Posts by PT 350 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2007
I'm sorry, I left out the <sarcasm> tags.
By "fit for innocent American teens", I meant of course censored to suit the prejudice of the handful of vocal religious retards that set standards for American public morality. One such scene in Harry Brown would be the one immediately preceding the one of the head being blown off in gory detail.
The movie distributors really are their own worst enemy. What do they expect, when they offer "jam tomorrow" but we know how to get it today? Never mind that the "jam" so often turns out to be high fructose corn syrup with artificial flavor and coloring, and not worth the wait.
After seeing Michael Caine interviewed on US tv last week, I decided to go and see "Harry Brown" on its US release day last Friday. Unfortunately, "US release" didn't include any venue within a thousand miles of where I live. During my diligent search for a way to give money to the movie industry, I discovered "Harry Brown" had already been widely released elsewhere in the world, and available as a torrent for about six months!
If I had downloaded it - which of course I wouldn't dream of - I would probably have found it was a very high quality copy of the original British version, including scenes which have undoubtedly been Bowdlerized out of the US release to make it fit for innocent American teens. I would probably also have discovered there were so many seeds that I could have downloaded it in less time than it takes my wife to get ready to go to the theater.
I'd have to disagree with that. Pelosi (and for that matter Harry Reid also) is fairly unremarkable, not an extremist by most peoples' standards. She's only an object of right-wing hate because she holds high office in a Democrat administration. If she were not Speaker you'd hear nothing about her at all.
Bible Spice, on the other hand, has gone out of her way to identify herself with the worst kind of right wing extremism. She's become a rallying point for people who loudly advocate the violent overthrow of the government, and has come within a hair's breadth of endorsing that position herself. THIS, Keith, is an extremist.
As someone else already pointed out, the patent only covers long file names. The FAT system itself is old enough that if it was ever patented, which I doubt, the patent is long expired. Which is fortunate, because for SD cards, thumb drives etc. the FAT format is part of the spec, so using a different file system is not an option.
The LFN patent must only have a few years left now anyway.
As an ex-pat who has no intention of returning, even for a visit, it makes little difference to me who wins. But for sentimental reasons I'm hoping for at least a decade of deadlocked, hung parliament that can't get anything done. Everything will still keep running, and things can only get better. The UK has been effectively governed from Brussels for a long time, and the regional government in London only seems to use its remaining powers to bleed the country dry with expensive military projects and tighten its control over the people that elected it. A pox on them all. By all means elect some *cough* representatives *cough* to sit in Westminster fiddling their expenses and pretending to be important, so long as they don't pass any more laws.
Hmmm. Do you perhaps work for a bank, Philip Cohen? You sure sound like an interested party.
I used to have a merchant credit card account. It cost me a bloody fortune, including a fraudulent "lease agreement" for equipment that I never had. They snatched a payment back out of my bank once on a customer's word, then when I proved the customer was a liar and demanded my money they told me it was too small a sum to be bothered with. Now I use PayPal. I have a couple of hundred at risk most of the time, but if they were to freeze my account and steal that it would STILL amount to less than a month's blood-sucking bank, merchant and "lease" charges. Fuck the credit card companies, I'm never going back. If PayPal goes tits up, something else will come along.
I agree. For a real example of scam artists you can't top credit card merchant services. If a user claims fraud or a lost card, they'll yank the payment right out of your bank account regardless of whether you have funds to cover it, AND charge you penalties on top. If you complain, even with proof that the customer is a bare faced liar, they just shrug and say the amount is too small to bother about. And let's not even mention the extortionate monthly fees. PP may have its problems, but I wouldn't accept online payments for anything if I still had to use a merchant account.
According to www.fas.org, work started on the original bunker buster - the BLU113 - in February 1st 1991, and the first operational units were "delivered to theater" on February 27th, during the first Gulf War. That was with the air force doing its own development.
However, you are right about the USAF being a colossal waste of money, and when the Obama administration took over its dismantling was actually mentioned in public.
"1) how can you flood a market with anything non-existent? Perhaps this was supposed to be amusing but it reads more as idiocy than comedy."
Surely that's obvious. It's a futures market - you don't have to deliver anything today. Nobody knows whether the shares really exist until settlement day, and by that time - if things go according to plan - you will have placed a buy order for the exact same number of shares at a lower price. Meantime, the fact that your shares may really exist drives down the price for everyone, by supply and demand. On settlement day, the aggregators add up the totals and find you neither have to deliver nor accept any shares, but you are owed a sum of money for the difference in price.
"Naked long buying" works exactly the same way and is not illegal - it is just offering to buy shares you have no money for, and selling them before settlement if they go up. Stockbrokers offer this service all the time to creditworthy customers. The difference is, they tend to make sure you have collateral they can liquidate if things go wrong. This is called "making a margin call" and is the reason people jump out of tall buildings when markets crash.
Short selling can go wrong, too. Famously, William Sharon's Bank of California went bust in 1885 because he was short in mining shares on the day that a major silver strike was announced. He jumped off a bridge.
...to spend the money on. A billion quid is about the cost of a good sized Las Vegas casino-resort, which would employ far more people for a much longer time, and perhaps earn a bit of money on the side. BAE's research efforts could be redeployed to do something about improving the weather - not much chance they'll succeed, but what's new about that?
"So, the Vatican are condemning a story about a girl who refuses to have sex outside of marriage"
I guess you haven't read them either. She's actually a horny little devil who openly lusts after her boyfiend (sic) for two and a half books. It's the righteous (undoubtedly Mormon) vampire that refuses to sample the goods until they're legally wed. And then he knocks her up on the first attempt.
(well, as a responsible parent I need to know what filth my kids are filling their minds with)
First I tried the update servers, but on seeing that my download would take 1 day, 23 hours or so I downloaded the ISO image instead (23 minutes). It installed ok, but I didn't get too far with it after that because it shipped with a beta version of Grub that doesn't work. Grub will boot whatever is on its top line, but if you move the cursor off that line it hangs forever. I was much more concerned that it didn't trash my XP partition than that 9.10 worked, so I manually edited the grub.inf file to put XP at the top, breathed a huge sigh of relief when XP booted, and decided to do without Ubuntu until the next service pack.
For the short time I had 9.10 up and running, I did find one major annoyance. I could not set the clock to the right time. The PC clock was right when I started the install but somewhere in the procedure it got set to some other time, 14 hours behind my local, and it would not be reset. Well I could try, but about 2 seconds after I finished it reverted again.
Robert Pulliam said:
"A significant portion of the proposed LA to LV route will go through Urbanized areas"
I would have a little more faith in his proposal if I thought his company was familiar with the route. His "significant [Urbanized] portion" would be the thirty miles or so getting out of Los Angeles. The next 240 miles would be through the Mojave Desert, some of the most rugged and least developed country in the US, with only two small towns (Barstow and Baker) in the whole stretch. Anyone who has ever driven it would know the route crosses seven or eight north-south trending mountain ranges, with very few opportunities for straight and level. The country is open, with free ranging cattle and numerous other critters including wild horses, and a human population that has little liking for outsiders. Fences will be cut before the fencing crews are out of sight. Nothing is going to travel safely through this wilderness at 150mph, let alone 300mph, unless perhaps it runs down the middle of the freeway and relies on the traffic lanes to keep it clear of obstructions.
Passenger train service to Las Vegas was terminated in 2001, for the very good reason that nobody used it. This scheme, like the Maglev, is nothing more than a plan to sucker money out of Eastern investors.
@cirby 18:18: "the operation was implemented completely by the FBI, and there's no indication at all that Israeli intelligence had anything to do with the breach."
Ah, but why did the FBI decide to run the operation, that's the question.
"He must have made some kind of attempt, which triggered the FBI's interest in him," Mr. Piernick said. "They cut in between him and whoever he was trying to work with and posed as an intelligence officer, agent or courier to handle the issue..." (Washington Times)
And the answer comes out of the man's own mouth - "I thought I was working for you already."
"I don’t get recruited by the Mossad every day. By the way, I knew this day would come." Questioned further by the undercover agent, Nozette said, "I thought I was working for you already. I mean, that’s what I always thought [the foreign company] was – just a front."
For a comprehensive background putting this particular incident in perspective:
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/10/20/the-dark-side-of-the-special-relationship/
Clearly an example of the Higgs Effect, whereby if a Higgs boson is in danger of being detected it goes back in time to upset the experiment, thereby avoiding detection. The meltdown and coolant leak at the LHC is thought to have been a previous occurrence of the same phenomenon.
Note, this theory was proposed in all seriousness by an otherwise intelligent-seeming physics boffin, not found in a Dan Brown novel. Ah, wait a minute - it says here this boffin is a leading proponent of string theory. That explains it, then.
... What about the perjury? The necessary wording for the DMCA takedown includes, "I declare, under penalty of perjury, that..... (etc)"
Clearly the perjury part of the Act doesn't have any teeth, otherwise we'd be entertained by images of lawyers and executives for this and many other companies being dragged away in handcuffs.
At least you declared your interest, as a software developer. I too am a software developer and I comprehensively disagree with you.
You may have negotiated with your employer (or yourself, if you self-publish) a right to be paid a royalty for each copy sold, but that's where your rights END, with the agreement you negotiated with the first seller. You cannot claim any "right" to control or be paid for what someone else does with your software after that first sale, no matter what imaginary rights the industry may like to claim for itself.
Supposing instead of writing an application, you write the embedded software for (say) an MP3 player and negotiate a royalty for each unit sold. You may argue that the ROM, the PCB and the plastic case is merely a method of conveying the software, and while the purchaser has the right to sell the ROM, PCB, plastic case etc they have no right to sell the software with it.* Try taking THAT to court - we'd be laughing about it on El Reg for a year. But from a developer's point of view, there's absolutely no difference between the two cases. You develop code, you get paid for every copy sold. By the original seller, that is. End of your involvement.
* Not that it hasn't been tried, mind you - IBM tried to impose a no-resale clause for PS/2s on the grounds that the ROM BIOS firmware was licensed and not sold. I don't know if they ever took anyone to court but if so, it would be an interesting precedent - heloooooo, OutLaw?
The true unemployment rate here is much worse than 10%. They only count those currently claiming unemployment. Approximately equal numbers of people (a) have already run out of benefits, (b) were denied them in the first place so were never counted, or (c) recently left school or college and have not yet found a job. See, you only get unemployment benefits in the USA if you held a qualifying job for some specified period before you lost it. Part timers, contractors, job hoppers and those new to the workforce need not apply.
On the bright side, a number of companies that downsized their techies now find they need a bit of work done after all, and the jobs-on-the-side business has become a seller's market.
I'll second Peter39's comment above - a price point of about $25 might make it worthwhile to upgrade, though still hardly necessary.
Of course, one can always cut costs by sticking with XP and whatever version of Office and other MS applications are currently standard in the organization. I believe that's the strategy we'll be following here, at least as long as we can still get XP licenses to upgrade new computers.
I see from the comments above that we've heard from the authors.
Perhaps Congress could resolve the problem by reducing copyright terms to a realistic level, like say 20 years - retrospectively, of course, as was the Sonny Bono extension. That way, by the time Google and the publishers have finished arguing, the subject will be moot.
While I'm happy for you, anonymous coward, that you apparently get such good service, the experiences you relate - if true - are far from typical.
Much more typical was the experience of a friend of mine, who went to the doctor with a severe headache. The doctor referred him for an MRI, as you rightly point out he had the discretion to do. However, before the local hospital would carry out the procedure, they wanted some assurance they'd be paid, so they contacted his insurance company (HMO). The insurance company in turn contacted the doctor, who filled out the proper forms in support of his referral and faxed them back. The insurance company sent it all to one of their assessors for a final decision.
All this took about a week. On the sixth day, my friend died at the age of 36 from a brain aneurysm.
If extradited, he might as well be facing the death penalty. He's never going to see the light of day again anywhere, ever. The usual practice in the USA - especially in matters that upset the government - is to sentence to consecutive terms for each offense, which in this case will probably total more than his life expectancy.
@ledmil - "I'd love to know how the cost of the 'damage' was calculated? "
I thought everyone knew that. After prolonged and exhaustive analysis, it was found to be the exact amount necessary in each case to make it an extraditable felony. Funny how these things work out.
"... which they fear will cost the UK economy as much as £1.5bn a year."
So the employers are part of the British economy and their workers are part of - what? Do they employ nothing but Poles and Romanians who wire their paychecks back to the mother country?
I'm sick of reading this sort of one-sided crap. It's about time employers' groups woke up to the concept that the money they pay their staff is watering their own fucking garden, by putting money into circulation that strengthens the economy they're dependent on.
It's not the same as dropping the charges. If they just drop the charges or the prosecution decides not to go for trial, the case isn't resolved. There's always the possibility that new evidence may show up, or the DA will worry about being called soft on crime, and the case can be prosecuted at some later date. But when the court is convened and the prosecution offers no evidence, it's over and done with. The accused is declared not guilty and any attempt to go after him again would be dismissed as double jeopardy. It's the same as if you elect to go to (US) court for a speeding ticket and the cop doesn't show up, only more formal.
Badgers, because I want to use one of the new icons. No other reason.
What happened to the mountains behind Carnaby Street? I know they used to be there, I saw them in one of the Austin Powers movies where he time-travels back to 1969, but an extensive search of Street View failed to find even a small hill today. I can only imagine HM Government had them removed because they were blocking the surveillance cameras.
I love my home town - it's about the only place left in the US where personal liberty is still important and adults are allowed to say and do things without thinking of the children. Our mayor is a former mob lawyer who played himself in the movie Casino, and we love him. So, we have some nutters - what else would you expect to find in the Review-Journal comments section? Our local newspaper combines the reporting quality of the Sun with the paranoia of the Daily Mail and an editorial board that considers Rush Limbaugh a dangerous liberal. I buy it myself sometimes, though not often, as my cat refuses to use the litter box if it notices.
Well it's after 5pm, I'm off to practice with my machine guns in case I see one o' them Yankee revenooers on my land.
"anyone else find it odd that its the house of lords that seem more intent on looking after the little people?"
It's called "noblesse oblige, n. Benevolent, honorable behavior considered to be the responsibility of persons of high birth or rank." Also known as Doing The Right Thing. It used to be the main characteristic of the British establishment - in the 1950s, the Civil Service would have gone all Sir Humphrey about ID cards and just prevented it ever happening. For that matter, the police would have indignantly rejected laws for social control, instead of forming a private corporation to lobby for more of them.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
When they're finished in Spokane, they can come and sort out my property in Las Vegas. I've been battling against these improbably cute pests for years without success, as their numbers are constantly replenished from a rodent city on an inaccessible empty lot across the street. They're in my roof, under my foundations, and have a veritable apartment complex under my front garden. Every so often a mature plant keels over dead and I find all its roots have been eaten. They've even killed a tree. Gassing and flooding doesn't seem to bother them, and poison bait takes a bigger toll on the local birds. Somebody needs to develop a chipmunk myxomatosis.
A lot of commenters here seem to be under the impression that the USA is like Britain, except with accents and cowboy hats. It isn't. There have been numerous European visitors who made that mistake, challenged a mugger, and went home in a box.
You're responsible for your own safety over here - armed robbers are the rule, not the exception, and the police never show up until it's all over. I would have shot to kill.
"Sounds to me like this Skumanick may have some issues."
By a curious coincidence, two judges in adjacent Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, went to jail recently for corruption. The scam, which ran from 2003 until it was discovered late in 2008, involved sentencing juveniles for trivial offenses to lengthy terms at private detention facilities, in return for kickbacks. Between them they netted several million dollars in kickbacks. Here's a link to a New York Times article about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?ref=us
Now Skumanick started making a fuss about these kids just before the judge scam came to light. I wonder whether a private juvenile facility was being lined up to provide the counseling service the kids were coerced into, and whether Skumanick received a consideration for his marketing efforts. I think we should be told.
@AC 13:25: "A lot of people who lived in the 80s hated Thatcher."
I not only hated Thatcher, I still do. It's because of her that I left the UK, never to return. In fact, I plan a 3 day drunken celebration when she eventually dies. You didn't live through the 80s? Or maybe you were a child. You obviously don't remember how she deliberately put Britain into an economic crisis similar to the one we're in today by jacking interest rates to 18%, driving the Pound about twice as high as its natural level and holding it there for two years. You don't remember that mortgage payments tripled over six months, that prices crashed, that people were walking away and abandoning their houses. You don't remember how manufacturing crashed because no business would borrow for new equipment in the UK, and nobody would buy our exports because of the exchange rate. You clearly don't remember the relief in the country when her own party sacked her and replaced her with a Tory version of Gordon Brown, only more useless, so useless that even the Sun turned against the Tories.
If you knew any of that, you'd know who to blame for having a radical Labour government these past years.
Only $225,000? That's practically an admission of triviality. But blame the lawyer, not the plaintiff. She might well have been content with actual damages plus a sweetener. What I find hard to believe is that an American lawyer will get out of bed in the morning for only $90,000 (40% of the award, if she gets it). It must be the recession.
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