Posts by Colin Jackson

Okay

This strikes me as a good idea. The religiousites and the would-be censors can now fuck off to their safenet, and any attempt to regulate the realnet could be countered with the statement "if it bothers you, fuck off to the safenet"

@Mark_T:

"The technical difficulties will never go away either no matter what level of technology is applied."

Shome Mishtake Shurely?

A fuel-efficient VTOL 'hands-off' system would clearly work. It could even be publicly owned (as in the 'automated taxi' idea above). We can't build one at the moment, but are you really saying we never could?

Meh.

I guess the point is that the buoyancy of a submersible in fresh water will be much less than that in salt water, making it less difficult to go down but more difficult to get back up again.

@Den: way to take people's comments too seriously, dude :)

Paris, because I'd love to plumb her depths.

Had enough.

My flight to New Zealand is booked for 3rd October. Good luck with the whole 'prison island' project. So long suckers.

Paris because she can sample my DNA anytime.

Eh?

Do you have to be an 'out of control eco-nazi' to think that the 4th most densely populated country in the world could perhaps be...y'know...a bit less densely populated. They DID talk about a sustained 0.25% pa decline - hardly a catastropic reduction. At that rate it would take a century to get down to 46 million, and nearer 2 centuries to get down to their target population size.

Paris, cos this is a shagging thread.

Heh...

They should have had Sylvester McCoy as the ghost. And Mickey and K9 as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.

Paris, because she's bigger on the inside.

Er...

@Richard: Here's your coat...

Hmm..

To be honest, I'm as big a privacy advocate as anybody, but for some reason Streetview doesn't really worry me. I'm no more worried than making an unplanned appearance on Streetview than I would be about walking past a street-based bit of TV reportage or being in the crowd at a sporting event. Maybe it's just the geek in me outweighing the bolshy bastard for once.

Why?

I like to put my WinXPPro taskbar to the side of the desktop, as I have a 2-monitor system. Why does it regularly reset to the default 'bottom' configuration after a reboot? Also, when I set the language bar to not be displayed, after a reboot it returns. Any solutions?

What?? Might as well get some useful info while she's here!

Derek...

"The Britons?? Who are they then?"

Meh...

Moving to New Zealand in October. I've given up. Seriously. I can't stand it any more. It's either emmigrate or pick up a rifle.

@Simon

"Does Singapore have the same high rates of criminality and anti-social behaviour that we see in Britain?"

Britain doesn't have high rates of criminality and anti-social behaviour, as far as I can see. Got comparative data? Or just been reading too much Daily Mail?

But...

...it's "knob", surely? Tsk, the chavs of today...

Bah

Does this mean there'll be a subtle natural selection towards games set in a modern-day environment where contemporary ads are appropriate? Can we expect to say goodbye to sf, fantasy or historical genre games in favour of gritty urban dramas?

Adverts break the suspension of disbelief. It's not like media companies have a great track-record of being subtle about product placement as it is. Unsubtle product-placement always ruins a movie.

Er...

Isn't there an irony in Sky (part of the Murdoch mediocracy) developing a show whose theme revolves around the individual rebelling against challenging the man? Wouldn't the appropriate response be "In the spirit of Rog Blake, I'll stick with Freeview"?

Mine's the one with the leather shoulderpads.

Word

I got Vista with a laptop I bought in the Jan sales. Hated it on sight, not so much for its bloat but for the random pauses and the fact that any disk ops just took forever. Also, the constant flood of dialogs between me asking to do something and it doing it were a pain. Update would NOT work, despite several hours on the intertubes tring to fix the problem. Even manually applied updates failed to install, much less auto-updates, giving error numbers neither Microsoft nor anybody else has seemingly ever heard of. So when I finally got hold of the manual SP1, and THAT failed to install correctly, I knew there as no prospect of Vista ever getting any better for me, so I scrubbed it and put on XP. My laptop immediately sprang to life, and my only regret is I didn't do it sooner. Vista is a piece of shit.

Hmm

What an ugly bunch of hacktards. Keep up the...um...work.

Cool

At this rate, I'll be able to back myself up onto my own Ipod.

But wait...

I spend far more on live gigs than on recorded music. I did before filesharing took off, and still do now. I went to the trouble of checking my diary for 2007 and checking my CD rack - number of gigs attended 23, number of CDs bought direct from the artist at gigs 13, number of CDs bought via a retailer 2. That's never going to change. Tickets for a live gig go between £10-£30, CDs at gigs are usually around a tenner, throw in a couple of t-shirts. Why the fuck are artists worrying about those 2 CDs I got from Amazon which they probably only make a few pennies on anyway?

In any case, I thought we'd established a clear (and positive) correlation between an individual's inclination to fileshare and their inclination to spend money on music? Aren't filesharers the biggest purchasers? So what's the problem? Either filesharing is pushing music buying, or at the very worst filesharing is not impacting buying. At the end of the day, nobody can actually establish that filesharing is doing any harm. For all Bragg or any fucker else knows, it's actually driving sales. Tell me I'm wrong, but show me the figures if you do.

When did it become received wisdom that an 'artist' can do a job once and make money off it for the rest of his natural? Somebody pointed out that classical musicians work for a living. I'd add folk musicians to that too - Bragg should know this, he's performed with enough of them in his time. They don't expect a big enough audience to get by on CD sales, so they treate it as both an art-form and a regular paying job. The good ones thrive. The bad ones aren't being propped up by studio money, and have to go back to the army.

If you can't perform live, you're not an artist. If you can't do it well enough and often enough to make a living at it, then you're not a musician. Bragg's never going to starve because he can shove his guitar and amp in the back of the Mondeo and go do some gigs. In fact, you might argue that's his reason for being on the planet.

Hmm.

Surely the 'purpose' would be to stop the News Of The Screw profiting from the use of the video. If the judgement is that the video is intrusive, then the fact that it's widely available elsewhere shouldn't be a bar to preventing the people who 'leaked' it (ew.) from making hay with it.

Jeez

Go home Lester.

Heh

"Powered flaps"...

Mine's the mac.

What...

no CTRL-ALT-DEL?

Lame!

Must try harder next year.

Hah,

Who'd have thought it? Americans and fundamentalist Islamist have something in common after all...neither have a sense of irony.

Mine's the one of many colours.

Enough!

Yes, enough with the "freetard", or is El Reg now a fully paid up member of the "copyreich"?

-What?

"So how do you compete with free stuff?"

Ask bottled-water manufacturers. Ask printers of the bible. Ask the owners of any web-site that makes money but doesn't charge for what it does.

Content as a commodity is worth exactly what people are prepared to pay for it, no more, no less. There's no supply-and-demand at play.

I've made the point before: folk and jazz musicians make handy professional livings despite having minuscule sales. My favourite band make more money than I do as an IT professional just by gigging. They don't expect to make enough money to retire on from one album (though they do make them and sell them direct, thus keeping what profit is there for themselves), because they know their market isn't big enough, so they treat it like a job and put the hours in. They'll probably retire about the same time as me, only with more money. And they LOVE performing, whereas I only tolerate IT, so what's wrong with that business model?

Cheers Gary

"Don't flame the dwarf, he's not worth it!"

For many of us, D&D was our Breakfast Club.

So long Gary - HP:0.

@Spleen

"Besides, overusing a swearword takes away its impact."

Well, quite. So write out "cunt" a thousand times and it will NEVER...BOTHER...YOU...AGAIN...

Eh?

"I'm a veggie, proud of it"

Why?

Mine's the mink...

But...

Do they think that 15-year-old Johnny is going to BUY the software if they can't pirate it? With what? He's 15 ffs!

So if he can't pirate Windows and Photoshop, basically he's going to grow up not knowing how to use Windows or Photoshop, and is therefore very unlikely to buy it when he finally does get a job. In fact, he's unlikely to get a job that involves using Windows or Photoshop.

They should be handing the frigging stuff out at the school gates. Knobs.

Okay.

So presumably they'll block Google at the same time? No? How strange. Bearing in mind that Pirate Bay hasn't been found 'guilty' of anything in a Danish court, this is effectively censorship at the whim of an unelected judge. Nice.

Meh.

Good luck testing the SP. I'd give it a go, but I can't for the life of me get Windows Update to work on my brand new laptop.

There is a living to be made

"The fact is in Britain you can't earn a living from live music."

This is fantasy. How does he think the folk music scene has managed all these years? Folk music CD sales are miniscule - and CDs are very much seen as a nice supplement to one's income once the artist has garnered sufficient reputation to generate sales. But they're not the mainstay of how artists make a living.

Good folk musicians make a handy living doing live gigs, despite charging about half the ticket price of a contemporary band. What they can never do is get fabulously wealthy. And they have to be good to make good money. The problem with rock/pop is that artists expect to get rich being average, and at some time being able to retire and live off their royalties. Folk musicians know they have to put the graft in and work. I've seen folk artists travel 200 miles to do a gig to 40 people at under a tenner a ticket and STILL make money. Classical musicians seem to make a handy living performing live.

Music isn't like football. Musicians don't have to retire at 35. They should expect to keep working for their living, the same as the people who pay for their music. The idea that you can't do that playing live is nonsense - live is the modus operandi of most forms of music.

Well...

On the plus side: I get 20Mb reliably, the 3Gb limit only applies through peak times. There's no torrent throttling that I can see. It's not failed on me yet (going on for a year now). And nobody has complained about my downloading habits. The cost is comparable to BT.

On the minus side: Technical help? Forget it.

Meh...

I have chosen Paris Hilton because even SHE could be expected to have known all this without having to read about it in El Reg. This just in..."Pope - catholic!"

But...

So 15% of illegal downloads are done by students. But not all students live on campus. I couldn't begin to guess what the percentage is who do, but let's say for the sake of argument it's 33%. So if that's correct, then only 5% of illegal downloads are in fact the problem of college campuses. Hardly a large enough of a percentage to justify the draconian targeting of campuses throughout America and the force majeur of federal legislation.

Even if campus downloading were wiped out tomorrow, it still would hardly make a dent. What's 5%? A year's growth in file-sharing?

Uh-huh...

I just brought a new laptop that came with Vista Home (and a licence). It was so shoddy I wiped it and put XP on, for which I don't have a licence. Technically, I'm pirating, but what exactly have MS lost? I paid for one licence, I'm using one instance of their OS. It's not my fault that Vista sucks ass.

In the end, it's pretty much a zero-sum game (not quite, maybe, but mostly). There's only so much that businesses and individual users will spend on licences. If the price gets too high they'll do without or find cheaper alternatives. MS, Adobe et al rely on a tendency to want to standardize (that is, wanting to have everybody using the same software and the same file formats) to prop up their businesses. But if the cost gets too high, that tendency won't stop individuals and businesses from finding other methods. Conversion software for file formats isn't generally hard to write, even when the 'owners' of the file-formats aren't being cooperative (I speak from personal experience).

On another point, another cost to companies if licensing is strictly enforced is the cost of training (which could amount to several times the cost of the actual licence). How many companies can actually afford to train ALL their employees in Office, or Photoshop or whatever? That's the logical consequence if new users don't have access to cheap ways to self-train.

I worked in the games industry years ago, and I remember when expensive dev-kits for consoles came along (including the cartridge bays which you needed). These couldn't be circumvented. So all that happened is we had to train everybody. Whereas for PC games we could rely on newbies having done quite a lot of self-training, they COULDN'T self-train on the consoles, so our dev costs sky-rocketted. Many industries are founded on self-starting 'creatives' - does the BSA really want to throttle that?

I chose Paris Hilton because even she is capable of more incite into how the creative industries work than this article shows.

Bah.

Well I'll never know, since the Vista install on my spanky new OEM laptop is singularly unable to update itself, no matter what I try. (*%$*^% thing.

Puff.

I'd have been fuming.

Mine's the smelly jacket.

Meh.

If the tip jets are just to get the rotor going to provide the initial lift, why don't they just use a giant rubber band?