Posts by Velv 2756 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2010
FAIL
You've suggested that you'll go to the pub AFTER the new list has been produced.
USELESS.
You should be going to the pub NOW to discuss the options - that'll produce a much more biting selection for commentard consumption and will avoid lots of Political Correctness rubbish (there's a point - a political correctness icon?)
Perhaps it's time that Standards Essential Patents are automatically assigned over by the standards body and released as public domain.
Patents in principle protect intellectual property theft and exploitation, however if they then form part of a standard then maybe the greater good of the world takes precedence. If not assigned for free, a fixed fee scheme could be used - fixed NOW, not negotiated later.
I'm not defending the large corporations as they are playing the rules to their own advantage, however those crying foul really need to learn a bit more about business:
"Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality"
It IS possible for a business to turn over billions and make little or no profit. Turnover and profit are NOT directly linked. Some MPs and Journalists need to learn some basic business facts.
@AC 16:50 "open to people copying all your hard work like Samdung does"
Nice of the Fanbois to prove his own argument. Swatch, Rolex et al have decades of design work in their product, a history of design that repeats their design elements for over a century.
Tablet design on the other hand is 30 years old (I'm making the leap of faith from Star Trek:TNG tablets), and Apple has no proven track record of "design elements" that gives them any rights to "the design". Apple entered the market less than 5 years ago, and it could be argued they copied the "design" of several other tablets before them.
"already had an alternative domain name registered, which seems to have been the case, given that Mega is back online so soon."
Seriously, journalists these days.
It takes SECONDS to register a domain name, and not much longer to get it active (depending on the supplier). OK, so he is likely to have had at least one other registered. He probably has more. But even if all of those are mysteriously shut down it doesn't take long to get another active.
In the good old days the cops would have given him a good stern talking to and a cuff around the ear (no matter how old he was).
Sadly our society is now so obsessed with the freedoms and rights of the guilty that the Police can no longer work with the spirit of the law and must follow it to the letter - get a complaint, arrest, paperwork, report to CPS or PF.
I don't want to condone Police as Judge, Jury and Executioner, but we need to appreciate our liberal society has brought the overreaction problem highlighted here on ourselves.
Ah, nothing like having a STANDARD and complying with it...
When is the ITU going to publish a roadmap that will converge the existing "standards" used around the world. Technology is advancing, and while the Merkins (and othes) use a different system from GSM now, they will replace their infrastructure over the coming years (have done already for LTE) so at this point you can start to incorporate a GLOBAL standard.
(And I'm not staying it should be GSM, just that the ITU needs to get a roadmap agreed that in 10 years it will be converged) (and don't give me excuses about bandwidth and frequencies - that's part of the ROADMAP).
Charge them £1 for every "copied" device they've sold in the UK.
Now that would be interesting, not from the money perspective, but from the real sales figures for the UK - would they downgrade the numbers to reduce the fine, or upgrade the numbers to increase the publicity :)
"Surprised we haven't seen it this side of the pond yet"
There are already intrusions used this side of the pond.
There are often large interruptions to the credits (OK, maybe not the same) but there are also lines of text overlaying onto the main content of some programmes. It may only have been text lines on silly programmes so far (daytime?), but it has been there.
Note to broadcasters - stop it NOW!
Just because the MPs change doesn't mean the people who make the policies change.
The Civil Service carries on regardless on most of the business of running the country, and the politicians are really just voiceboxes that give vague indications of how the country should be run - a general direction as opposed to the nitty gritty.
Anyone who thinks the Tories, Labour, LibDems, Greens, UKIP, etc actually have any real say in how the country is run are clearly misguided.
So not being a member of a party suddenly stops you being biased?
FAIL
I absolutely understand the utopia of the suggestion - politicians once elected should be there purely for the people. But every one of us has our political leanings and will tend to side with those of a similar disposition irrespective of party membership. And Political Parties have been known to apply influence on non-members...
So the article was marked NSFW.
And the picture was edited with Vultures to be on the safe side.
BUT
The article is then added to the Spotlight feature on the homepage with a section of cropped picture that doesn't include the vultures making the ENTIRE El Reg homepage TOTALLY NSFW!
Hence why I'm posting this from my personal tablet. But more please.
Now I know they're doing it for charity, and its probably quite respectable, but the thought did cause me a monetary shudder... This morning I went for coffee and a bacon roll and was offered a copy of the Greggs Calendar Girls 2013 Calendar.
10 out of 10 for helping Children In Need
There's a difference between NEED and AFFORD - the vast majority of Linux installs run on Intel not because they need to, but because it is (currently) about the most cost effective hardware available for the job.
There are lots of other options. But will your bean counters let you buy them?
(not saying its right, just pointing out fact)
Apart from it would start a bidding war - too many other manufacturers rely on ARM so they couldn't afford to let Apple own it. For now they all survive by having a chip designer that can be used be them all, creating a market of different vendors devices that do similar jobs.
As someone else commented, they are playing the bratty child pushing the boundaries to see what they can get away with".
Well it will all end in tears.
Their legal costs will continue to spiral if the Judge needs to recall them to court. And the Judge will simply dictate more specifically how Apple needs to respond - full front page of the UK website with set font size and text, with only one link to "Visit the rest of Apple". Or perhaps even "full front page advert in named newspapers". Or even "prime time TV advert on at least 10 UK mainstream television channels including ITV1 and Channel 4"
Apple already have the TV adverts slots booked, its just they were planning on showing something else.
Most customers won't notice. The vast majority never roam. They pay their £45 a month out of their dole so they have their iPhone5, but they don't actually go out of the country.
The roamers may vote with their feet and move networks, but I doubt O2 really care (except they've probably given customers the option to break their contracts with such a high change, especially if said customer has roamed in the past).
Further, "this El Reg hack" remembers his local Boots taking copies and appears to be condoning the practise, suggesting the public should expect it as part of the service. I'm sure he'll feel differently when he's subjected to some form of rip-off when using a service somewhere. Perhaps his broadband will be stolen, or his car used for errands while in the garage for a service, or many other "misdemeanours".
These staff deserve jail, not just for stealing the pictures, but for the stupidity of trying to distribute them.
Never mind the obsolescence of the iPhone 5, it'll be "5G" that is being rolled out.
(while some claim a new Generation comes out roughly ever 10 years, 3G and 4G have a much closer overlap, and Moore's Law appears to have started to kick in, with advances being at roughly half the time and more than double the speed)
First they came for Comet, but I didn't say anything because I didn't shop in Comet.
Then they came for Dixons, but I didn't say anything as I didn't shop in Dixons.
Then they came for John Lewis, and I didn't say anything because, well, I didn't shop in John Lewis
Then out came some new gadget that I thought I might like.
But there was nowhere left to go and see it
Which is where Cyberspace is going to get interesting, and there is no law that currently answers the problem.
Is it where the data is hosted?
Is it where the data owner is located?
Is it where the processing server is located (which may not be in the same jurisdiction as the storage)?
Is it where the company owner is located (which may be a registered company and subject to different laws for directors than from individuals)?
Is it where the domain name is registered?
Is it where the copyright content owner is located?
Is it at the choice of anyone who wants to raise the legal action in cases where there may be a choice (think patent law in the US where the case is filed in certain states which are more sympathetic than others - what would happen if the EU had a similar "federal" circuit of courts)?
Many of you will have opinions on these - please don't post replies, there is NO right answer at the moment.
"It is understood Mega's staff and owners cannot access the encrypted uploaded data, absolving themselves of any responsibility for contents of the files"
Is this the opinion of the journalist or of me.ga??? It hasn't absolved any other service provider, so what makes anyone think its going to absolve me.ga of responsibility now.
9,000 years according Paul Broun.
And he should know, as he's a physician and member of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the House of Representatives.
It's good that the science deniers can never agree on when the universe was born, but the Scientist generally do. OK, so the boffins sometime revise their dates (as shown in the article), but that is usually followed by nods of agreement from their peers. Meanwhile the buffoons continue to argue over a couple of hundred years.
Everybody's out to make a buck.
Presumably the French News sites think google makes a massive profit from their content, and they want their share of google's profit (and I'm not denying google doesn't make a profit, however I suspect there aren't that many clicks through from ads on news searches).
So the French could set the robots.txt to stop the search engines indexing the content and thus preventing google et al from stealing their content to make profit. That would show google, wouldn't it?
This may be an Apple specific legal situation, since the unlock comes VIA Apple/iTunes, not directly from the network operator (or at least it did).
When O2 unlocked my old phone it was necessary to plug the phone into the computer and connect up to iTunes. Only once the phone had "phoned home" to Apple did it receive the unlock code. (i.e. at the time O2 could not unlock the phone without going through Apple).
It may be different now the iPhone/iOS supports Over The Air for updates.
Apple have wiped Apps.
In the early days of the App store I bought a wireless hotspot finding app for my 1st Gen Touch (it tested which were open). After a few months Apple decided this type of App was against their policies and they deleted it. They didn't tell me of course, but I found out when I contacted the author.
So on its own, maybe it doesn't appear to make sense.
However I have heard a similar rumour (from a source I trust to have just enough credibility) of Cisco also wanting to broaden its horizons. How can it do that? We there are other virtual platforms out there. Clearly they're not going to get VMWare off EMC, nor are they going to get HyperV off Microsoft. But next in the Magic Quadrants is Citrix.
Suddenly you can see very good reasons for EMC to own a network company.
They could always get a partner in another country to offer the courses to Minnesota residents.
DEAR RESIDENT OF MIMASOTA
I AM KING JOFFEY JAFUR OF NIGERIA AND THROUGH THE GREAT WEALTH OF MY GLORIOUS COUNTRY I AM ABKE TO OFFER FREE COURSES OF EDUCATION TO MY GREAT RELATIVES IN THE COUNTRY OF MINNESOTA.
TO OFFER THESE FREE COURSES I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE TO SECURE THE LICENCE FROM MIMASOTA GOVERNMENT BY SENDING ME MONEY TO COVER THE NECESSARY REGISTRATION FEES.....
ooops, maybe the law isn't entirely daft, especially if Minnesota is following the spirit of the law instead of the letter
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