Posts by Simon Neill 246 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2007
@Bicycles have existed for centuries without that being a problem...
Bikes can't go 60mph and don't mass significantly more than a person.
Also, all cars these days already come with a device to prevent injury to pedestrians. It's called the brakes and they can be operated by the driver with ease.
"Downloading copyrighted material is stealing no matter how rich the company is you are stealing from. People are employed by these big companies, and when profits go down, innocent people loose jobs!"
No, copyright infringement is NOT stealing. This is a civil matter not a criminal matter, especially on the level of a single user downloading.
Consider those crappy ads they plastered all over DVDs. "You wouldn't steal a handbag/car/movie" Well, if I steal a handbag someone has lost a handbag and I have gained one. If I "steal" a movie/tv show/music track the owners still have it. I've downloaded all sorts over the years. Some I have later bought, some I have scrapped because it was shite. You would find it very hard to prove a lost sale. As a concrete example I currently own every Futurama DVD. I wouldn't even have watched it without a friend sending me an ep over the net. Same for Family Guy.
This of course is not saying it is right to download files without permission, just as it is not right to drive 33mph in a 30mph area. It is however time to admit that it doesn't do as much harm as they say and that it is never going to be stopped through legal action.
@So what's with plod reaching for the taser as a first course of action?
Why is pepper spray or nightsticks better than a taser?
As for blaming the satnav....how long before one of these idiots runs over a child and blames the satnav for not telling them to stop? surely the lack of tarmac and presence of water would cause most people to stop the car, satnav or no.
@silencers
Silencers won't work on supersonic bullets too well, since the bullet will still make a sonic boom. Fitting a silencer might reduce accuracy but the system will still work.
@new weapon
if they have any sense it will mark it as a weapon of unknown type, but still be able to track it. All you need to do is make sure all friendly weapons are flagged friendly, shoot the rest at will.
Causality fallacy here. These people assume that nutters play violent video games a lot and thus become violent killers. My belief is just the opposite, these people have pre-existing violent tenancies that cause them both to become killers and play the violent video games.
"Geiger-Muller tubes work by detecting charged particles directly. Since the average radioactive particle will only travel a few centimetres through air, they would be pretty much useless unless you go around waving one over every part of a person's anatomy. Add that to the fact that the radioactive iodine used to treat a thyroid condition (not an uncommon treatment) will be concentrated in a persons thyroid gland, which is in their neck beneath skin and surface musculature, which would tend to absorb the beta particles pretty effectively."
Indeed. Surely if he was radioactive enough to be a danger to others he would be....well...dead, dead dead and more dead to the power dead. So that raises the question, if he IS radioactive enough to be dangerous he should be easily detectable.
"Virgin Media maintains on the trial information page that as its current national policy, only the heaviest five per cent of users will hit the data limits on a given day."
Yes, I had no idea only 5% of their customers ever used the iplayer, downloaded a game demo, browsed youtube for a bit etc etc etc.
I can hit their pathetic caps just by playing games, I highly doubt only 5% of users get capped.
As Anthony said up above. The language is not getting harder. Its over-reliance on spell checkers among other things. Why spell right when the PC can fix it for you? I work in a school, if you want to know how someone spells don't look in the file, look at the file name.
One year 11 (15/16 year old) had a perfectly spelled comic life document, then saved it as "Carton Stripe"
Its a dilema. IE doesn't follow web standards, FF doesn't play with group policy. We have nothing but IE at work for that reason.
You want me to deploy FF in a corporate environment? make it work properly with group policy.
As for bundling other browsers with windows, I'd rather have to install FF than have to uninstall Safari/Chrome/Opera etc etc etc. What these tards need to realise is that its EASY to install extra browsers, the reason people don't is that your average user doesn't care. IE gets them to their e-mails, youtube and google. I bet even if you offered a choice all the people that currently use IE would STILL use IE.
"Now can someone explain why BT are forced to offer LLU and wholesale bandwidth but Virgin cable isn't?" because BT was originally publicly funded to be the country's only telecom network. Virgin has only ever been a private company and also has maybe 50% coverage.
I think the whole thing is ludicrous. Should I pay £20/month to watch the two or three things I watch on iPlayer? the same £20 that someone who watches it 5 hours a day would pay? What if I want to watch one iPlayer show, a few youtube vids, download an update from steam, try out a few demos....am I going to have to pay a seperate fee for each of those next?
Why is google mentioned? the google search and e-mail pages can't be that big....sure they are hit a lot but that comes under BROWSING to me. If you need to charge people for google searches you don't qualify as an ISP to me.
like on dabs for example. I once read a comment where someone gave a hard drive 1* because of the 1000->1024 thing. You also get comments like "I bought this product, put it in the dishwasher, hit it with a sledge hammer and then lit it on fire. Now it doesn't work, shoddy product never buying again" Admittedly anyone reading those can tell that the writer is a dribbling moron to be ignored, but if you are in the list view and sort by rating, a few of those reviews can sink a product to the bottom of the list.
That's not to say expert reviews can be trusted, all you need is an expert "mac fanboi" to review a windows PC and you will get a bad review even if its the best PC on the planet.
"Perhaps we should campaign for all new phones to have a 'text only' mode"
We have those. They are called "pagers"
As for the dangers of using a phone while driving, mythbusters did it. Using a phone while driving can be just as dangerous as driving drunk in terms of response to unexpected events, with and without hands-free. Of course, when it comes to expected events like lights changing you can put the phone down you can't stop being drunk. Same for people singing with the radio, you can stop that whenever you want and comparatively it sucks less brain power than holding a conversation. Now, as for the whole "applying makeup, talking on the phone and screaming at the kids while speeding" thats just flatout dangerous driving and is already illegal.
"Can somebody explain why a system would reboot or freeze up?"
I imagine the contradtiction of the time going 57 58 59 60 00 rather than 58 59 00 would cause a reboot, unhandled exception or whatever you want to call it.
Odd how the y2k bug that everyone paniced about caused no real issues, but a leap second brings oracle to its knees.
"Actually, you can skip the 'quartered', never really saw the point in it."
It helps with storage.
"Direct debit is not right for everyone, so why do i pay so much for wanting to simply get a bill and pay it."
I'm not saying the fee is reasonable, but I always understood it as being the extra man power required to process one off payments every month and the increased risk of missed/late payments over an automated DD. They basically want to encourage you to use DD as much as possible.
"In third place was Halo, fourth was The Sims, fifth Sims 2, sixth RuneScape, seventh Diablo II, eighth Team Fortress 2, ninth Counter-Strike, and tenth Counter-Strike: Source."
If you go HERE http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ steam register more players for cs / cs:s than tf2, consistently. Every time I have looked. Right now left 4 dead and football manager are both beating tf2 as well.
Its damn true, the ACTUAL cost of an unlimited 24/7 line is HUGE. We had a fibre line installed between two buildings on the site and no joke it was £12k to dig the hole, this is for a single fibre pair to carry 100Mb. So....5*20Mb "users" would need to pay £480/year to pay for the cable run in 5 years. Thats a sodding 20m cable, max. VM have to run cables cross country, I dread to think of the expense. As I say, that was just the hole. Now you need to add in the costs of hardware at both ends, running and maintaining and thats before you consider the cost per GB of downloads.
I have no objection to the idea that my service is shared or limited. I'd actually object less to having p2p nerfed than having this horribly small download limit.
and I say if they wanna throttle my P2P they can go nuts, so long as they don't block it.
I do most of my downloading overnight (11pm->) so if I have to download for 2 nights not 1 (unlikely, I don't download much really) then so what. If however this throttling of p2pers halves my ping playing tf2, great.
Yes, P2P has many legit and illegit uses. BUT my game playing/web surfing is much more important than your mass P2P download.
Mines the asbestos firesuit.
The statement says "The only diapers ever in her car were toddler sized pampers, unused, in the trunk of her car that her twin daughters used".
I read that to mean that they found unused pampers in the car (ie, no smelly leftovers) and they were there for the use of her twin daughters.
I would just like to point out that some countries INSIST that every citizen own a gun and ammo. I can't remember which it was, I want to say sweden, every male is in the army for a year and they keep their rifle and ammo. I have no objection to people owning guns.
What I object to is when it is easier to own a gun (an item designed 100% to kill things) than drive a car (an item designed to get from a to b which can only kill when used badly). What I'm saying here is own all the guns you want, just make damn sure you know how to use them. Darwin awards is stuffed full of "I thought it wasn't loaded" stories. THAT bothers me.
Also the issue is storage. Sure, the bad guy has to think about that potentially armed citizen next to him. On the other hand its a lot harder to get a gun when they aren't in every house and available for easy sale.
Your right to own guns is fine, so long as it doesn't interfere with my right to not get shot.
"I have corrected it for you. Given that Wii game sales are pretty dire (most Wii owners just have WiiFit and WiiSports), Nintendo don't make that much from game sales."
And 3 extra remotes and 3 extra nun chuck attachments and the special wii sports attachments that turn your controler into a golf club and the charging stand and the jacket things........ Nintendo are surely raking in the money.
...They will just not go there. Of course that is the aim. But if, as has been suggested, then it affects adults too then shops that use these will soon have no customers.
I can't imagine the local spar deploying one of these to drive away the chavs that provide 99% of their cider sales.
There are a lot of weird correlations flying around here. "Software vendors write crappy software that requires administrator access, therefore MS suck" what? no, the vendors suck.
"Windows is insecure" Well, I've been running a windows domain here for 3 years and the only viruses I have EVER seen are caught in the temporary internet files and never spread. Its simple, no user (other than me) is admin, no user has access to ANY drive other than their user area.
Strikes me that if you end up NEEDING people to run as admin then let them run attachments from e-mails it really doesn't matter what OS you use. The difference between having to deliberately allow access in *nix and having to deny it in win really is irrelevant. Its not like patching is a hassle, automatic updates and WSUS server, jobs done.
"....but it's all still underpinned by a lot of poorly written W32 legacy code in the kernel which quite frankly should have been binned." perhaps, but then what would all the apps that rely on that code do?
They knowingly deceived their employer, boot them all. This is no different to lying about qualifications or a disability that would exclude you from a job.
Also...if they truly believed the BNP's views were not only the way to go but RIGHT, why would they be afraid of being identified? (other than the few that will lose their job, I can understand their concerns) I'm willing to bet that such a list of labour party members being released would not be so controversial
"But what about "P.C." with the dots? Does the dot remove the need for the apostrophe? ie. "P.C.s"? Shouldn't "PC" be "P.C." anyway, meaning that "PCs" or "PC's" are just wrong?"
Yep, should be P.C., H.I.V., A.T.M., A.T. & T. etc.
Hey look! ., , I'm sure that's not right. And I just used an apostrophe to replace the letter i. Then I started a sentence with "and" so now the gods of grammar are going to kill me.
I saw a great one yesterday though, it was a guy that used "etc" instead of "e.g." then the old "to" instead of "too".
As for apostrophe vs single quote, an apostrophe goes in the middle of a word like "don't" single quotes go round a phrase 'something like this'. </2 cents> <coat>leaving</coat>
A while ago they found a gene affecting fat uptake in the intestines. They then said that people with the active form of this gene were more likely to be fat.
The reality is that the people with the inactive form are the mutant freaks that can't absorb vital nutrients and end up being these people that can eat what they like and stay thin.
Point being, fat gene or not....if you eat healthily and exercise you will stay thin. Coke gene or no, you can't get addicted if you never take it.
Now where's the gene for attraction to Paris Hilton?
I have a mixed experience with VM, I am only on the 2Mbit package and I DO usually get that. However.....if I breathe too hard on my PC I hit the cap. On the other hand, capped to 1Mbit with VM has proven better than being on 2Mbit ADSL for me.
VM need to realise that having 50Mbit is no good if you get capped to 5 after 15 mins. I'd rather have 8Mbit uncapped than that.
I seem to recall fictional drugs in the other fallout games, certainly Fallout tactics that I'm playing with atm.
What they don't tell you is that after taking drugs (assuming they stay true to previous versions)
1) You have a withdrawl period when the drug wears off that at least counters the high
2) you have a chance of becoming addicted (really bad).
Sounds like they represented drugs pretty accurately to me.
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