Posts by Red Bren

Brit smut slingers shafted by UK censors' stiff new stance

Instead of criminalising the acts of consenting adults, perhaps the UK parliament should concern itself more with the criminal acts against non-consenting children committed by those within their own ranks?

Musicians sue UK.gov over 'zero pay' copyright fix

Re: Makes sense

"Because there is only one person listening to the music, I should only have to pay once."

I played a CD in the car while my family were travelling with me. Where do I send the money I owe?

Yes, UK. REST OF EUROPE has better mobe services than you

Re: Can't trust the survey

Greater Manchester is a metropolitan and ceremonial county that encompasses more than one city, so you can't call it "the second largest city after London". With a population of 2.685 million, it's less populous than the West Midlands (Greater Birmingham) at 2.738 million. With an area of 1,276km^3 it's smaller than West Yorkshire (Greater Leeds) at 2,029km^3 or South Yorkshire (Greater Sheffield) at 1,552km^3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ceremonial_counties_of_England

The only measure where Manchester comes second to London is for it's own self-importance... (ducks for cover!)

Can't trust the survey

How can you trust a survey that defines Manchester (pop 420k) as a "big" city and Leeds (pop 720k) as a small city. What about Sheffield, Bradford and Liverpool?

http://www.ukcities.co.uk/populations/

We want a common industry approach so we can game it.

FTFY

MI6 oversight report on Lee Rigby murder: US web giants offer 'safe haven for terrorism'

Re: Jump on the privacy bandwagon

Isn't the answer to get MI6 to apply for a search warrant from the relevant US court? Of course that would involve due process, probable cause and an undeniable audit trail, and if there's one group keener than terrorists to hide their tracks, it's spooks.

'Snoopers' Charter IS DEAD', Lib Dems claim as party waves through IP address-matching

Re: Blind leading the blind

I find it distasteful that you're condemning Ms May on the basis of her appearance, when you could be condemning her for her words and deeds!

Useless 'computer engineer' Barbie fired in three-way fsck row

Re: Barbie films are just as bad

It's a typo. I meant "lead" role, but my phone had other ideas and I didn't spot it.

Don't give up the dream. I still want to be an astronaut when I grow up!

Barbie films are just as bad

Innacurate retellings of classic fairy tales with Barbie playing the kead role. The moral of the story always seems to be with hard work and quick thinking you can overcome adversity to become a princess, because anything else is a failure.

My 4 year old daughter is obsessed with these films but thankfully wants to be an astronaut.

LIFE, JIM? Comet probot lander found 'ORGANICS' on far-off iceball

Re: They may be rocket scientists...

Are you familiar with the Birmingham Screwdriver?

Mystery Russian satellite: orbital weapon? Sat gobbler? What?

Re: Bah!

Objection Mr Chairman

A constellation can refer to a collection of related objects.

As to the reference to geological time, the constellations in the night sky are slowly but constantly changing due to the proper motions of their constituent stars. In a timescale as short as 50000 years, many of today's constellations will be unrecognisable.

It's fluoridating the atmosphere

They're polluting our precious bodily fluids!

Nokia's N1 fondleslab's HIDDEN BRILLIANCE: The 'Z Launcher'

Re: Why can't we have this in real life?

Because some script kiddie will hack it so it moves away from your hand or to swap the buttons' functions. And they would upload the video that they recorded with your hacked webcam, so the whole internet can laugh at your frustration and humiliation.

It's space WAR: Comet launches fireballs at space-invading EARTH

Re: The Leonid shower in full swing here

So you're proposing a twist on the hypothesis that the oceans were seeded by comets?

The Leonid shower in full swing here

What do you mean, I'm supposed to see meteors? Through these rainclouds?

Sky: We're no longer calling ourselves British. Yep. And Broadcasting can do one, too

Pirate TV

Until the merger with BSB, Sky were broadcasting to the UK without a licence, effectively making them a pirate TV operation. But Uncle Rupert was such a generous supporter of the government, so it was ok for him to unfairly compete with the legitimate operator.

BOFH: SOOO... You want to sell us some antivirus software?

"have them keep all their work on a file server."

That's been the policy at almost every company I've worked for. Along with the policy of giving staff terabytes of unusable storage on their local machines, while refusing to invest in disk space on the file servers. And the network hasn't got the capacity to cope with more than one person at a time moving data about.

Has anyone invented network RAID yet? If every desktop in my office could contribute 1TB to a massively mirrored and striped array, I'd be delighted, even if the resulting shared drive was only 1TB. Although the network would still be a bottleneck.

Doctor Who trashing the TARDIS, Clara alone, useless UNIT – Death in Heaven

I'm with Brid-Aine on this

Her review sums up almost all my frustrations with this anti-climatic end to the series. But I'd like to add another.

Unless the whole of humanity have been burying their dead in metal coffins, how did the corpses all reanimate with full cyberman armour? I'll give the writers the benefit of the doubt over the whole cyber-pollen thing, even though it's a blatant rip off of borg nanites, but I'm not having this conjuring up armour from thin air.

BBC clamps down on illicit iPlayer watchers

Re: Where's my TV license rebate

You've already had it. Without the revenue from content sales and international syndication, the licence fee would be higher.

Personally, I like the idea of overseas viewers subsidising BBC content.

A rock and a hard place

The BBC are in a difficult position. On one side, they have licence fee payers who want to access content on multiple platforms and may not be satisfied or even catered for by the official iplayer app. On the other side they have rights holders to negotiate with, and one of the elements of the negotiation will be the security of the delivery mechanism from "piracy" or out-of-region distribution.

This isn't just about the BBC, it's a symptom of the conflict between producers and consumers over how content is accessed and paid for. The ideal solution for the consumer would be an open, common API used by all content providers, that anyone could build a player to access, with a payment model that would support TV licences, Satellite/Cable TV subsciptions, or Pay Per View. Sadly it appears that the industry is going down the path of repeatedly reinventing the wheel, releasing own-brand incompatible apps with limited lifespans and support, and creating built-in obselesence that benefits the hardware manufacturers.

NHS quango fatcats spend £2m tax dosh on iPads and iPhones

How many of these devices will be left on public transport?

Reg hacks see the woods or the trees In the Forest of the Night

Was it just me?

Or was anyone else hoping the earth (or at least humanity) would be destroyed? At least that way, we might get an episode where an alien, who can travel to almost any time or place in the universe, might do something that doesn't involve humans. But no; it seems that the rebooted Dr Who universe is so small and empty, that anything of any cosmic consequence has to happen to the earth, or it's dominant species.

I wasn't convinced that Peter Capaldi was the right choice to play the Doctor, but he's grown on me. However this incarnation of the Doctor seems stunted and diminished - despite his 1300 years of experience and timelord intellect, it's his female, human companion who solves everything now. It feels like a clumsy attempt to overcompensate for the passive, intellectually limited companions of the past. If they wanted a strong and smart female character, why not be bold and cast a woman to play the Doctor? I'd find him losing his testicles more believable than losing his character. There's nothing to suggest a regeneration couldn't result in a swaping of gender, it's even been hinted as a possibility, it just hasn't happened yet in the same way that tossing a coin can give you a run of the same result.

I like much of Moffat's work, including some of the Dr Who episodes he's penned, but it seems he's at his best in small doses - Sherlock and Jekyll being my favourite examples of where he delivers small, self-contained masterpieces. But under his long-term stewardship, Dr Who seems to have run out of ideas. Even the opportunities offered by later scheduling are being squandered; every ending is a happy one; every problem can be solved by love, rather than (or in preference to) science; and nothing has to be explained, be it extinct-bar-one creatures that can lay eggs bigger than themselves without losing their virginity, or missing siblings that turn up out of the blue in a magic shrubbery.

I know this is supposed to be a kids show, but there are plenty of shows that explore the human relationships. This show should be opening young minds to questions about the universe and our place in it.

Edward who? GCHQ boss dodges Snowden topic during last speech

Re: Mission Shift

"The mission shift presumably happened because of the threat shift”

But when the mission shifts to spying on your own population, that suggests a government that regards its own people as the threat.

“[the terrorists] killed less than the weekly toll from smoking, but so what? The victims didn't choose to risk their lives, as smokers essentially do.”

The victims of reckless drivers didn’t choose to risk their lives either, and they also outnumber the victims of terrorism. If you want to save innocent lives, there are better ways of doing it than blanket surveillance.

“I can't imagine they could even attempt to listen to or read that many phone calls, emails and banal facebook postings.”

That only proves you have a limited imagination! Sorry, that was a cheap shot, but how much resource is required to hold a picture of who communicated with whom, or to apply Bayesian analysis to flag communications as “interesting” (in a similar way to spam filters) and then focus on the communications between groups of “interesting” people, where “interesting” could mean paedophiles, terrorists, or peaceful protesters being a thorn in the side of a corrupt and authoritarian regime.

“I don't give a stuff if they hold metadata on me, after all the [assorted corporations] do”

How private companies collect, store and use data about you is subject to various legal protections, you generally have to opt in (sometimes just by using their services) and are free to opt out. I never opted in for state surveillance and I’d like to know how do I opt out?

“The cops have ANPR to read my number plate as I drive around. So what? I'm glad they do - those systems bin the info as long as it's no longer needed”

As I recall, the cops also have a DNA database with a sample from everyone ever arrested for a recordable offence, even if they were never charged, let alone convicted and they are VERY reluctant to “bin the info”. I would wager they have the same attitude about any data they collect.

"I guess it's hard to find a needle in a haystack unless you're actually allowed to look in the haystack.”

Adding more hay doesn’t make finding the needle any easier, and asking for permission to look for the needle would be fine. The problem is the security services don’t want the oversight of asking for permission, justified by probable cause. They want the ability to go on warrant-less fishing trips, where they can redefine the needle based on whatever they find.

Re: "British values"

For most of its history, British values consisted of going round sticking a flag in the ground, stealing all the resources and oppressing and enslaving the local population, all under the guise of spreading civilization and culture. Only through blinkered, Daily Mail tinted spectacles was it ever about freedom, fair play and community spirit, which sound rather similar to those pesky French values.

But that's all in the past - now we can bomb freedom and democracy into our enemies. After all, an enemy is just a friend who stopped doing what you want.

Vanmoof Electrified Bike: Crouching cyclist, hidden power

Re: Sadly lacking two fairly essential features

- cup holder

- iDevice mount/charger

- fat chance of obeying red lights or behaving considerately

You're describing a car

Secret U.S. 'space warplane' set to return from spy mission

Shale gas in the ground

Isn't doing anything to meet the over-optimistic ROI figures I gave the shareholders! Screw this long term planning of energy requirements, I'm trying to make a fast buck!

Protesters stop ground breaking on world's largest telescope

Religion or Extortion

Mauna Kea is already host to 13 big telescopes and they are listed as a tourist attraction!

An article written around the time that the Sub-millimeter Array was built in 2002 calls into question how sincere the spiritual grounds for these protests are, when some of the protesters demands are financial. There may be a legitimate argument for renegotiating a monetary settlement, but playing the religious card undermines it. After all, why do gods need money? If they didn't like telescopes being built on an active volcano, wouldn't they have done something (see icon) about it?

Britain’s snooping powers are 'too weak', says NCA chief

Re: Humint

Wasn't there a little too much penetration when Plod went undercover with the hippies?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/23/police-spy-tricked-lover-activist

'Cops and public bodies BUNGLE snooping powers by spying on 3,000 law-abiding Brits'

Re: @ Red Bren

I think I'm saying almost the exact opposite of you. While we agree that extraordinary powers should be available and that there should be severe punishment for their abuse, we disagree fundamentally disagree on how they should be granted.

You don't object to the police deciding for themselves when it is appropriate to use their extraordinary powers to investigate what they consider to be terrorist activities. What if you/I/the general public disagree with their definition? One person's civil rights march is another person's rioting in the streets. I find the idea of the police making these decisions without any judicial oversight to be undemocratic and open to abuse. Unless they volunteer the details of all their investigations, how are we supposed to know when they have abused their powers?

You are content for the police to justify their actions after the fact where as I want them to provide just cause for their actions before hand. Otherwise what is to stop them going on a fishing expedition for one purpose (no matter how noble) and when finding no admissible evidence, claiming that something (possibly trivial) they did discover was what they were looking for all along, just so they can "Get the bastard for something" and justify their actions.

As for making illegally obtained evidence inadmissible in court, that doesn't address the possibility that the data collected could be used in other ways, to coerce an informer or to silence a critic. It's not illegal to have a mistress, or a prediliction for S&M, or to be a closet homosexual, but you may not want your wife, or parents, or parisioners to know it.

Extraordinary powers require extraordinary circumstances and extraordinary oversight. This manufactured climate of fear is not enough to justify turning the country into a police state.

@ Rolf Howarth

"I don't have a problem with giving the police extraordinary powers to infringe people's privacy to tackle what they see as genuine terrorist threats."

I have a massive problem with giving the police extraordinary powers to infringe people's privacy to tackle what they see as genuine terrorist threats.

For a start, where is the judicial oversight? Without having to at least notify some other external agency, you're giving the police carte blanche to go after anyone they take a dislike to. Down that road lies corruption and blackmail to silence critics.

If lives are genuinely and immediately at stake, it's probably too late to start snooping on emails, and if the risk isn't immediate, then there's time to apply for a court order.

"any abuse of those powers beyond the limited scope of what parliament granted them for should be severely punished"

Very often, the powers granted by parliament are not of limited scope, or are so loosely worded that they can be subverted to a completely different purpose, e.g. siezing the assets of a bank from Iceland - that infamous hotbed of terrorist extremism. As for being severely punished, when did you last hear of a senior police officer get severely punished? In the aftermath of the shooting of an innocent Brazillian electrician, the officer in charge was promoted

"By all means let the police intercept and read any email or other communication they feel they need to, as long as they're absolutely confident they can legitimately justify having done so after the fact, otherwise all hell will let be loose."

You can be damn sure the police will crow loudly about any successful fishing trip they go on, and how it justifies giving them increased blanket surveillance powers, but do you honestly expect that when finding nothing, they will hold up their hands and say "Sorry, we had a hunch but it turned out to be nothing." If they're that confident of finding something, they can apply for a warrant, otherwise, the number of intercepts that result in prosecutions will be dwarfed by the number of wasted ones, all paid for by us.

Re: No words

"The process is supposed to be awkward, expensive, time-consuming to cut out trivial use and ensure it's only used when necessary."

There is no matter too trivial for an agency of the state to abuse anti-terrorism or child protection legislation to investigate. Thankfully, the Tories will address all the problems this causes by repealing the Human Rights Act so you can't complain about it.

The security services can't be trusted not to abuse the powers they already have, but the government is always ready to give them more.

They must have blackmail dossiers on all MPs

Man brings knife to a gun fight and WINS

Racist police robots

Of course they're racist. They despise the human race!

Apple, Google mobe encryption good news... for TERRORISTS – EU top cop

Knowing the difference

"People don’t know the difference between privacy and anonymity, says EU top cop"

Perhaps we wouldn't be in this situation if law enforcement agencies had learned the difference between

legal and ethical behaviour

proportionate and disproportionate reactions

targetted and blanket surveillance

scrutiny and accountability

innocence and guilt

right and wrong

WHY did Sunday Mirror stoop to slurping selfies for smut sting?

Re: Mirror, Mirror

Who's the sleaziest? F them all!

FTFY

Sun of a beach! Java biz founder loses battle to keep his shore private

Re: how many...

How many appeals are allowed? As many as it takes until one of the sides runs out of money to pay the lawyers.

It must be great to work in an environment where you can charge a fortune for your services and if you fail to deliver, just explain to your clients that their opponents must have paid more. But they can still win on appeal by spending even more...

Moon landing was real and WE CAN PROVE IT, says Nvidia

Buzz shows the way

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2272321.stm

Scotland wins WORLD RECORD as voters head to referendum polls

"carrot cake is not a real dessert"

For this assertion alone, I will now be treating everything written by this author as undeniable FACT!

Murdoch to Europe: Inflict MORE PAIN on Google, please

Is this the same virulently anti-EU Murdoch that's now begging for protection from potential competition?

Perhaps while their at it, the EU could investigate the moribund pay tv market?

Smart meters in UK homes will only save folks a lousy £26 a year

Re: Sometimes I'm convinced

"do you want to be billed every second? if not, every minute? every hour? lets settle on a reasonable time frame...every month. which they already do. so what difference does it make?"

How about half-hourly billing. The technology exists because big energy users have it. When you're using MW/year, timing your heaviest usage to coincide with the cheapest energy prices is worth serious money. So roll out a similar system for domestic customers and that way, they have an incentive to schedule the dishwasher or washing machine for when demand and price is lower and the energy suppliers smooth out the peaks in demand. Even a simple peak/off-peak unit price split would help. You could call it "Economical Eight" or something…

3 Questions

When British Gas tried to persuade me to get one of these things with the argument it would save me money, I asked three questions:

Q1. Will I be put on a cheaper tariff to reflect the cost saving of sacking their meter readers?

Q2. Will the meter tell me what the unit prices are throughout the day so I can time my energy use to avoid peaks?

Q3. Will the meter monitor unit prices from all suppliers and automatically switch me to the cheapest?

Obviously the answers were:

A1. No, you will still be on the same tariff (Thanks OFGEM for "simplifying" things!)

A2. No, the unit price is the same all day (After I explained the concept of Half-Hourly)

A3. No. (with laughter!)

So when I asked her to clarify exactly how a smart meter would save me money, she said it would show me how much energy I was using so I could switch off the biggest consumers.

"Like the oven or washing machine?" I suggested.

"Yes!" she enthused, delighted I had finally seen the light.

"So I can eat raw food and wear smelly clothes?" I enquired.

"No!!!" she laughed, realising the futility of her task.

"Then I think I'll wait until the meters get a little smarter."

Chelyabinsk-sized SURPRISE asteroid to skim Earth, satnav birds

Re: Disappointment.

The problem with the unaided eye is its inability to see through the thick cloud that always accompanies these events.

If this object is difficult to see, the skies will be clear!

Data entry REAR-END SNAFU: Weighty ballsup leads to plane take-off flap

Spot the difference

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_fleet#/image/File:Malaysia.airlines.b747-400.9m-mph.arp.jpg

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_presidential_aircraft#/image/File:Il96-300pu-96016.jpg

Re: Does it really matter who shot it down?

"Putin was on a plane through this airspace 200 miles (ie 24 minutes) behind MH17"

Would anyone care to remind the class the colours of the Russian flag and the colour scheme of a Malaysian Airlines aircraft?

Re: the “adult weight” of 87kg

You read El Reg, you're definitely not normal!

Video: Dyson unveils robotic tank that hoovers while you're out

Re: Still missing critical feature

"A software fix should enable it to identify the cat flap, reverse up to the flap and engage reverse thrust? Admittedly it'll make a mess outside until the wind blows, but I can tolerate that."

I bet your cat won't!

Britain's housing crisis: What are we going to do about it?

Re: The Missing Piece

"we had Gordon Brown charging the BoE to regulate interest rates based on a measure of inflation which excluded the cost of housing"

Excluding the cost of housing from inflation calculations has been a con trick played by governments of all hues for as long as I can remember, to keep wages in check. Now there will be those that argue that wage restraint would keep the property market from overheating. In reality, it becomes a bidding war between those with assets to borrow against vs those trying to borrow against future earnings, so those trying to get on to the property ladder get priced out. But these people still need somewhere to live so they end up renting from the very people who priced them out the market. Demand in the unfettered rental market causes rents to rise so people have less to save towards a deposit of their own, or they have to claim benefits to meet the shortfall from their stagnant pay packets. This (taxpayer subsidised) rental income is then used by the landlord class to buy up even more property, the cycle repeats and the chance of owning your own home fades as house price rises outstrip pay increases by an order of magnitude.

Re: negative equity

"When housing markets collapse people who made unwise investments MUST be burned."

As I recall, the people who made the unwise investments, i.e. the lenders, got bailed out by the taxpayer. The people who got burned were the borrowers just trying to get on the property ladder before house price inflation outstripped their salaries.

Don't confuse property speculation with the need to put a roof over your head during a housing bubble.

Ofcom will not probe lesbian lizard snog in new Dr Who series

A loving moment between a married couple causes 6 people to complain? What the feck will they think if they watch an episode of Eastenders?

Ex US cybersecurity czar guilty in child sex abuse website case

Absence of evidence = evidence of deletion?

"His lawyer claimed investigators didn't find any of the vile images on computers at his home, but the prosecution said that he had used specialized software to erase them from his systems."

How are you supposed to defend yourself from the accusation "We couldn't find any images, which PROVES you had them and deleted them as thoroughly as if they had never existed!"?

What next? "The watertight alibi, the lack of bodies or missing person reports PROVES you're a serial killer who is very good at covering your tracks!"

In this case, there was plenty of other evidence to secure a conviction, but I still find it worrying that the prosecution can make unsubstantiated claims.