Posts by The Other Steve

Suck it up,

Pay up or fuck off. If you want free, try linux, if nothing else it will make you wish you had paid for your OS in cash instead of your far more valuable time.

Flame on, freetards, it only hurts so much because it's true.

Arse Floss

"I get to to write FLOSS code and my company gets code that's 10 times better than I could write on my own,"

That either speaks of a lack of confidence in your own ability, or you really suck and need to find a job you're competent at.

I hear Burger King are hiring,

@The Silver Fox - history fail

"Coming from South Yorkshire I can wholeheartedly say that putting nearly everyone in a region out of work isn't what I'd call "fixing a problem" so much as "creating another problem". A bit like fixing a computer by belting it with a 141b lump hammer until it's as thin as a postage-stamp."

Coming from the North East, and having attended actual miners picnics with banners an' that (mines bigger than yours, look!) I shall simply call you a fool.

Scargill put the miners (et al) out of work, not Thatcher. That and the fact that nationalised industries are far to expensive and were, at the time, running on pure protectionism. Most of the heavy industry in the UK was economically doomed.

Still, it needn't have been the bloodbath it was, and If that pig fucking ginger trot mentalist hadn't turned a pay dispute into a blatant attempt to bring down the government by means other than democracy, it wouldn't have been.

Everyone involved in that act of terrorism got what they deserved. Many, unfortunately, got what they deserved for being to stupid to realise what was going on and getting all carried away in the jingoism, but that's still their own fucking fault.

Flame away, maggie bashers, but you know in your tiny red hearts that I'm right, that is why you hate yourselves so much.

@NutZ - kool aid slurper

You might have had a point, if I hadn't been reading similar drivel for over a decade, oh and if you weren't wrong.

Despite the bum gravy that emanates from the 'white hat' community with tedious regularity, if you publish an exploit that can be used to harm others you are responsible for it's subsequent use in doing so. Like handing out loaded guns to children.

The ass hat community came to the conclusion long ago that 'security through obscurity doesn't work'. They did this all by themselves, based on absolutely zero evidence (trust me, I was there) and subsequently decided that this was grounds to make full disclosure of all exploits a Good Thing, despite the fact that the two are patently unrelated.

They were wrong then, and they are wrong now. And they know it, and they don't care because it's all just an excuse for them to massage their pathetic geek egos and strut around calling themselves "hackers" (largely a misnomer, but the semantics of self applied labels are out of scope) while lacking the man danglers to actually engage any live targets.

I see by the fact that you think they are knights in shiny armour keeping us all safe in our beds that you have bought into their self aggrandising propaganda. Put down that kool aid and get a clue. These retards release live exploits into the web where they are taken up by skript kiddies and used to wreak havoc. That's actually not very fucking clever.

@By Joefish

"Perhaps you intended to use 'i.e.' rather than 'e.g'?"

No, fuckface, I intended to use E.g, exempli gratia, "for the sake of an example"

You might not like my sentence structure, but kindly don't presume my intent.

Media Studies _is_ a separate topic, at all levels from GCSE up, and as for "corrupted literature, doctored history and soundbite-science" I think you can do AS levels in those.

What nicomach said, only more so

"where a supplier recklessly contracted to provide a service that was unlawful ... penalty clauses may be resistedl"

Fuck "resisted", unlawful activities can not constitute valid consideration in a contract, and no contract including them is considered to be valid. Such a contract would be unenforceable in it's entirety. You can write whatever clause you like, and it means zip.

It may take court action to prove this is so on a contract by contract basis, but most of the costs of that would ultimately be borne by the party attempting to enforce such a contract when they get their sorry asses laughed out of court.

In theory.

RE : @P 8 u-turn!

No, it was P 8 who suggested that Ts&Cs could make something illegal. Only legislation can do that.[0]

"I wonder if that lyrical windbag The Other Steve will make a similar retraction. He really laid it on thick."

I know no other way :)

[0] Unless you're in the UK or some other banana republic where any random minister of state can just make up shit to criminalise, obviously.

@AC/breakfast

Yes, that would work! If only there some kind of markup language that we could use to describe the data ? It would need to extensible ...

Truly amazing that they've spent so much time and money and missed that out, innit ? I can only assume that Syd's comment is broadly correct, and that the whole project exists solely to drain taxpayers wonga into private contractors pockets, or that the entire management structure of the project is utterly fucking incompetent. Or both. Not neither though.

How many neighbourhoods will be bulldozed to build wheelchair ramps for the information superhighway

"15% of our population is disabled"

That screams out for a definition, doesn't it ? A better figure would be the percentage of the population whose disability presents them with accessibility challenges that can _only_ be overcome with the cooperation of content providers.

For example, the UK's DDA defines disability as "physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his or her ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities." This includes learning difficulties, HIV and cancer (e.g. being thick, and being ill)

Even taking that into account 15% is a low figure already, and it would be much, much lower if the above criteria were applied.

Take for example the case of those who are blind or partially sighted, who make up a vanishingly small percentage of the population, but experience arguably the largest number of accessibility challenges due to the largely visual nature of much web content.

There are ~153,000 people registered blind in the UK [0], out of a total pop of ~60.8 million [1] which makes up a staggeringly small ~0.2516% of the population.

I have no idea how many more people there are who are blind or partially sighted but aren't registered because they don't want the stigma and are in any case gainfully employed [2] (like me), I'd guess quite a lot, but probably not enough to pull that figure up to anything significant.

And frankly, if you have a disability, there are things that you aren't going to be able to do like everyone else. However unPC it is, most disabled folks know this. If you've got no legs, you have no career as a ballroom dancer ahead of you. Blind ? No train driving for you! It's a bummer, sure, but that's life, and you just have to suck it up.

So while it's very sweet of Viv to think of us, frankly, I'd rather she spend the money (tax revenue will be lost as businesses accrue compliance costs) on medical research. Bionics would be a great place to start. Wheelchair guys get to be the six million dollar man, me I want a field of vision like a terminator or Geordie LeForge. I'm sure most of us crips and mongs would gladly line up to join a super secret cyborg army, why not fund that instead ?

[0]http://www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-data-collections/social-care/adult-social-care-information/people-registered-as-blind-and-partially-sighted-2008-england

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=uk+population (no idea where they sourced that from)

[2] People register to get benefits and parking permits and avoid working, there are no other advantages.

Oh dear

ANPR bad, but FFS can't all you car driving weenies come up with some better arguments ?

I mean, the likes of "we can lead the way in taxing the shit out of law abiding citizens,"

No, see, the point is that once you break the limit you are no longer a law abiding citizen.

It isn't a tax, it is a fine. A penalty imposed upon a convicted criminal.

As long as you idiots keep wheeling out your persecuted driver, OMG I'm like such a victim, weepy bullshit, the state will continue to roll out it's micro managing behemoth and right thinking folks will cheer it on. Wrongly, in my opinion, but you only have yourselves to blame for that.

@Shakje - complacency like that makes you complicit

"But really, really, is it going to turn into an apocalypse of parents being arrested for looking after a neighbour's kid for a few hours?"

It might, yes. For a while now there have been highly visible posters around these parts encouraging citizens to dobb each other in for precisely this and publicising the hotline number for doing so. I kid you not.

It would seem pretty fucking pointless to do that and then not bother to follow up with enforcement, particularly as every report leads to a "child at risk" scenario (in the minds of the hysterical righteous, not in reality). Expect to hear more stories like this.

"and for all the protesting, the law will still go through"

That's true at least. The law HAS gone through, it is part of the Childcare Act 2006. And no, nobody listened to the protests.

"and the next day, things will pretty much be the same."

No, that's not the case. After this bill passed into law, millions of people who were previously ordinary citizens partaking in the life of their communities became criminals.

After this bill passed into law, the right of a parent to decide who looks after their children no longer existed. After this bill passed into law, virtually any childcare that was not regulated by the state became a criminal offence. After this bill passed into law, the parents of children were stripped of their responsibility for deciding which other people could be trusted to look after their children, and that responsibility was arrogated to the state, by the state.

"There's more important things going on, and things that have a slim possibility of being changed."

Name one, go on. Name me one thing that even this current bunch of Stalinist pigfuckers have done that is more apocalyptically horrible than mandating that children are chattels of the state.

@Brett Weaver - you're doing it wrong

"It is impossible that you are a developer on windows and retain those opinions. Vista is too slow. Full stop."

Bzzzt! You're wrong. I am a developer on windows (amongst many other targets), and I share those opinions. See, not impossible at all. Wonder what that does for the rest of your off topic argument ?

"If you ever become a developer with a real deadline"

Like what I am. See later for cock waving, but trust me, mine's bigger than yours.

"you will appreciate why people get upset when their machine just stops for no reason"

It doesn't.

"takes 15 minutes to read the table of contents on a DVD"

It doesn't.

"or starts going at half pace because Microsoft has initiated some unnecessary process in the background which is stealing memory and machine cycles."

It doesn't.

"All of these things happen to me on a quad core COMPAQ with 3GB of memory."

Then it's broken. My main Vista development box is a quad core with 2GB, it has been running for over a month (e.g. has been powered up constantly) with 4 virtual desktops, minimum of 4 instances of Visual Studio 2008, a Virtual PC instance running an older VS version, apps, custom code, Immunity Debugger and IDA pro. And windbg attached that for kernel debugging.

Add standard email and web on top of that, constantly either iTunes or streaming audio over the web. The only problem I've had is occasionally blue screening the VPC due to bugs in the drivers under development.

So, you're doing something wrong. Very, very wrong. Vista has its irritations for sure, but it aint that bad.

As I've said many times before, show me a crashy windows box and I'll show you a shit admin, or if I'm feeling charitable, some poor sop who installed some utterly repugnant and poorly written piece of ware that is actually causing all their woes. In your case, I suspect some horrible, PHP IDE, or perhaps that Ruby On Rails server you're running.

Windows developer my ass. Crayon waving web monkey, more likely.

@Martin Nicholls

"The only place real soldiers special ops or otherwise use a .45 is in rifles,"

Nope, 22 SAS troopers have been known to carry M1911A1 as a sidearm, their personal choice, doncha know.

Look before you leap.

Dumb and dumber

Raising money for public infrastructure projects by tax is all well and good, if the infrastructure is public, but since the telecomms infrastructure is in private hands, it should no longer qualify for such investment.

If there is a sound commercial investment opportunity for faster broadband connections, then the private telcomms companies will have no difficulty obtaining capital in the usual way, e.g. they can borrow it or issue stock.

If they can't raise funds this way it really rather suggests that there is no demand evident. If this is the case, then seeking funding via taxation to provide the capital is simply forcing everyone to pay for something that that is neither wanted nor required, or at least not enough for people to voluntarily pay for it.

Call it rent seeking, call it theft, call it extortion, either way it's a fucking stupid distortion of an already pretty fucked up market.

And as so many other commenters have pointed out, the idea that al those extra fifty pences would find their way to some mythical utopian broadband project are slim, to say the least. The proposers of this tax know that, of course, they just hope we haven't noticed so that they can sneak an extra revenue stream under the guise of some trendy e-society wankfest.

Watch out for the first fuckwit to suggest that opposing this is akin to denying our children the opportunity of an education or to putting the poor in ovens, I've no doubt that they can get the race card in there somewhere as well, but I can't bring myself to imagine how.

@AC 11:51 - Idiot

"Now MS want to try to get one going, 'cos Apple are! Pathetic aren't they?"

What I love most about retarded fanbois is their utter ignorance. MS has been shipping "Windows for pen computing" since Windows 3.11. E.g. before Apple got out of the beige toaster market.

Of course, the other thing that you've managed to overlook is that yes, actually, lots of people have successfully taken tablet form factors to market, including Apple (Newton, duh!), Palm, HP, Lenovo (né IBM) and many others.

See, now you've made yourself look like a cock in front of people who actually know stuff. Classic fanboi knee jerk fail.

Guess that's why you post AC.

Get a warrant

Get a police liaison, get evidence, get a warrant and have the cops mount a legit investigation.

If the police say they don't have time, lobby for more officers, not more powers for bin sniffers.

I appreciate that illegal dumping is very bad and can have extreme environmental consequences, there's a quarry up the road from me full of arsenic, for instance, and a site being cleared of dioxins.

The potential seriousness of genuine environmental crime (vs e.g. putting your bin out on the wrong day) is a reason to involve the proper agencies (viz : the rozzers) earlier, not bypass them altogether.

Lobby For Bobbies! Cops Not Quangos! Down With The Police State! (oh, hang on ... )

Brown mist ?

" ... sustained only a minor injury to his hand"

Where was the prince's hand for it to get injured ?

"Hassan, come here, what's that ? There's a string hanging out of your fundament. Have you been sticking tea bags up there again ? BISMALLAH-WTF!"

White hat, black hat ?

More like Ass hat.

Just another pitiful set of attention seeking wannabe securetards.

Doctors, if you are reading this

Fuck off. Fuck off back to your hospital or your surgery and do your fucking job. You will know when I require your advice about my lifestyle choices because I will ask for it.

Until then, kindly STFU.

That is all.

Sober as a judge

I had to read that again in order to decide which of us is drunk. Sadly and somewhat unusually it turns out that I am sober. So it must be you.

Broken bogon filter

So some "researchers .. gathered a group of about 100 students".

So a self selecting group of statistically insignificant size was used to perform a 'study' with no controls and no double blind protocols, thus rendering the whole thing utterly and completely meaningless.

"The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."

Only the special kind of retard that you find in academia would be able to postulate that as a universally bad thing.

And only the special type of retard you find in the reg comments section these days (where did everyone else go ?) would cheer lead for it.

I can't juggle at all , and I know a man who can but is rubbish at it, therefore, by the type of logic displayed above, not only are there no people who can juggle properly, but even of there were it would not be a valuable skill in any context.

Dicks.

Dear Reg Editors

Seriously, WTF ? That's two utterly retarded articles from Bill Ray now, This is not the Grauniad FFS, I do not expect to see this type of sub Daily Mail crap in my much beloved El Reg news feed.

This :

"which should have implications for celebrities using mobile phones, but will probably have a more immediate impact on low-level drug dealers who've long relied on the security of GSM for their business."

Should have flagged up some serious danger signs. It is crass, unsubstantiated, ridiculous bullshit which clearly demonstrates the authors lack of understanding of both communications security and "low level drug dealers".

Could you please, please, please either find someone to write about security who knows what they're talking about (no, step away from the keyboard, Goodin), or at least get Dziuba to do it so it is _entertaining_ bullshit.

@Matt 21

"or logon to the server and loo, at them in vi."

Firstly, only the truly clueless use vi, it is the suckiest text editor on the planet, bar none.

Secondly, an _editor_ is not the correct tool for viewing log files.

Thirdly, if you analyse your log files using your eyeballs, you've missed almost everything they have to tell you.

Epic fail.

Good old Apple, still trying to catch up with MS ...

... in the evil monopolist and vendor lock in stakes, but never quite making it. Cue pointless rehashing of the Apple Good - MS Bad flame fest.

Will the linux jihad side with the fanbois on the issue of software patents, will anyone with a life care ? Will anyone capable of retaining some rational objectivity care ? Are a thousand mardy geeks about to shout their worthless opinions into the internets, again ?

Find out in the next 200 comments. If you can be arsed.

@crashies, woe is you, but as usual ...

If your WinMo phone is crashing frequently, it's likely not the OS, it's the 3rd party apps you, your OEM or your network provider have stuffed into it. Stability rally isn't much of an issue with the core OS.

As usual, the fault for all crashes washes up at Redmond's front door, when it doesn't belong there. There are lots of bad things to be said about the current crop of windows OSes (sit in, or even near to, my dev environment for a day and you will hear many) but instability is not one of them, not any more.

If your MS system is crashy, look at your app vendors, and particularly at your hardware vendors who have probably shipped shitty device drivers because device drivers are hard and they can't be arsed putting in the dev time to test them properly, lazy fuckers.

Or look at your sys admin, many problematic windows boxen are administered by the sort of person you wouldn't want to sit next to on the bus because they might drool on you.

You must first eliminate all of these things with a debugger and/or a cluebat before you start shouting about OS instability. And frankly, I'm all in favour of eliminating app devs and admins who can't do there jobs properly because the scarcity would make day rates go up, which would be required to compensate for the decrease in work caused by such mongs. Work less, earn more.

For winmo this will improve over time as people move to develop using .NET CF, (at which point the retards writing crashy apps will only be able to show themselves up by crashing the app, not spoiling your whole day) and that will happen when MS make the tools free, not before.

Until then most people will be using EVC++, and most people should just stay the fuck away from C++ and play with their crayons. And that goes for the teams working for most of the mobile operators who just don't seem to be able to supply a winmo phone without cramming it full of crudware.

Double meh.

It is of course possible to code Java on WinMo, but unless MS pull their heads out of there arses and ship a proper J2ME, which will never happen now that Sun have GPLd it, this is not a universal solution

Hmm, puts me in mind of a Don Knuth quote

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it"

@Rob Dobs

"The facts just don't agree with your statements."

No, they do, they just disagree with _your_delusion_ of what my statements are.

And as for MS, what have they to do with it ? There is no pot calling the kettle anything. That connection, also, is entirely manufactured from whole cloth inside your head.

Seek help, before your comprehension skills are entirely consumed by the linux jihad meme. I've seen it happen often, and it is never pretty.

It's like I always say

You can put lipstick on a pig, but you're still not allowed to fuck it.

@Si 1

"So what happens if I use steganography to obfuscate my email, then encrypt that email and then go and send it via an overseas SMTP server while hiding my tracks with Tor and using someone else's unsecured Wi-Fi connection?"

Then you'll be arrested under "anti terror" laws and held for up to 28 days without charge while the Met, SS, SB or whichever other shower of bastards stomp all over your life with their mucky size twelves, and they _will_ find something they can charge you with.

You will be required to hand over any and all crypto keys or go to jail for for five years.

When it turns out they can't get a solid conviction, you will be placed under a control order, tagged, monitored, curfewed and prevented from attending education or employment.

Because clearly, you have something to hide. Otherwise why would you have felt the urge to 'cover your tracks' in the first place. And clearly, the first thing you do with a big pile of traffic data is mine it to see whose usage patterns suggest they are doing such things.

And that, my dear children, is why IMP is so fucking bad.

almost, but not entirely, quite unlike perl

If you are tied to the horrible abortion of a "language" php and it's attendant coterie of minimum wage, low skill, crayon wielding web monkeys for anything that could plausibly be described as 'business critical' then you are in seriously deep shit and no amount of spending on 'frameworks' is going to pull you out.

Like basket weaving and visual basic, php was never meant to escape from its primary role as a tool for pacifying the mentally ill into the wider community.

@Fragula - pwned.

Yes, I was waiting for some knee jerk linux jihadi to take the rather obvious flamebait there, I am well aware of the genesis of the WIMP paradigm all the way back to Xerox PARC and beyond, thanks.

I'm also familiar with RiscOS and it's UI, and indeed Next Step and its various progeny.

If you have a look at a screen shot of RiscOS and then screen shots of early KDE releases and screens from Win95 it's quite obvious which KDE was based on. Look at that start button on the left, and the notification area on the right with the clock. Then, if you're feeling really educational, go have a look at some of the window managers that predate it that come with a "windows" skin and observe the similarity.

Thanks for playing though. And thanks for proving the excellently made point by AC Friday 3rd July 2009 09:38 above.

BTW if you write a post flaming someone about their lack of education, using "Windows 85" is a bit of a schoolboy howler.

I've got any amount of sharp things

Prisoners chib each other with sharpened toothbrushes, an HB pencil properly applied to an ocular orifice is fatal, and then there are any amount of sporting goods that could be used in the course of a proper GBHing, including tennis racquets and practically everything to do with cricket.

FWIW most of the knives that the filth actually confiscate (i.e. not the PR friendly collection they keep for showing TV cameras when they have amnesty campaigns) are, in fact, of the cutlery draw/home ec department variety rather than the well crafted (expensive) outdoorsman's variety.

But it's not really about crimes of violence, it's about the interaction between hysterical parents who wish to abdicate responsibility for their own children (if they're shopping online and you don't know about it, you're doing it wrong. Period) and a state which is only to happy to arrogate that responsibility to itself because it is run by scary authoritarian control freaks with their heads up their arseholes who can only remain in charge if those parents can be kept hysterical enough to vote for them.

If the fuckers were smart, they'd be thinking about banning piano wire, and maybe sturdy lamp posts.

Oh ouch, epic usability fail.

Apple have clearly disregarded the Law of Least Astonishment in their headlong rush to equip the iPhone with stuff that everyone else has had for ages.

@Michael C : Very well put.

@Ian Michael Gumby

"1) The GPS 'chips' in your cell phones are not the same as the ones in your TomTom or Garmin and are not as accurate."

Careful now. Until recently, when they switched to Global Locate, TomTom exclusively used the SiRFstar III chipset. That same chipset was also found in a whole lot of Garmin models pre 2008 (after which they used MediaTek chipsets for a bit)

The SiRF chipset is very popular in smartphones, particularly HTCs, and other windows mobile devices including PDAs and lots of vehicle and hand-held GPS units (Mio, etc). It is also a pretty damn good chipset. Excellent TTFF, good performance in urban environments (decent multipath handling), both areas in which it seriously outperforms older Garmin kit.

Now as it happens, late (2009) model Garmin kit uses ST Micro Cartesio chipsets and the iPhone uses the catchily named Infineon PMB 2525 Hammerhead II chipset, which is, a someone pointed out above, an AGPS chipset.

So you are partly right, but only through luck.

@ AC 29th June 2009 17:22 GMT

"IT Security is a very hard field to master"

No, not really. There are actually a lot of professionals in the field. The distribution curve of talent approaches normal. There simply isn't anything magical about it, it's just a different set of working skills than _you_ have.

"primarily because you need to know ... " <snip utter wank>

Mmm, only not. See what you have there, again, is someone generalising from their own turgid wank fantasy of what constitutes "a hacker". I can't think of many professional pen testers who are also hard core functional programming geeks, just to take one example.

"there are just not that many people"

No, there's loads. They just don't want to hang out with you.

"These people also seem to be able to work in chaos, and order and that duality is a rare trait even if you take the entire populace."

Rubbish. Have you ever worked in (or even been in) a call centre ? A night club ? Any average office environment ? A hospital ? Police station ? People work in and out of chaos all the time. That's the norm, not the exception.

"They want the best they will have to pony up the cash, and to sign the Official Secrets Act most would be looking for at least 0.5 million sterling"

No kid, they don't want the best, they want the BEST of the BEST! Hoo yeah!

ATTN Delinquent parents: Increase Ritalin by 0.5 mg/Kg

Erm .....

"unless Ofcom find network operators or ISPs to have Significant Market Power and justify intervention on competition grounds"

Yeah, just remind me again, who owns the all exchanges, most of the the backhaul, and practically all of the the last mile copper ? Is it just one network operator ? I mean, because if it was, I think it would be pretty obvious that they would have "Significant Market Power", especially, if, say they were also the UK's largest ISP. Or is that just me ?

The company under discussion here is already wielding it's"Significant Market Power" by using a combination of it's own QoS-a-liciuos TVOD service, streamed from it's own servers and therefore never crossing the wider internet with all the bursty traffic problems therein entailed, and extremely aggressive traffic throttling policies which kick in between 16:00 and 23:00 weekdays and which see average non http transfer speed drop from 100Kbps, which is on the the unacceptable side of slow in any case, to average 5Kbps*. Weekends are worse.

.I'm not sure how I feel about the whole net neutrality thing, although I fail to see how making innovation more expensive will encourage it, but if Ofcom can't see that BT, the UK's practical monopoly network operator and default ISP of the masses doesn't have "Significant Market Power" then they aren't fit for purpose.

* Some may be tempted to say that this is simply congestion at busy times, it is not, as a quick look at the traffic graph shows, transfer speeds cease to be bursty and clearly never rise above a given maximum pf 10Kbps during the entire 7 hour period. However, even assuming that I were wrong about this, and this was simply an artefact of congestion, then who the fuck do ISPs think they are to charge content providers and consumers extra for access to additional bandwidth that simply doesn't exist ? Either way is a massive fail.

"discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices".

Personally, I am not homophobic, and I despise those who are, especially those who revile homosexuality for religious reasons. But let's be very clear, the same principle that entitles me to that opinion also entitles them to theirs. The very idea that a subject can be made illegal to discuss goes against everything I have been brought up to value as being "British", it pisses on the graves of those who died to save us from fascism.

Tory:

"Once again Ministers have produced a rag-bag of measures. While some are welcome others, including the resurrection of plans for secret inquests, we have serious concerns about."

Good, in that case we can look forward to all Con MPs voting against it in it's entirety, and trying to forge alliances with the other opposition parties who will no doubt feel the same, can't we ?

Or will the yellow bastards go along with it because they don't relish the task of explaining why they are "soft on criminals and perverts" to the Daily Mail's readership. I wonder.

Or to put it another way ...

What Peado Finder General Gamble is saying, essentially, is that it isn't worth £18 of his departmental budget to protect one child from abuse.

What price the safety of a child ? (etc, etc, dear Daily Mail).

Spin it that way and looks a bit different. Bearing in mind that we pay for it either as consumers or taxpayers and the only difference is how it's disbursed.

Ahem, BURN HIM!

"The numbers are a surprise" ?

They aren't really a surprise unless you happen to be a PHP or Ruby weeny and harbouring the delusion that your skills are somehow relevant in the wider computing sphere. Both are domain specific tools for building web sites, useful in that context, but frankly not much use outside of it where there are far better and more appropriate tools.

I suspect the prevalence of C reflects the fact that outside of the odd CMS derived frameworks like ticketing and CRM systems, the fact is that most FOSS software is not run in the 'cloud', but on a box, e.g. applications. Running on a box means either native, which means C, because nothing else is portable enough to even compile across nix flavours, or cross platform, which means C with a cross platform framework like QT, or Java, which to picky will be running a VM that was written in C.

C is, was, and will be, the rock upon which the church of IT is built. This will remain the case at least until someone builds an OS out of a managed, type safe, language, which won't happen until until the type safe wars have died down a bit and a language that everyone can accept, or can be stuffed down enough peoples throats, comes along. Which may well be never, nothing has ever had the broad appeal of C.

ARRGH! SPOILERS!

I was trying to avoid hearing that news, so it would be, you know, a suprise. And so I have avoided clicking any headlines of this type. Cheers for putting the name in the link, then. That helped. Really.