into hordes. 90% market share, remember? What it's supposed to do is stop 'em buggering off somewhere else more cloudy when the tech column of the Financial Times says it's The Next Big Thing.

DRAM patent holder sues Big Blue

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Unhappy

Re: on-chip DRAM patent?

You probably were, but this'll be one of those "ah, but if you do it *this* way" patents.

The lawsuit will be one of those: "You are doing it this way, aren't you?"

"No"

"Oh yes you are"

"Oh no we're not"

"Oooooh yes you are"

"Oooooooooooooooh no we're not"

......pantomime ones that all revolves around whose lawyers are better at confusing a judge with technical detail and where the subsequent appeal revolves around a tortuous definition of the word "innovative".

NASA orbiter returns first shots of Apollo moon sites

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Unhappy

@Joe Cooper

Thank for that.

What I was going to say on that subject was that it was a classic example of where the conspiracy berks get their feet under the table. Unfortunately, for every tinfoil hatted, paranoid little arsewipe who's prepared to perform mental gymnastics in pseudo-scientific lala land to come up with the theories, there are umpteen hundred thousand perfectly ordinary joes who lack the basic scientific knowledge necessary to treat them with the contempt they deserve.

Let's face it. To most: "oh noes, big guvmint is eevill and is tried to fule youse" makes more sense as a compelling argument than a careful analysis based on scientific fact.

No doubt the OP will now get google scraped and will, through no fault of his own, be responsible for the " no camera on a string" proof of this year's NASA coverup.

US space superloo claps out

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FAIL

Double post, oops.

But you missed an important bit, reported elsewhere.

They also can't use the shuttle's bog at full capacity and were rather banking on the ISS's porcelain facilities being up to snuff.

The reason?

The crapper on the shuttle empties into a waste tank. Said waste tank then gets flushed into the great unknown when full. In a shocking design pig's ear, if this is done when docked the delicate scientific instrument cluster on the Japanese* Kibo lab gets a liberal coating of sewage.

So, no flushing the bog when the shuttle's standing at the station.

*The first person to mention the involvement of the eminent Chinese scientist Huflung Poo here gets a fat lip.

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Coat

The way I heard it.

They're not sure what's actually gone wrong and are adopting the time-honoured method of replacing bits until it works.

At least, that's what I think they meant when they said: "We have nothing to go on".......

Apple sued over shrink-wrapped Mafia death threats

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WTF?

Those picnic sandwiches.

Maybe. But it appears he's gone OTT on the fruitcake.

Riot police raid birthday barbecue for 'all-night' Facebook tag

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FAIL

@James O'Brien

"Isnt that what pretty much ALL music is?"

No.

As I've said before around here, there's more to music than four-minute "songs" by a Popular Beat Combo, regardless of what the iCrap fixated and their shepherds at the Big Labels may tell you.

Still, look on the bright side. At least you've come up with something that Mozart, Dylan and Stockhausen could probably agree on by way of objection.

Opera slams Microsoft's Windows 7 E move - again

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That question.

"All of which prompts us to ask the question: why didn't Microsoft have that option in place before now?"

Er, they did. If you set your default browser to summat else and then fire up IE, it comes up with a dialogue saying that it's not the default and would you like to make it so? IIRC it even has an "I know what I'm doing, don't ask me this bloody stupid question again" option therein and you can also control this behaviour through Internet Options (check whether default on start).

As far as I can see, the only change is that it now asks "up front" on install as well rather than assuming "yes" (not unreasonably* IMHO, as you've gone to the trouble of installing it) and leaving you having to go off and thump FF or whatever in its "make me the default" option.

Just out of interest, does anyone know if Opera does this? I haven't installed it from scratch in a while now and I wonder if there's a bit of pot and kettle going on here.

*However annoying to some.

Xbox 360 reverses plunging console sales trend

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Gotta be asked.

Is that "sold" or "shipped"?

I'm wondering if all the ones shipped out to replace RROD'd ones sold last Christmas are in those figures.......

Oz cops turn to wardriving to fight Wi-Fi 'jackers

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Stop

Cue:

Loads of whiney comments along the lines of: "Oh noes WEP as insecurrs anyhows. OzPlod shud be arks for WPA / TKIP / <whatever>, is most silly har har"....

Probably followed by someone blaming Microsoft........

Google puts Chrome updates on Courgette-only diet

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Re: Take note MS

I think they already have. They've been only patching the bit wot needs it since Jesus was a lad, but then they designed their patch update system when the world was on dialup and keeping traffic to a minimum was bloody important upfront, rather than something you could tack on as an afterthought.

Cost of seconding workers to the UK could soar

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@Kay Tie

Er, the key bit you seem to have missed in there is "non-doms". This is short for "non-domiciled for tax purposes" and, as you might expect from this, means that it's a cheesy way of weaseling out of paying tax.

They may be in the top 1% of earners, but they're not contributing much to that 25%.

Incidently, for sheer entertainment value, when the Daily Heil holds forth on the subject of spongers not paying tax, remember that their proprietor is non-domiciled for tax purposes.

Twitter's underwear exposed after Google Apps hack

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Badgers

"Biz Stone"?

Isn't there anyone in this Web 2.0 business called Philip Smith*, Jonathon Williams* or something else of a more prosaic nature?

More importantly, if I change my name to something like "Jaks Thumper" are a load of Venture Capitalists going to queue up to give me money in exchange for bullshit?

*If you are actually called Philip Smith or Jonathon Williams, I don't mean to imply that you're boring or anything**, these are just random examples. Sorry.

**Even if you are.

Apple ends Palm Pre's iTunes charade

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Jobs Horns

Bound to happen.

Apple's reputation for "just working" is built on maintaining a vice like grip on the hardware and environment they permit their users to use. The last thing they want is a load of Pre owners bleating for support when something f***s up in version x.y.z. Better from their perspective to officially close the door now.

However, as other commentors have pointed out, iTunes is a virtual monopoly (success has its price) and this action does have the stench of monopolistic practice about it, regardless of the motivation.

Let's face it. It's not like anyone else has ever produced an "unofficial" interface to a large computer company's software, had this door slammed shut on them and then seen said large computer company nailed to the regulatory cross for their trouble now, is it?

California skateboard dude swipes Reg logo

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FAIL

Re: Facing the wrong way.

Lester. Do us a favour. Turn that pennant over and photograph the other side for the benefit of the denizens of fucktardia, who seem to be out in force here today.

Tattooed Swedish devil girls sexually molest cyclist

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Coat

Incentive.

This may just be the incentive I needed to go and oil the jolly old velocipede this weekend and take it out. I'm not in Sweden, but there's always the danger of copycat attacks to take into consideration.

The tweed one with the leather elbow patches and the grey wig and bicycle clips in the pockets please.

PS: Apart from the bicycle, were any of the other participants equipped with a nice rack?

Anti-trust bomb falls on LCD market

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Flash memory prices.

I suppose that the current trend for sticking hundreds of gigs of the little beasties into boxes with a SATA port on one end could be important here. This coupled with the mass dash of the storage vendors to outdo each other on how many terabytes of such they can then shove into a rack could easily take up any slack due to the economic downturn. One multi-terabyte flash storage sale is a heck of a lot of iPods, cameras and USB sticks.

If it weren't for the recession taking the shine off the consumer market and putting a crimp in Data Centre investment, I'd have expected flash to be on a par with unobtanium-plated rocking horse shit around now.

Airbed-fixing German blows up mattress flat

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Thumb Up

Mythbusters.

This one's a given. The raw materials are cheap and it involves blowing things up (in both senses). I look forward to Jamie and Adam doing this one, failing to get the required amount of KABOOM and resorting to finding out what an air mattress full of gunpowder can do in a fit of pique.

As for the veracity, I reckon it's one of those "one in a million" things. Presumably he found the leak while trying to inflate the thing and then patched it. By sheer chance, the amount of air in the partially inflated mattress and the amount of volatile gases from the glue that ended up in there were in exactly the right proportions to produce the greatest effect and......

It's just like turning on the lights in a kitchen with a gas leak. Results range from sod-all to flying house depending on the gas/air mix achieved in the kitchen concerned.

Plod offered SIM confiscation powers by Tories

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Also @AC Re: Lib Dems.

It's all right, we're not there yet.

We should give the Official Monster Raving Loony Party a chance before we resort to the mob from Wavering-under-Clegg.

Ballmer gets tough with girly Microsoft partners

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FAIL

Wow, insanity roolz!

Apart from the rant nature of the whole thing, I just loved the bit where what MS are actually doing contradicted the World According to Ballmer.

Google may well have Android now, but if it's a fact that you don't need two client O/S's*, is there an EOL plan for Windows** Mobile that you're not telling us about Mr Ballmer?

A quality Ballsup moment! Come back Bill, your successor's just publicly demonstrated an inability to find his own arse without using both hands and a map.

*Although I remember the '95 / NT split working rather well at the time. The client desktop O/S maintained back-compatibilty, keeping the end-lusers happy, without loading the "real" O/S with a load of unreliable*** cruft to accomplish this.

**Yes I *know* they're both *called* Windows, so were, er, '95 and NT which was the perceived FAIL according to him.

***There were more than enough unreliable bits in NT without this.

Unlock your iPhone, miss your messages

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Jobs Horns

FFS!

Will all those who keep saying things like: "I've got an unlocked iPhone and it works on <insert network list> just fine" please read the entire article?

It's nothing to do with whether or not it'll work as a phone on "unapproved"networks, purely whether the push notification works when it's running like that. Now if someone could confirm that push notification and NotifyMe *do* work on networks that don't offer the iPhone if the unit in question is an officially unlocked one, *that* would be interesting. It would answer the question of whether this is indeed a carrier infrastructure limitation as some have suggested or just the usual Stalinist crud from Apple.

Garmin Nüvi 1340T

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Coat

I'm sorry, I haven't a clue how this works.

Pedestrian mode? London Underground?

Does it support the obverse diagonal rule as well?

Also, I don't think you're allowed pedestrians north of the river on a Tuesday as it's not a leap year.

Staten Island manhole swallows texting teen

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Coat

I sympathise.

"Oh my God, it was putrid. One of her sneakers is still down there."

My eldest son's sneakers are also capable of making a sewer putrid, must be a teen thing.

Cats mix baby 'cry' with purr to score dinner

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Another one.

Yet again, a PR from the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious.

This one says that cats are devious little bastards. Who knew?

Business throws cold water on gov hot air proposals

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Grenade

@Michelle Knight

"As for the trains....."

Ah, you'll be one of these strange people who seems to think that all was rosy in the days of British Rail. How terribly sad.

The only difference these days is that you can now find out exactly how crap a given train service is without going and standing on a piss-stained platform in the peeing rain, listening to the cancellation announcements as they're read out underwater through a crisp packet in serbo-croat (well that's what it bloody sounded like anyway). This level of information availability would assume the minor miracles of both the tannoy system being operational and the workshy git whose job it was to make the announcements actually being around that day.

The sandwiches were better than the service and they were a national joke.

Hurt yourself? Try f**king swearing

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Joke

Re: The Elder Swear

"...and lo, the very air itself turned blue and a great silence fell upon all. Much redness was seen upon the faces of the assembled multitudes and as one they shuffled their feet and looked unto the firmament for guidance. Then one spake into the silence, saying: 'Fuck me. Did you just make that up or what?'"

Book of Expletives: Chapter 4, verse 8.

Rosetta Stone rocks Google with trademark lawsuit

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Coat

@Doug Ealey

Re: "Kwik-fit".

Really? I'd always thought that they just thought it was spelled that way.

In much the same way as they think "9/16 AF" is actually spelled "M10 and an air hammer with the torque limiter disabled".

iPod fingered in car inferno

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Happy

@Eric Hood

I think that the OP was being sarcastic, as it's an "Estate Car"* over this side of the pond.

Unfortunately for you, given the topic, a "Hood" is a "Bonnet".

*Unless you're Rover, in which case it's a "Tourer". They deserved everything they got for this.

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Flame

Related news.

Anyone know if there were any iPods in that Lamborghini Gallardo that went on fire rather spectacularly last friday in Peterborough?

You can get quite a lot of Saabs for the price of one of those....

Jaguar opens up about future e-car plans

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Grenade

@richard 69

Oh the dilemma!

Get the jag and be thought of as old by those with antiquated preconceptions or get the 7 series and be thought of as a complete wanker by absofuckinglutely everybody on the planet.

<checks bank balance>

S'ok. I don't seem to have that dilemma after all.

Endeavour launch scrubbed for fourth time

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Coat

Don't get it.

Every shuttle emergency landing to date has been in the form of small pieces distributed over a geographically significant area. Takeoff failures in the rocketry world are generally characterised by some variation on the word "BANG" and crew intervention restricted to something like "What the fu....?".

What's the runway for?

ESA to develop cargo-lander space podule

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Coat

Questions potential astronauts should ask. In order.

This 'ere spacecraft, that's a development of the Advanced Reentry Vehicle, right?

The ARV is a development of the Automated Transfer Vehicle, yes?

And the ATV was designed to burn up on reentry.....?

Can I have my coat now please?

Google Oompa-Loompas dream of virus-free OS

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Linux

@dave hands

"Linux does not allow remote installation of code by websites"

Then you install a browser......

As for the "social engineering" bit, how do you think the win attack vectors work these days? Until we get away from the end-user treating every occurrence of "MoodyMalwareApp is trying to modify your system files, do you wish to allow this?" as an automatic "yes" response, any O/S you care to envisage will be on a hiding to nothing.

Linux has a huge advantage here. I know a lot of Linux users, none of them are gullible idiots who know fuck-all about computers.

Did the Vatican suppress hidden 'Galileo Cryptogram'?

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Coat

Other news.

Isaac Newton discovered faster-than-light travel. Many of the pictures he appears in show him wearing a pleated cravat, which proves that he understood the concepts behind the folding of space required and the details are in an encrypted message yet to be discovered.

Sacha Baron Cohen is actually a reincarnation of Queen Victoria. The Bruno character is obviously an illustration of his love for Price Albert and the proof is in an encrypted message yet to be discovered.

Dan Brown is an artificial, vatgrown construct created from a fusion of the DNA of Galileo and the Antichrist. There's a teastain on page 24 of my copy of "The Da Vinci code" which proves it and a full description of the process used is in an encrypted message yet to be discovered.

Bloody easy this. Do lecture tours pay well?

Rogue CA update bricks Win XP systems

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Pirate

Interesting.

Apparently Cygwin is a commercial application.

I guess that my free version must be a pirate copy then.

Aaarhaaar, 'tis time to splice the mainbrace methinks, 'tis Friday ye knows.

Teen cuffed for bomb threat webcam pay-per-view

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FAIL

Dumberer and dumbererer.

"Lundeby's crew also phoned in bomb threats to the FBI"

Or, how to seriously piss off the organisation most likely to be trying to catch you and get yourselves bumped up their priority stack. The only surprising thing here is that an agent didn't have an unfortunate firearm safety catch malfunction when they went to arrest him.

I'm rapidly warming to the idea that being a brain-dead fuckwit should be a crime punishable by life imprisonment. It'd save time and effort.

Robot land-steamers to consume all life on Earth as fuel

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@Martin 6

Hummers? Nah. They'd need to be able to turn waste into ersatz petrol to run 'em and if they could do that, we wouldn't need 'em in the first place.

They'll be generating power, so the obvious mitigation to the robotic fat bastard problem would be for them to nick a lard chariot, plug it in to a handy power take off and run around like that. So, if you wake up one morning and find that the trees are gone from your garden, your dustbins are empty and your segway's missing, you know what's happened.

Samsung N310 netbook

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WTF?

Am I the only one then?

I've not had problems with bacteria breeding on my keyboards to date.

Is that whalesong I can hear?

Ofcom coughs 3G coverage maps

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@Lunatik

Ever thought about why O2 have the iPhone and Pre?

The thought occurs to me that this could have a lot to do with their cutting a better deal for the handset makers in question, as they know damned well that these products being offered on a network with better coverage would mean that they could kiss their user base goodbye.

Which do you think's cheaper, investing in the network or buying a couple of well-hyped devices that come with a guarantee of joe public beating a path to your door?

Moderatrix to gain even more sinister powers

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Troll

There's a flaw in this plan....

".....it is likely that the downweighting applied to new addresses will become even more negative."

So, by trolling and flaming like right bastards from as many one shot email addy's as possible we can get this thing to a level where n00bs are automagically banned?

That'll be fun. Is there a list of places using this that we can get started on?