Posts by Brendan Murphy

Mysterious organic blobs found in Alaskan waters

Mmmm...

Free goo

US Supremes flatline Virginia's hardline anti-spam law

So...

So what is the supreme court's email address, for the benefit of all the spambots?

Now Hollywood is chasing UK downloaders

@Tim

"It's like going into a shop and stealing the DVDs off the shelves or petrol from a garage. An old argument I know, but it is still true."

Except it's not true, which is why copyright infringement does not result in a prosecution for theft.

Game sharer gets £16K fine

share ratio

£6000 damages at (say) £30 a throw means 200 copies. That's a hell of a share ratio.

US judge says University can ignore Christian course credits

Did many people actually read the article?

An awful lot of comments seem to indicate that the posters believe that the University of California is somehow refusing to allow religion to sully its secular establishment. This is not the case. The court ruling applies to one particular credit because it is not academically rigorous not because it is religious based.

A quick google reveals that the University of California offers courses in "Theology, Divine & Relgious Studies". Sorry to burst some bubbles.

BT slams bandwidth brakes on all subscribers

Another happy Be customer

I moved from Virgin to Be (O2) a few weeks ago. Cancelling Virgin involved explaining that Be were cheaper and faster. Sales droid insisted (lied) that Virgin were the only people capable of offering a faster than 10Mb service to which I pointed out that I had already tested the new connection at 15Mb, and Virgin couldn't currently provide me with better than 3.5Mb anyway.

The difference in p2p performance is HUGE. I'm an occasional p2p user, yet Virgin's method of throttling you after one hour of high use regardless of what you do the rest of the month was frustrating. This did not seem to be in keeping with the claim that throttling only affects the 5% heaviest users.

I use a Draytek modem, following instructions at <http://www.draytek.co.uk/support/kb_vigor100_setup.html>, so those who don't like Be's modem may wish to look there for setting clues.

Gordo's DNA database claims branded 'ridiculous'

@Tom

You can be dna swabbed when you are arrested. There is no requirement for a charge to be subsequently made.

9/11 an inside job, says Irish pop folkster

@Jim Morrow and concrete structures

"Concrete is not a viable material for tall office buildings ...The only way to construct large buildings is to use a steel structure."

The Petronas Towers are a reinforced concrete structure - not a steel frame. I believe they are quite tall. If you want to know about how tough reinforced concrete can be, investigate the Berlin Flak Towers constructed during WWII.

Kaspersky false alarm quarantines Windows Explorer

progman not an alternative

Since SP2, the progman.exe file explorer has been crippled. It only exists to allow older software installs to run. So you can't run it as an alternative to explorer.exe.

Woman chews on chap's todger in fast food joint

Imagine...

If the genders were reversed. Do you think the sentence would have been a fine, if a man had forcibly performed a similar act on a woman?

Sheet music site forced offline

Greedy artists

Originally the law for both copyright and patent protected IP for 28 years. In the intervening 300 years, scientists and engineers have managed to make a living without any extension to this. However the greed of the artistic community has continually edged the length of their protection upwards.