* Posts by The Other Steve

1184 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2007

Police shut non-urgent crime reporting portal

The Other Steve

Dear Sir or Madam,

Fire ! Fire !

Space brains resign over efforts to attract ET attention

The Other Steve
Flame

Wow

What a load of clueless and humourless blowhards and hippies this story seems to have attracted.

You guys all regular readers, or did you just hit up Google news for "alien civilisation" this morning and jump on board to share your expertise in exobiology, exopsychology and exosociology ?

Inquiring minds want to know.

The Other Steve
Alien

I, for one...

would happily be prepared to precipitate the destruction of the entire planet and every last human being, plant, animal, fish, bird and insect on it just to go to my grave with the smug satisfaction of being able to say "I fucking told you the aliens wouldn't be all serene and friendly, you stupid lentil eating hippy dickwads."

But then, I'm just that kind of guy.

US fails to reverse online gambling ban

The Other Steve
Unhappy

Eh ?????

"The agreement involves commitments to maintain our liberalized markets for warehousing services, technical testing services, research and development services and postal services relating to outbound international letters,"

Erm, apart from the obvious WTF ? (Hell, I don't know, maybe these really are multi billion pound markets), that reads to me rather like "The US promises to keep doing what it's already doing"

Isn't that where we started from ?

With all this bending over backwards, would it be wrong to make a joke about getting an EU Trade commissioner who *doesn't* like it up the Gary Glitter ?

Poor taste ?

MIA in Iowa - personal data on 3m UK driving test candidates

The Other Steve
Unhappy

Hypocrisy ?

Doesn't it smack somewhat of hypocrisy (let alone stupidity) for uk.gov to big up exporting our "ICT" services to the world, and then themselves consistently contract out all their data processing to US based contractors ?

Or is that just me ?

I mean honestly, is it so hard to find UK firms who can do this ?

HMRC manual on data protection was protected data

The Other Steve

Yes Minister.

That is all.

Opera hits Microsoft with EC complaint

The Other Steve
Happy

@Mark - it's OK to hate me.

"What bit of my response was evidence of hallucination?"

The bit that says "FOSS is not about killing MS", I never said it was.

"Oh, and if I call you a twat, is that OK because I've put the "joke alert" icon?"

You may feel free to call me a twat with any icon you chose, partly because I respect your freedom of expression, but mostly because I clearly am one.

"as your post was insulting to millions of people" *

Millions ? Really ? I was aiming for the mid thousands, I feel like such an overachiever now (see above w/r/t twattyness)

;-)

*but only one of them took the bait.

The Other Steve
Flame

@Mark

"Your persecution complex isn't valid."

Nor are your comprehension skills, guess I should have used the "Joke Alert" icon, but I do so like to see the knee jerks.

You appear to have refuted at least on assertion that I plainly didn't make, but as the great Scot Adams says, feel free to argue with your hallucination of what I said.

[Excised by Reg Moderator]

The Other Steve
Happy

If it wasn't for MS bundling

There'd be no FOSS jihad, no kernel mailing list, and no rabid linux fanboys cluttering up the place with their ill informed flamage, because all the decent coders would have jobs at profitable software companies. There'd be no slashdot.

Imagine that world.

There'd just be Stallman, crying in a computer room somewhere, and no one would give a fuck.

So in that respect at least, MS have lot to answer for, bastards.

Latest NetBeans thinks big for scripting

The Other Steve

Javascript

Yes, it appears so. There's a full AJAX (how I hate that word) feature set, which is why I've just started downloading it. Who knows, perhaps this is the road to Damascus.

Six in ten UK punters fear what gov will do with private data

The Other Steve
Flame

Known terrorists ?

"But if an agency tries to use the data to catch known terrorists, then let the worldwide media screaming commence."

If you know who they are, you don't actually need to mine anyone's data.

Data mining vis a vis terrorist hunting is simply no more than a fishing trip to identify people who *might* be terrorists.

Look at it this way, punters don't mind giving up a certain amount of data about their shopping habits to retailer loyalty schemes because the worse that can happen is they might get some vouchers for products they don't actually want.

Even in the case of a total breach of the happy shopper database, the world might find out they bought some pile cream at Asda, mild embarrassment all round, or their junk mail input might rise. Annoying, but not exactly life threatening.

It's a bit worse when this data finds it's way into the terror data mine, because then the worse that can happen is that the mining algorithm finds you bought piping, nails and weed killer from a DIY store, sugar and soap flakes from the supermarket, and lots of petrol from the station, fingers you as a bomb wielding jihadi, and you are woken up by the sound of armed police officers kicking in your door at 4am in the morning. If you survive this, you face long periods of detention without charge or legal representation and possibly torture and/or incarceration without trial, depending where you live, and what your surname is.

I'd say that's quite a big difference.

As for the whole "socialist agenda, leftist concerns" thing, I have no idea what you're on about. I suspect you're just a batshit crazy yank with a limited political vocabulary, something that is borne out by your concern that your local shop might "[turn] you over to Chinese or Israeli government agents". (An interesting juxtaposition, since Israel is your number one best bosom buddy ally)

I suggest switching to decaf.

Knickerless: the secure data centre connection

The Other Steve
Flame

@frank denton

You should ask Santa for a betters sense of humour.

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's

The Other Steve

Bummer

As a proud owner of a libraries worth of PTerry books, I'm saddened by the news, but like many others heartened by his optimism.

ob-anecdote :

When I went to get my copy of "Thief of Time" signed, the chap in front of me in the queue said to the Great Man (who was, indeed, wearing his most excellent hat) "I'm a student and just starting out on my career path, so could you maybe write some words of wise advice" (or something like that, it was a while ago).

PTerry's response was to inscribe his copy with the words "Get A Job!"

Pure genius.

Fark attempts to trademark NSFW

The Other Steve

WTF

Is a 'fark' when it's at home ? I'm far to busy to google it.

Football horns could spread Black Death, says Interpol chief

The Other Steve
Thumb Down

Yeah but no

"The attack itself is not particularly sophisticated. It does not rely on advanced scientific expertise, large amounts of money, or elaborate laboratories."

Erm, except that it is, and it does.

How to use plague as a bioweapon :

1) Get plague

2) Weaponise plague (it will need to be resistant to all antibiotics, current and in development, and you'll need to up the lethality and shorten the incubation period)

3) Culture plague in sufficient quantity

4) Engineer and manufacture a delivery system.

5) Organise delivery

Now I'm neither a scientist nor an engineer, but I think it's plain to see that at least steps 2 and 3 require a fair amount of scientific knowledge, plus a big wad of cash to buy equipment. I'm afraid that contrary to this pricks assessment, you will need a decent set of lab facilities and personnel even to do the culturing without either fucking it up or killing yourself.

The weaponisation you can forget unless you have a couple of Molecular Bio PhDs with experience in the field, and an even better and safer lab. And a really long time.

I can't see step 4 being a walk in the park either, since it requires you to be able to manufacture your delivery system in quantity, so again we're talking machine shops and engineers, except that they'll also need to be very special engineers, and the machine shop will presumably need a decent level of biocontainment.

Even a complete retard can see that such an attack needs, exactly and specifically, "advanced scientific expertise, large amounts of money, [and] elaborate laboratories", or at least any retard not working AT for Interpol, anyway.

What saddens me is that the population at large is buying into this utter shite.

Mind your languages with Microsoft LINQ

The Other Steve
Thumb Down

Erm...

"Application programmers are used to dealing with things such as objects, classes and methods but they are not usually familiar with SQL"

Then they should be sent back to school (or at least forced to read some books) until they are, or simply taken out and shot to free up headcount for competent people.

How is it even possible to avoid being familiar with SQL ? Anyone with a college or university level education in the field will (or ought to) have been through at least one RDBMS module during which they will (ought to ?) have been at least introduced to SQL. If you're hiring people without a formal education - not necessarily a bad thing - then SQL, as an industry standard (of sorts) should be on your training plan for them.

Anyone who isn't familiar with it has no business being anywhere near a database driven app, and as such it's usually an advertised requirement for MIS (and such) developers.

I had always believed that I'd had the misfortune to work with quite a few seriously incompetent people over the years (as well as some truly excellent ones, you know who you are), but I never came across anyone who couldn't speak SQL.

Maybe I've been luckier than I thought ?

Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain

The Other Steve
Flame

@daniel garcia

"A lot of you are a bunch of egotistical elitists that think they have the right answer to everything and no one else does. The internet is the wrong place for you."

I laughed so hard I nearly ruptured something. Talk about a PKB.

I have no idea what planet you're on, but the last time I looked, the internet was absolutely packed solid with this type of person. From usenet to the blogtards through the pediaphiles, it's the perfect media for them.

Not quite sure why you would think otherwise, possibly you are one of these morons who think the net is in some way 'democratising'. It isn't, but even if it was, in a democracy people have the right to call a you a fucktard and you just have to deal with it.

I suspect you get plenty of practice with an attitude like that.

The Other Steve
Black Helicopters

I don't care.

Really, I don't, but somehow I find I have read all five pages of the article and then all the comments.

That's just weird.

Maybe I need to drink more.

German Wikipedia attacked over Nazi symbolism

The Other Steve
Flame

@Rob

".... it's an ideal not a given, so stop banding it around like we're all entitled to it, some of us clearly shouldn't be entitled to it, especially if their main aim is to use it to harm others."

Oh for fucks sake, another one of the "Freedom comes with responsibility to only use it for things that I think are OK" idiots.

I'd argue the toss with you, but I really can't be arsed, you're clearly immune to logic.

I love it when you sad fuckers make this argument, never seeming to realise what an utter prick you are making of yourselves in the process.

That's the real power of freedom of speech in any form, it allows really stupid people to unmask themselves for all to see.

Carry on, dickwad.

The day Microsoft 'embraced and extended' Java

The Other Steve

Javascript/VB

Is a pretty good comparison, much like VB in all it's forms, Javascript enabled hordes of untrained and ill disciplined dabblers to create literally millions of lines of really poor code very very quickly.

Unfortunately, since it was subsequently built into nearly every web browser on the planet, it allowed the hordes to foist their crawling horrors on the rest of us via the magic of the internet.

Arse!

In fairness I should point out that the comparison also holds in the sense that it isn't actually necessary to code like a retarded monkey on crack in either language, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

'Heavy' handset challenges all comers to prove its mettle

The Other Steve

It looks kinda sexy but...

... it doesn't appear to play mp3s, 1.65m is bollocks, PoC is rubbish (if I want a walkie talkie, that's what I'll be using) and 250 quid is way OTT.

Besides which I'm a fairly hardcore cross country MTBer and I have never managed to damage a phone yet, despite always taking one with me and falling off quite a lot (also a member of the 'I broke my ribs and it really really hurt' club), so although it would look sexy nestling in my camelbak, I can't really see the point.

If it was cheaper, I'd buy one for the looks (it's also available in a rather more fetching black and grey colour scheme), but at that price you can sod off.

Mind you, if I was the type of 'all the gear but no idea', extreme sports twat that happily drops 300 quid on a pair of Oakleys, I'd probably buy it, so I guess that's where the market will take off.

Judge brands Kirsty Wark's husband a snoop

The Other Steve
Unhappy

Kirsty Wark is married ?

Bugger, I was holding out for her!

Catholic schism over mobile icons

The Other Steve

@Will Leamon/Chris Leason

"or offer much humanitarian aid across the globe either smart guy. Good to see you're using that thesaurus you got for Christmas though."

As far as I can tell, there are (at least) Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and, in all likelihood, members of plenty of other cults who do just that.

Thanks for the entirely predictable response though.

The Other Steve
Happy

Nice to see...

...a story that reminds us that christians are just as stupid, venal and needlessly obsessed with trivial dogmatic minutiae as other cults.

Especially so close to christmas.

Microsoft kills Santa Claus

The Other Steve
Happy

ROTFLMAO

Best Headline Ever

Grisoft acquires LinkScanner

The Other Steve

@Léon

"I'm curious though how the connection can be dropped while still being able to report to a database?"

Yes, on first read it's easy to make that mistake, but I presume that what is meant is the individual TCP connection on which the SPI detects badness, not the network connection.

Different layers, innit.

Xmas hangovers to cost UK biz £790m

The Other Steve
Flame

Well fuck you, Travelodge

Is this some kind of twisted conspiracy ? Reading the headline, I expected this to be yet another mewling pseudo study by unpopular slave masters the CBI, or another desperate 'don't shove your arse in the photocopier' story from the HSE. Now bastard Travelodge are getting in on the humbugging.

WTF is a cheap and nasty (well, nasty anyway) shag motel chain doing conducting 'research' like this ??? I mean, why ? Is this somehow supposed to make me want to stay in one of their turgid little establishments ? Where's the hook ?

Get a grip, it's christmas, everyone is going to be shit faced, if you don't like it, close your eyes. It has been like this for as long as I can remember and as long as my father can remember, and, oddly enough, as long as his father could remember. That's within delta of forever for planning purposes. And let's not forget that not to many years ago it was considered allowable (sometimes mandatory) to be shit faced IN the office at christmas.

Mum defends suspected Kiwi botmaster

The Other Steve
Flame

And Hitler...

...only ever posted anonymously. Pillock.

Electrical supe charged with damaging California canal system

The Other Steve
Thumb Up

"He'd had a few beers he says"

<quote>

“I’m certain I did something to cause it,” Mr. Keehn says, but he’s not entirely sure.

He’d had a few beers he says.

</quote>

Well then, tough shit. You don't fuck with critical infrastructure after you've "had a few beers". In fact, during the working day, if you're a systems engineer, you just don't, ever, have a few beers.

I can't help noticing that as well as this, the linked article describes him as "computer genius and conservative thinker", I may be adding two and two and coming up with the wrong answer, but frankly I'm reading all this as "Arrogant, drunken, bigoted jesus freak sacked for working on systems while tanked."

In which case good riddance.

YMMV, perhaps there's some definition of "conservative thinker" that I'm not aware of.

Counterfeit Vista rate half that of XP

The Other Steve

Before even reading the article

I thought to myself "Yeah, I bet the XP counterfeit rate is twice what Vista is doing, because who the hell wants Vista?"

Nokia unveils eco phone and planet-friendly charger

The Other Steve

Eco friendly my hairy bum.

But then, "Eco-fractionally less harmful" doesn't have quite the same ringtone to it.

Still, if everyone joins in, maybe we'll save a baby whale or something.

Bloody code!

The Other Steve
Coat

Death to all extremists!

Like all code constructs, multiple exit points are sometimes appropriate, and sometimes not.

If it improves readability and maintainability (closely related), then go ahead and use them.

On the other hand, if you feel uncomfortable with them, feel free to do it your way. A good coder should be competent to deal with either approach at implementation or maintenance. OTOH I've seen some truly awful constructs result from peoples attempts to avoid them just on the grounds that someone told them MEPs were 'A Bad Thing'.

If the methodology zealots would spend less time worrying about arbitrary rules and more time worrying about clarity the software world would be a nicer place altogether.

Hell, I've even used goto from time to time, and if that makes your blood boil, consider that all your structured exception handling is actually just goto with a fancy name.

Good code is code that has clarity of intention, there are many ways of achieving this, but excluding some constructs because some ivory tower language facist once decided that they didn't like them, or more likely because some slashdot weenie told you so, limits your flexibility of approach. The more options you leave yourself, the more likely you are to be able to turn out an aesthetically pleasing bit of code.

Mozilla rubbishes IE Firefox security study

The Other Steve
Flame

@Chad

"Is Microsoft English a different language to the regular English?"

Yes, very much so. As anyone who has ever tried to read any of Microsoft's API documentation can bitterly attest. Often for hours, especially after a few pints with some other codemonkeys.

"Is a Microsoft English Dictionary avalible on Cash and Carrion?"

I doubt it, since MS have a fun fun tendency to redefine words as soon as people get used to a meaning. It keeps us all on our toes, and the landlords of several local hostelries in Bahaman holidays.

@Ill informed AC :

Jeez, shot your wad a bit early there, at least wait until you see a fanboi before you start flaming them.

Beeb coughs to Panorama WiFi-scare travesty

The Other Steve
Flame

And they should bloody well...

...be made to apologise publicly in the same time slot, and on a full page ad in every daily newspaper.

And if that eats up the remaining budget for the entire strand them good riddance.

Panorama has gone from interesting hard news documentary strand to fearmongering tabloid "Tonight" rip off in less time than it took Horizon to become a travesty of it's former self

That's not an achievement to be proud of.

MI5 warns over China hacking menace

The Other Steve
Black Helicopters

A new demon, how very.

Oh deary me, so the UK populace has rumbled that the terrorist 'threat' amounts to little more than a few nutters who've read "The Anarchist's Cookbook" and a woman who writes exceptionally bad poetry and owns some obscure literature ?

Well, let's remind them that the ruskies and the damn chinee are still out to get us.

Of course, we won't have to mention immigration, but I think we can safely assume that demonising Ivan and the Chinks will bolster an agenda in that direction as well, I mean, who can tell the difference between the eastern euros anyway ? Used to be all the same country didn't they, KGB the lot of them.

I really don't see how this can be anything other than a play in someone's hidden agenda. Since the security advice the SS are likely giving will be effective against all ITsec (or non IT specific, come to that) threats there is no need for them to specify China as the perpetrator.

To do so publicly is clearly politically motivated, I fail to see how it could have anything to do with security. MI5 are in serious danger of loosing their credibility, IMO, as all we hear from them at the moment are unsubstantiated scare stories and finger pointing.

The 2k terrorists soundbite for instance, if they *really* knew of 2000 people hatching terrorist plots, guess what ? Those jails would be even more overcrowded and we'd never be seeing the back of Shami Chakrabarti, because lets face it, we've happily banged people up for truly trivial acts of stupidity, never mind actually plotting terrorist acts.

Why can't they just STFU and get on with their jobs like they did in the good old days of the Cold War proper, before the wall came down and we pretended it was all over and we had won ?

Seems to me they have become bum boys of the fear agenda. They came in out of the cold and gained a public voice only to feed us this tired line of government approved bullshit. "Fear Thy Neighbour!"

Shame on them, or rather, shame upon whoever is driving this agenda forwards, I imagine that the ordinary SS staffer just wants the best for their country, and that as with all large organisation all the real twats are at the top end of the management scale talking about "strategic direction" and similar such cobblers.

Sidcup massive threatens Reg hack

The Other Steve
Happy

Ah, the nostalgia

When I lived down Cheshire way, around the suburbs of the suburbs of Manchester, "Townies" was a term for the teenage children of the wealthy who would spend all of their time wearing ugly but expensive clothing and pointlessly hanging around the town lying about how much beer they had 'necked' (in reality, almost none, since they were almost universally to stupid to produce or procure fake ID).

We called the unrepentantly nasty and violent scum "Scallies", which is Manchester proper terminology, and doesn't necessarily involve a shell suit. There was some crossover between the two, Cheshire being such a hotbed of social climbing, and not always in the upward direction. I spent many a fond Friday evening kicking these fuckwads out of my pub and into the car park, there to be administered a suitable kicking before being summarily bundled into the handily parked black mariah that used to frequent our car park. Ah Cheshire, how I miss your random pointless violence and criminally negligent police force.

Later (mid 90s) I moved to Newcastle, and discovered the term "Charver", which almost always involves a shell suit, cap, Elizabeth Duke at Argos bling, poor social skills, and teenage pregnancy. There is a guide to charvers, similar to the above mentioned sites at : http://www.newcastlestuff.com/charver/index.html

I would argue that at the time, the two were distinct, but they seem to have merged into one large and unpleasant subculture. If that weren't the case, Jeremy Kyle would have no audience.

Cattle prods and Landrovers, it's the only way.

Balls blames parents, computers for English literacy slide

The Other Steve
Unhappy

Sodding Typical

Collectively, the current, and indeed previous, Labour government needs to seek some counselling to help them out with their complete inability to take any kind of responsibility for anything at all.

OK, parents undoubtedly have to take their share of responsibility for their kids, but by the same chalk, government should take responsibility for their education policies, which are apparently not effective.

As for the questionable effect of video games, I spent countless hours playing Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and the like as a youngster but I also adore reading and going outside, and always have.

It's going to take a little more than whining from yet another Labour minister desperate to shirk personal responsibility for a failing policy to convince me that there is any kind of correlative relationship between exposure to computers and gaming and a lack or literacy.

Darling could backtrack on capital gains

The Other Steve
Flame

Greedy, grasping, manipulative thieves

And that's just the Labour cabinet, the CBI are even worse.

Top government boffin urges rethink on GM crop ban

The Other Steve
Flame

Feed the world

Except the parts of it that won't bend over backwards and take it up the Gary Glitter from Monsanto, et al.

If the motives of the Pro GM crowd were pure, there would be no need for them to lodge patents on all these fabulous food crops, no need for the terminator gene, and no need to erm, charge for the seeds, since they are operating with such altruistic abandon.

Except, that's exactly the opposite of what's really happening.

Like "The One", off of the popular Matrix trilogy, it's just another system of control.

Conniving shitweasels, the lot of them.

As for the Pro Nuke crowd, fine fine, but by the time you have finished designing and building the 'next generation' of power plants, it will be to late. Also, come back and ask for my opinion again when your costs include the long term management of waste and the full operational lifetime of the plants, including decommissioning them in 100 years time. Oh yeah, and include the cost of the land, in perpetuity, because it sure as fuck isn't going to be any use for anything else in the foreseeable future, now is it ?

Poll confirms Brits believe Jesus Phone salvation too costly

The Other Steve
Flame

@William Donelson

So, when it's had more features added, which warrant paying more cash, it will be worth the price it is now without those additional features ?

So, in other words, it's to expensive.

Hey look ! Your circular logic can lick it's own bum !

UK gov bans 'terror' suspect from science class

The Other Steve
Black Helicopters

Intercept evidence

Isn't allowed in a proper court, particularly if it was obtained by member of the SS tapping your comms without a warrant.

It has been mooted that this if intercept evidence (presumably *with* a warrant) was allowed in court, there would be no need for control orders.

If this is true, does it mean that the government and the spooks, who have fought tooth and nail against this, simply don't want people to know how easily and comprehensively monitored their comms really are ?

Either way, if you don't have any evidence that the CPS can go to court with, surely the best way to proceed would be to investigate and, er, get some ? And surely surveillance of the 'suspect' when he's 'free' would produce some important intel ?

Or is that just me ?

Senior officials now in frame for HMRC data fiasco

The Other Steve
Flame

RE : Agreed, not access, not sql...

Think what you like, but the points made about 'just' executing a query are still valid.

Even if you have to fire up Microfocus COBOL workbench to do it, the principle still holds.

You obviously don't have much exposure to COBOL, a language which was designed to make writing and executing just such queries easy *. A system I worked on three years ago on ICL minis (yes, original ones at that) and which was largely written in COBOL sometime around 1976, was happily able to export a selection of fields to a CSV file for transfer to more modern kit.

In fairness COBOL programs often take a while to write because you need some downtime to recover from the psychosis inducing whitespace and indent rules and the enforced boilerplate. But the principle is very much the same.

The only question is why doing this should incur unacceptable delay and/or cost. Most likely because this counts as additional work under the outsourcing contract, the terms of which (esp in government departments) are so nit picking as to induce hysterics in all but the most fearsome contract experts, and are in fact designed to exploit just such situations.

This is a totally separate issue from the technology involved, and part of the "systemic failure" that Darling et al are so fiercely denying.

*Although weather that design goal was met is still a subject for some often strenuous debate, and I can easily imagine several COBOL coders have just spit coffee through their noses.

The Other Steve
Flame

Utter Toss

Obligatory speculation : CSV file, zipped with password. This is very, very common when shifting bulk, high value, personal data to/from outsourced functions or external organisations. Sad, but true*. But who knows how these muppets go about things.

Not so speculative part : Additional expense ? For unticking two fields (sort code, account number) in the database table export wizard used to dump the CSV (or whatever format) file ? At worst, setting up a duplicate query with those fields removed ? Fuck off. And there simply isn't any way it would have been much more complicated than this** no matter what's on the back end. (And it will be SQL Server or Oracle, I'd guess Oracle 'cause HMRC (or their outsourced pixies) have some experience in Oracle data warehousing)

I've seen this done (and done it myself) a hundred times, and I don't recall it ever being a chargeable extra.

Definitely not speculative : If a "junior official" is in a position to make such decisions, and access such data without some managerial supervision, then whatever else the gov might claim, HMRC really do have *serious* systemic problems with their IT, security and management processes, this is beyond question.

Grr!

*In which case your whole 'security' policy is largely predicated on the integrity of the physical transport process.

**OK, it's a little more involved in Oracle with no third party tools, but come on, it's what ? Seven lines of sqlplus ?

Chilis could struggle in 'Californication' lawsuit

The Other Steve
Joke

Ah Ben...

" "Californication" is little more than a middle-aged man's w*nk fantasy, and I've enough of those myself "

But isn't that the whole point of the plot of the show ? To examine the whole mid life crisis thing. Is that how we'd all be acting if we were Duchovny-style rich, feckless California dwelling divorcees ? Isn't that what all your MAWF are all about ? I mean I'm phrasing that as a question because I'm usually distracted by all the bouncing nipples, but it could be a valid point.

As for quality TV drama, yup, with you all the way. I'm a big 'Spooks' fan myself, especially now they have that gorgeous blonde totty in it, I mean w00f w00f!

The Other Steve
Paris Hilton

Huh ?

"The show is really just an excuse to show as much sex as possible, with a little violence and drug taking to keep it "edgy""

You manage to say that like it's a bad thing !

Americans clueless on NASA budgets

The Other Steve
Flame

@mark

"my work colleagues are just as intelligent as any I had in the UK."

Sure, its just that they are lacking in the ability to recognise irony, sarcasm and things of that nature, which is presumably why you fit in so well.

The Other Steve
Joke

Really only have themselves to blame.

If NASA have failed to effectively communicate this to the (admittedly mostly thick as pigshit*) 'merkin population, then they need to rethink their PR strategy a bit.

*Don't worry 'merkins, I'm sure a goodly portion of the populace of these benighted isles wouldn't even have been able to tell you who NASA are, unless it was somehow mentioned on popular bear baiting analogue 'The Jeremy Kyle Show', long running grim up north soap 'Coronation Street', or tedious cockerney whinge drama 'East Enders'.

I'm told some of the rest of them can actually read, but I doubt NASA budgets feature much in 'Shite Z List Celebrity's Tits Gossip Weekly' magazine either.

Tories call for mobile phone ban in schools

The Other Steve
Flame

@Simon Painter

I'm not so polite as the above commenter, so I'm just going to call you out for the ignorant, horse shit spewing, trolling cunt bubble that you are, and pretty much leave it at that.

The Other Steve

Back in the mists of time...

(well, the mid nineties anyway), I had a series of mobes while in sixth form. I would never have dreamed of entering a classroom without switching off my phone. To behave otherwise is just plain rude.

I hate to jump on the "Kids These Days Have No Respect"® bandwagon, but hey, if the glove fits...

Dutch mull radical cash for kidneys plan

The Other Steve
Thumb Up

Can't help wondering if ...

this is because the Dutch only managed a measly 811 road deaths (major source of transplant organs*) in 2006, compared to a stonking 3150 in the UK.

That's because there are less retarded petrol heads and more bicycles (more bicycles than people, in fact) in Holland.

I like Holland.

*UK organ donation from this source has fallen (allegedly) as a result of road safety measures, by about 48% between '94 and '02, for instance.