Posts by Maty 714 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2007
She told him to put some ice on it? We need more detail here. Was it particularly cold outside, or does this particular prison have ice machines? Or did she offer the ice as part of the medical treatment for the condition?
What kind of African antelopes are we talking about here?
And who is Miley Cyrus?
If the market on browsers is free fair and unfettered, why do something like 80% of computers run IE? Is it because users appreciate the extra security that IE provides? The privacy (hint: look at index.dat), or is is because IE is so slim, mean and fast?
Or is it because MS use their monopoly to push their browser on to the general public? As a further clue, note that only a small minority of skilled computer users have IE as their browser of choice.
So IE is an inferior browser foisted on the public by the Microsoft windows monopoly. Despite all the ranting by some posters here, that is a fact.
Had a user once who insisted on storing his mp3 collection that way. Sadly his collection got so much larger than his file size allocation that it overwrote the buffers on the filestore and consequently the MBR was unable to locate where his files were on the hard disk.
Normally I'd be able to restore from backup, but sadly my last backup was made on the assumption that he'd reduced his mailbox size as I'd strongly suggested. Also, my recovery tools only work on text and pictures, because that's all that's meant to be stored on that server, so while I 'might' be able to get his emails back the MP3s were toast.
He believed it. Actually his taste in music was so crap that I didn't even bother keeping the MP3s for myself.
...we can see that this poor woman is either ignorant or demented, but an awful lot of people agree with her. And when politicians who don't know their ASDL from their arseholes can see votes in it, they will try to make her harebrained vision reality. And no-one is going to publicly oppose it because they can be cast as 'promoting porn for kids'.
Perhaps we should be pointing to the wave of sexual crimes and deviancy that has swept across the world since porn came to the internet. If not 'wave' then 'huge rise'. Perhaps 'a statistically significant figure'. Anything?
After watching that vid, I'd say cop and granny were perfectly suited - a pair of violent numbskulls. Incidentally, WAS granny speeding? 'Cos getting hit by a speeding 72 year old's car is a lot worse than getting hit by a taser.
Nevertheless, a taser should not be used as an electrical whip.
One of the largest minorities in England is the Polish (i.e. mainly Slavonic) community. Lots arrived at around the same time as the Pakistani and West Indian communities (and more have come over in recent years). Not being Celtic, Nordic, or Anglo-Saxon, I'd be interested if the BNP is planning to send us 'back to where we came from' as well. This would help to show whether the BNP is racist and xenophobic, or merely xenophobic.
I guess we could all go to Sweden and vote for the Pirate party. Up anchors, me hearties!
Yup - I've got the damn thing on my computer. Disabled it even before I finished reading the article and will now set about removing it. The annoying thing is that I have my windows update set only for security patches, specifically because I don't want MS buggering about with my setup without good reason.
This makes my browser LESS secure. They didn't ask me before they did it and I didn't want it. So now I know I can't trust MS even to add security patches without playing silly buggers.
You don't play major games on it, you use it to keep in touch with things on the move. (I've used mine to have a video conference with a student whilst changing planes at Vancouver airport.) Get an extended battery (or better yet, two) with ten hours of life and you can cross the Atlantic, watch several episodes of your favourite TV show, prepare your emails for sending as soon as you land, read the newspapers you downloaded before you took off, listen to music, and work on a current paper. That's what my Asus 900 netbook does. With linux.
I do trust MS Windows. When I'm hooking up to foreign hotspots and sharing my connection with dozens of unknown machines, I trust MS to be insecure enough to get my machine hacked an hour after I've left home. How the hell does that 'parent' manage secure his XP box? Working as a tech at a major British university I never managed it to my satisfaction ....
There are frequent reports of tasers used as coercive instruments in situations where a gun would stay in the holster.
You're a cop with a taser. Is a member of the public arguing with you? Taser him. Refusing to do what you say? Taser. Not doing what you said fast enough for you? Taser. Don't like the look of the guy? (Too big/aggressive) Taser, taser, taser.
I have no problem with a taser being used as a substitute for a gun. But sometimes it 's used as a whip. And that seems an increasingly common use - which may tell us a lot about the changing relationship between police and public.
Much of the recent legislation which this government has passed is of two categories; 'we know what is good for you' and 'trust us to make sure that this over-broad legislation is selectively applied in your interest'.
What appalls those members of the public who fell for this line (broadly described under the epithet 'Daily Mail readers') is the discovery that they can't trust their politicians, who are only human, and rather flawed humans at that.
It's interesting that when the expenses row broke, the establishment's first reaction was to look to see what laws the person who leaked the information could be charged with. If we extrapolate the current trend a few years down the line, it is possible that 'protection of govt data' 'anti-terrorist security measures' and 'prevention of irresponsible reporting' legislation would have ensured that the scandal never saw the light of day.
Hmmmm ... perhaps they could nail the newspapers under hate crime legislation. The scandal has not caused people to love their politicians very much.
People have sex, you say? That's disgusting. And there's visual proof on youtube? Horrible, horrible.
Someone should think of the children. And how they got here in the first place. Since they are also visual proof that this loathsome conduct has been going on, lock them up as well.
Bill, master of the immaculate conception.
We pay those MPs with our taxes. Can there be any other job in the universe where the employees are allowed to call the police because someone has shown their employers what they are claiming expenses for?
Fortunately we do have the employer's last resort. Come the next election, let's fire the sodding lot of them. While we still can.
The cops tell the jury that the odds are 'millions to one' against your DNA matching that at the scene of the crime.
The fact that as they ran their lossy DNA profile against a database of millions means that the odds are in favour of a match with some poor sucker somewhere, and this time it was you.
Good luck explaining that to the jury.
(Didn't the FBI try to nail a preacher who had never left Washington State, USA for the Madrid train bombings on the basis of his fingerprint profile?)
What is really scary about all this is that the people who are setting up the DNA database really think that they are the good guys. It reminds me of a robot in the sci-fi story who asked the hero 'If we do not know everything about you, how can we best look after you? If we don't know everything about everyone else, how can we fully protect you?'
It's amazing how regularly the satire of the past 40 years is becoming reality.
I had a user who had trouble remembering what day of the week it was, let alone a reasonably strong password. We compromised by a system in which half her password - the complex bit with random caps and numbers -was on a post-it note on her computer. The other half - name of a childhood teacher, pet or whatever, was stored in her tiny mind.
It was a very secure password, because unless the user was at the comp she didn't know the full password herself, and none of the other users of the office had the cracking ability, or the inclination, to try finding the missing half.
Eating large amounts of meat every day isn't. And your bowels did not evolve handling large amounts of processed meat like bacon.
But how is it that some natural instincts - such as men hitting any woman they fancy with a club and dragging her off to a cave - are considered impolite these days, while it is a legitimate excuse to eat meat because 'it's only natural'?
In the interests of full disclosure, I'll add that I'm a vegetarian - not because I love animals, but because I hate plants.
Many sysadmins will leave a backdoor to get back into the system even after they have left. Even the best-run outfits tend to grow organically and have their little quirks that a new sysadmin can't be expected to get to grips with. I'd go so far as to say that it's a rare sysadmin who doesn't do a bit of unpaid support after leaving a company, and sometimes the easiest way to do it is to log right in with admin privileges you have left yourself.
Is that patents run out - eventually. So once the 'press a key and see the result on the monitor' type patents have expired, then because these patents were so general, everything remaining will be unpatentable.
Next thing to watch for is a big push by the software companies to get patents extended, in the same way that the music industry, having killed music as an art form, extended copyright to cover real music that was about to come into the public domain.
I have to point out that lead cookie holders might have been a bit confused having missed previous episodes. However, if given suitable incentives - beer, cash and (in appropriate cases) sex - I might be persuaded to torrent the relevant episodes through pirate bay.
The cost will high, for the wrath of the BOFH is not lightly incurred, but I feel it is my duty to get the missing episodes out to all you lead cookie plebs out there.
If what the US govt did was not shameful, why try to make a secret of it?
And secondly, doing bad things (and torturing people - or sending them off to be tortured by subcontractors - is pretty near as bad as it gets) cannot and should not be covered by state secrecy laws, because it will encourage the government to do other bad things.
The people that authorized this need to be brought to account. If they can present a defence, we should hear it and judge. But they can't just pass an executive order that it didn't happen.
Are those the people who want to put their adverts on other people's copyright material without paying? Or are they the people who are against the idea?
Intercepting ships on the high seas for one's own profit is piracy. Now phorm reckons that objecting to the intercepting of other people's data for profit is also piracy. Biggest load of crap I've read since ... oh yes, Jackie Smith saying the govt is "Committed to protecting the privacy of UK consumers"
'The government plans to spend £2bn for ISPs to intercept details of their customers' emails, VoIP calls, instant messaging and social networking.'
But details of your online chats with leathergoddesses.com will never be left on the back of a bus. Cos you can trust the govt to make sure your private data is secure.
It was that bit about asking Gordo to pick a window. I think he's ready to move his IT life from DOS 6 now. Possibly even windows 98, or maybe only windows 95.
Sadly though, if you want to get authoritarianism, illiberality and censorship out of our political culture you can't just change the politicians. You have to change the minds (using the term loosely) of those people who keep voting for them.
As far as I know, tax avoidance is legal, and done by every person or company that can afford a tax consultant. It means avoiding those taxes which the revenue has decided you should pay when in fact, you don't have to, and how to change or adjust your activities so as to not pay tax.
If you don't buy an expensive PC because you don't want to pay the VAT, that's avoiding tax.
Tax evasion, on the other hand is not paying taxes you are legally bound to pay. It is an anti-social criminal offence that can get you put in prison. So if you say Google avoid tax, so what? If you are accusing them of specific criminal activity, that's somewhat different. As someone commented, the line between tax avoidance and tax evasion is as thick as a prison wall.
He said the decision 'would help the government obtain "robust results" from the pilot'.
Have you noticed the fondness of some govt spokesmen for the word 'robust'? As in 'robust policing' or 'robust legislation'? Is is because 'robust' sounds so much better than 'fascist'?
Has been done. Some tech mag had an article about this engineer who did a lot of work in Japan, so he arranged for a indoor heli that worked off the net. So when he went east he'd VPN to his heli, and fire up its video. Then fly around his house on the US west coast and make sure that the doors and windows were okay and that the cat was eating properly. Then park it on the recharger. Sounds like the guy had too much time on his hands, but the gadget was way cool.
'Once you have anonymous police you have a Police State. Any cop who hides their shoulder numbers should be summarily dismissed.'
Police are human, and have a standard set of human failings. And like anyone, they don't like being caught in the wrong. Sadly, in the cause of making England 'safer' politicians have decided to award more and more powers to the police and bungled attempts to make the police more accountable'. So police use their greater powers to cover up their own misconduct and we are shocked?
Come on - politicians couldn't have passed the legislation they did without at least the passive consent of the public. It's the public and the media that has been screaming at the authorities to protect them from hoodies with knives, child abusers, terrorists ... (You'll find the full list on the front page of our much-loved Daily Mail). Politicians are reacting to this by ever more draconian legislation.
If it's a police state, don't blame the police. We wanted it, we urged our politicians to make it so. And isn't it nice to feel so safe?
The idea that phorm is going to be sunk by people power has one drawback. People. Sure no self-respecting Reg reader will touch their product with a bargepole and may make an effort to change their ISP if phorm kicks off. That's a few thousand of you lost to phorm then.
Now let's turn to the millions who don't know what deep-packet inspection is, and wouldn't care if they did. These are the people who couldn't switch ISPs because its even harder than programming a video recorder. If conficker can infect millions of PCs because the owners are too braindead to use MS update do you seriously think they know how to cope with phorm, or even know that they have to?
As if they cared. With everyone from their local supermarket to the govt and yes, 'a certain large search engine' helping themselves to personal data in huge handfuls, what's one more nose in the trough? Most people don't care enough to fight for their privacy because they know they lost it some time ago.
"The blog, run by Rogers Cadenhead, published six stories using between 33 and 79 words of the AP reports."
So has your story, since I'll assume 'and', 'but', 'a', 'the' and so on are common to all the stories mentioned. Or do you mean contiguous words, or relevant words, or ... actually as reporters, isn't it your job to explain?
Is supermarket booze so much cheaper? Does the govt tax pub booze more, or do the landlords have greater operating costs/profits? And why don't the pubs just buy their booze from the supermarkets?
And surely the solution is to get pub prices down rather than keep trying to get supermarket prices up.
Maybe (since our govt likes making new laws) create an offence called 'drunk in public'. Statutory £50 fine, used to subsidize beer in pubs. There'd be a nice symmetry in having drunken chavs subsidize cheap beer for the rest of us.
watching politicians trying to legislate on something they don't know the first damn thing about?
I do know IT and I can see HM gov making a right horse's arse of trying to control it. I know little about nuclear power, traffic control, or the mechanics of immigration or national defence. It's rather chilling to realize that the muppets allegedly running the show are probably just as ignorant.
Good as it is to read that Ms Bee's comments were indeed due to it being that time of the month (i.e. the first, it being April), I could only wish that our Moderatrix had not expressed her rant with quite such splendidly Shakespearian eloquence. It was a wonderful read, and given the nature of the commentards(TM) on El Reg, I do hope that the gentlemen will refrain from Bee-baiting in the hope of an encore. I'm not holding my breath though.
I join the ranks of those crestfallen readers who will never be able to make the necessary despicable pro-nazi comments apparently required for the opportunity to kiss the Moderatrix's undoubtedly delectable derriere.
sigh
... in the male hormonal cycle is there a fatal urge to go out and buy something that has at least two LEDs and/or goes 'meep' once an hour?
By extensive research among male geeks, I've managed to narrow the time frame to between age 8 and 75. Almost all Geeks admitted to several such purchases, many over £250, and particularly regretted those purchases that ran anything by Microsoft.
Those with particularly virulent versions of this syndrome have become leaders of government IT projects.
These are UFOs. Let's be clear - these objects seem to be flying, and have not yet been definitively identified. Ergo, they clearly are unidentified flying objects.
Doesn't mean they are alien spacecraft.
Black helicopters, because if you look at those pics sideways and squint a bit ...
The USA has a population of 300 million of which - according to the census stats - about 32 million are juvenile females of the target age. If we assume that the number without camera mobiles is balanced by the number of teenage boys who receive this 'child porn' and 22% are into sexting, I make it about six and three quarter million juveniles that they need to lock up for seven years to, er, protect the children.
Better start building them prisons, because factoring in the juveniles under 10 who come into the target category means that the number will go up by 900,000 inmates per year until the time the first wave of juvenile child pornographers are released.
That will stop the little buggers from being disrespectful and playing on my lawn.
There's a serious issue here. I don't mean some idiot fantasizing about some idiot band of semi-dressed 'singers'. I mean the blatant dissing of Coffee (note the capital letter) on a geek forum, and by none other than the moderatrix (who deserves no capital letter after her comments).
Ma'am, are you not aware that Coffee is all that keeps thousands of sysadmins around the country hanging to sanity by the tips of their well-chewed fingernails? That geeks - who let's be honest - have trouble with social interactions anyway, should try to make conversation whilst not fussing about preparing mugs of java?
As a character in User Friendly remarks 'Of course Coffee is not an essential like oxygen - I can hold my breath for over a minute.'
For shame, moderatrix!
I've just used it to show a friend around Cambridge. We took a sort of virtual walking tour of the city and I pointed out various colleges and pubs and where to hire a punt from. The fact that we were both on different continents and neither of us in the UK didn't matter at all. I love the internet.
Incidentally, it's a good thing that cameras came out before the privacy nuts really got going or I doubt their use would be allowed by anyone except licensed photographers - and the government.
Let's see ... getting hit by a 15kg Maine Coon could cause concussion, whilst felis nigripus maxes out at 1.5kg - a weight factor difference of 10. On the other hand nigripus is a ferocious little beast which would do a lot more damage when it hit, whilst a Maine Coon would probably go to sleep on your face.
Personally, I think the ideal cat to lob at someone you seriously dislike would be a liger, but at half a ton, you'd need to get a trebuchet into the bedroom first .
Joke alert, because as a serious feliophile the author does not support the use of cats as domestic light artillery.
becoming an omnitheist? That's someone who believes in Jesus, Muhammet, Microsoft, Zeus, Xenu, Krishna and every other God ever conceived, up to and particularly including the Flying Sphagetti Monster. Of course, you can't follow ALL the commandments all the time, but not even the most fervent monotheist can do that. It's all relative. Advantages of omnitheism include
So many religious holidays you hardly have to work at all
Backing of a horde of deities, saints and blessed ones for all occasions
Always having a local church/temple/mosque/sabbat just around the corner
Not being bothered by fanatics trying to convert you to their belief system
And above all; getting a choice of paradises when you pass on.
Bless you, my brothers and sisters in faith and/or faithlessness.
was it the govt's bright idea on early closing times in earlier decades that brought about the British attitude that the way to drink is to get as much alcohol down your neck in the shortest possible time?
At some point, it may occur to the government that social engineering is not something that politicians should attempt.
>>'What if one of the compromised computers was at the Department of Defense or NASA?' <<
Indeed. And what if the BBC is actually run by lizard overlords intent on dominating the planet? And what if the person making the inane comment quoted above had to stick to the real facts of the case instead of thinking up scary fact-free hypotheses because there's not enough in the actual material in the story to get people worked up?
The basic fact is that most ISPs know damn well when a customer has an active botnetted machine because it behaves differently to your average box. They also know that many customers just don't care as long as they think their machine is working properly. 'I never put anything confidential on my computer so why should I worry?' is a very frequent response.
Since a pwned machine probably needs fdisk and a reinstall (for many users an expensive hassle - even if they do have installation disks) , many a response to a report from an ISP that a comp is hacked will be for the user to change ISPs.
ISPs don't want to lose customers. Many customers don't care. Kudos to the Beeb for explaining why people SHOULD care.
If the British libel law was twisted into the shape it was in order to suit the very important Duke of Brunswick, who no doubt knew a good few judges.
On the other hand, and just to be on the safe side, I withdraw the insinuation, and unreservedly apologise to the shades of the deceased duke, his heirs and successors, and those of the judges in question.
Um ... you've posted your views on this page, and let's assume that 30% of those were reading at work, thus lowering their productivity. It's a pretty simple matter to calculate how many times your post has been viewed, take 30% of this at the national average wage, and (using your figures) charge you for 2%.
Where can we send your bill?
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