* Posts by John PM Chappell

200 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2007

Page:

How can I make an old CPU SSE 2 compliant?

John PM Chappell

Well...

Custom interrupt handler is perfectly possible if the only way to run a piece of software is with SSE2 available and that software must be run on that CPU. In reality though, unless you fancy the challenge yourself or are prepared to pay someone to write it, you're looking at a much more sensible option of replacing the hardware or using other software.

Coin-sized nuclear isotope battery minted

John PM Chappell
Stop

Umm, Steve?

You've lost the plot a bit there, mate. The potential danger here is pretty minimal, the potential gain quite large and radioactivity really does work the way Jason and others have pointed out.

One in three kids believe Google measures truthiness

John PM Chappell
Grenade

I.E. not E.G. ;¬)

In the spirit of joining the fray, The Other Steve? You're doing it wrong. You want I.E. not E.G. whether you realize your error or not. HtH.

PC tune-up software: does it really work?

John PM Chappell
Grenade

A few myths still floating around amongst the tech literate...

Disabling the page file can be done simply, safely and is worthwhile for many people. I've read Russonovic and he's wrong, it'd be tedious to go into explicit detail of why but basically he incorrectly analyses the information, rather than being incorrect about the overall technical detail (which is his real field of expertise, in fairness). In practice, most users with enough memory to be disabling the pagefile (it doesn't actually disable paging, by the way), which is just about any system made this century and many older, should probably just set a fixed and very small one, in order to avoid problems with some software that blindly checks for it instead of trusting the OS to do its job as configured by the admin. The specific gain is hugely increased response time, especially from applications you have minimized or where the machine was left idle for any significant period, as well better caching (it's now always in RAM and not occasionally paged out to HDD). The danger is that you manage to put together a working set which really does exceed your available memory and applications begin to get failure responses when making allocation requests. I've never seen this happen without actually deliberately coding it, for test purposes (but I run with 4 GB on my systems).

That brings us to the next myth... Windows XP, yes even 32 bit XP, can see 4 or more GB just fine. In fact it can see whatever physical memory is installed as long your BIOS can see it properly, you do NOT need a 64 bit OS to take advantage of a lot of memory but a 64 bit OS will make more efficient use of it in many ways (at the cost of some significant overhead, but you have a lot of RAM now, right?). The limitation is the number of unique addresses possible and Windows lies about actual address anyway (to put it simply) so that applications can be writing to the same location (if you believe the raw address) but are in fact not. There is also the 2 GB limit on continuous addressable memory, PER APPLICATION, which can be increased to as much as 3 GB with a boot switch (but there are side effects) and can be circumvented cleverly anyway.

Truly, if you guys are what passes for the tech elite or even the tech monkeys, these days it is no wonder products like these sell to your customers and friends.

CA auto-immune update trashes systems

John PM Chappell
Grenade

This would be why ...

... I always retain user oversight of actions by such tools, when I even bother to use them; honestly, I run XP daily and I think the last time I was infected with anything was about three years ago when I foolishly attached an acquaintance's external hard drive to my own machine under Windows rather than scanning it from secure environment first. I've found that using Firefox with NoScript and only permitting scripting to run on sites that absolutely need it (and even then marking all ad domains and similar as globally untrusted) has kept my machine clean. I periodically run a full scan from a standalone AV tool with recent signatures to be sure but I found that permanently installed products, especially those using on-access scanning and auto-action were more trouble than they were worth.

Man gets 3 years in prison for stealing IDs over LimeWire

John PM Chappell
Flame

Come again?

@ babz - Some people don't lock their house up when they go out for the day, it doesn't mean we should let the burglars off to ‘teach them a lesson’, a crime is a crime and fraud is a relatively serious one, as is large-scale theft. I'm quite happy with treating offences where insufficient precautions were taken as less serious than those where criminals bypassed considerable security measures, indeed this a legal principle in Scottish Law but he's still a scumbag thief who thought he was being very clever.

All that said, using LimeWire ≡ FAIL.

Security elite pwned on Black Hat eve

John PM Chappell
Alert

Did we just get spammed?

(AC "Samantha” @ 5:26)

Anyway, Mitnick never impressed me but he's spot on about not putting important stuff online if it doesn't need to be immediately publicly accessible. There's a reason that I use encryption for stuff I really care about and keep anything that's not trivial on offline storage. *eye roll*

Sex Offenders returns to iTunes

John PM Chappell
Grenade

Nevermind ‘people close to them’

The fact is that most child abuse and paedophilia involves the PARENTS of the unfortunate children, not simply people who know the children. Idiotic and frankly dangerous (as well as possibly illegal) campaigns, dissemination of information and commercial products like the ones mentioned here should be very harshly dealt with, in my opinion.

SEC: Magical stock brokering software was a fraud

John PM Chappell

Heavy Metal Trader?

"He allegedly mislead his clients to invest their money in EIMT by claiming he had proprietary trade brokerage software which generated returns of about 3.5 per cent per month with little risk of loss." should be 'misled' with no ay, unless you're suggesting the involvement of heavy metals.

'Vista Capable' plaintiffs seek class action revival

John PM Chappell

@ James O'Brien

With a name like that, have you considered that you might be elligible for an Irish passport? ;¬)

IIRC Irish grandparents is sufficient (I am likely to claim my own passport on the same grounds, UK is not the shining beacon of hope some yanks imagine).

Windows 7 fast track alarms technical testers

John PM Chappell
Gates Horns

Wasn't impressed

I wasn't impressed by the build I was invited to test, so I can't say I am surprised. In my opinion it's doomed because of underlying decisions that go all the way back to the introduction of Win95 (e.g. workarounds to permit buggy applications and broken drivers and hardware to function).

Unisys threatens Itanium with death

John PM Chappell
Unhappy

Victim of its own success?

In many ways Itanium peaked too early; it's arguably a superior 64 bit architecture to AMD64 but the way that AMD was able to match or even better the performance of comparable 80x86 processors running 32 bit code and also run 64 code pretty much killed a lot of Itanium's potential (since its emulation was significantly slower than native code and usually far slower than an 80x86 processor at a similar price point or even native performance point).

Satellite-hacking boffin sees the unseeable

John PM Chappell
Flame

@jake & others

I see Jake has backed down now but I'm going to observe that this is fuel on the fire of "teachers are pretty crap today" as I appear to have a better grasp of the maths and technical details and I *don't* attempt to teach others about the topic.

As for the NSA, they can trivially crack some of the piss poor 'encryption' systems but they are stuck, like everyone else, when it comes to brute-force attacks on truly secure systems.

The GCHQ bloke was making a (quite old) joke, they don't monitor every phone line, etc, to do so is unfeasible anyway. GCHQ really does monitor the entire RF spectrum, however and I have one of the pieces of kit they used to use, sitting in the room where the rest of my radio equipment is. Needless to say they haven't stopped listening, just updated the kit.

This 'white hat' crap gets up my nose, though, it has to be said and playing with satellite dishes is really, really old hat.

Intel to put internet in your pants

John PM Chappell
Stop

Umm... didn't we already try this?

I mean, it's potentially impressive, what with transistor counts always climbing and better power management but a small screen and impossible to use input devices are why we don't rely on very small devices for more than a diversion or a very rudimentary piece of work.

My Pocket PC can do quite a lot but most of the time it just runs TomTom or a scientific calculator - I have a laptop for real 'mobile' work and a fully kitted out tower for a 'workstation' when I don't need to carry the work around. If someone needs to do serious work, they have the time to sit down and at least use a laptop, the idea that we're all going to be 'doing work' on the bus or something is just plain stupid.

Dear Obama: Please consider open-source a waste of your time

John PM Chappell
Thumb Down

Agreed...

myxiplx has it right, still I wasn't being productive anyway, just drinking my tea before the day starts. Oh, for the MS zealots who always seem to turn up; I use predominantly MS software (that's just how it is in Windows development) so don't bore me with some pseudo-religious strawman about how we all hate MS because they are successful or something.

IWF confirms Wayback Machine porn blacklisting

John PM Chappell
Stop

@Andrew Crystall

Kindly stop talking out of your arse; your lack of expertise in and understanding of the technical, legal and philosophical aspects of this issue is showing and your repeated trolling is getting boring.

In practical terms, you can tell your ISP that you do not wish to be subjected to filtering, especially not the IWF list and that if they are not prepared to remove it you will change providers (there are ISPs who don't use it at all).

The wider issues ought to be obvious; some people genuinely want to have some filtering in place so that they are very unlikely to ever see anything 'offensive' but there are products (even free ones, I recall) for precisely that purpose and nothing to stop ISPs from offering an opt-in filtering of certain categories of website (I don't like this but customers are customers and businesses make money meeting their needs and desires). Everyone else wants to be able to access any computer with a routable IP address on any protocol they choose, without interference, the ISPs could do with being reminded of that fact, alongside the well established principle of they not being accountable for the use of their infrastructure in an illegal manner, especially wrt content.

Aussie air zealot savages prêt-à-porter stealth fighter

John PM Chappell
Black Helicopters

I err 'second' Sekundra

I, too, am aware of that incident and some other stuff, besides. Suffice to say, F-117 is not 'stealthy' to first world nations, at all, in the sense commonly understood and sold to the general public and gullible customers.

As regards smaller RADAR returns; if the weapon system can still achieve a guidance lock, it doesn't matter that you're 'different looking' and 'half as large as the real outline'. :-)

Black Helo for similar reasons, of course...

P.S. JonB - It was a reasonably capable system when sold, the fact that it was a bit 'dated' by the time the UK used that variant is hardly the fault of the system (well, not in that sense) or the manufacturer as it was never sold with assurances against those opponents (IIRC).

US only kidding about 'clear to fly' January deadline?

John PM Chappell
Flame

And this would be why...

... I have no intention of returning to the USA until they've swept the bulk of this crap away again. Their tourism is taking a heavy hit, in spite of people being prepared to actually wade through it all, so that's probably just a waiting game.

@AC Your 11th September incident was small fry and you'd had it coming for a long time; proper terrorism was the kind meted out by the professionals in the PIRA, who were well-funded by you cunts. You might want to get a brain and an education before shooting your mouth off, in future, but until then we'll just try and remember that most yanks are not as stupid as you.

Windows 7 early promise: Passes the Vista test

John PM Chappell
Gates Horns

Yes, Neil, you probably are.

Rock soild? Doing what exactly? Try something challenging. Also, it's not Logitech's fault at all; if the hardware predates Vista (likely) it really ought to have drivers provided by MS already, since they are the one who changed the underpinning of the "Windows" spec. I'm pretty sure it has XP drivers, aye? Media Centre goes right back to XP (and I hate it for the most part but horses for courses) and I've never had any trouble installing drivers for USB devices, in fact I have a USB TV Tuner of my own, it worked when I plugged it in and the supplied software was ~okay~ but I all I really want is for it to work, not eye-candy.

Bash Vista to join in? No... we just have experience stripping it from machines beacuse relatively old, well supported, best-selling hardware is not supported on Vista and short of writing our own drivers, won't be, probably. When you cannot use a 'rock solid' printer/scanner combo because Vista doesn't know what to do with it, the eye-candy starts to look... well, tacky and the crap functionality comes to the fore.

Home Office acts to kick out Iceland's hate preachers

John PM Chappell
Flame

Let her knock herself out...

...it can only hasten the long overdue death of this administration and probably put this bunch of retards masquerading as a political party out of office for another thirty years. John Smith'd top himself were he not already dead.

Peaches Geldof cops a severe shoeing

John PM Chappell
Happy

Fear the wrath of the moderatrix...

...for she has been roused! ;¬)

So, talentless drone offspring of Geldoff write a vapid article... I have to admit, it's not exactly news is it? The response of the rag concerned is probably newsworthy though, if only so we can all have a giggle and it *is* in Bootnotes, n'est-ce pas?

Microsoft faces second 'black screen' lawsuit

John PM Chappell
Happy

Confused, methinks, NukEvil

NukEvil - Guess again. It is, and will remain, Microsoft's software and property, in its entirety, until such time as they choose to sell it on (unlikely, ever). You didn't buy it, you bought a licence to use it and implicitly and explicitly agreed to the licence terms. Some of those terms may not be enforcable in a given jurisdiction but rest assured that no jurisdiction tries to claim the contract never existed nor that you own the software. :¬)

El Reg launches Bletchley fundraising t-shirt

John PM Chappell
Thumb Up

I second Nick L

I'd surely pay for that T shirt :¬)

Dawkins' atheist ad campaign hits fundraising target

John PM Chappell
Happy

If it brings the morons who think 'Atheism' is a religion out of the woodwork...

... so that I can ridicule their stupidity along with all the other irrational and superstitious fools, it gets my vote (and fiver).

:¬)

BBC clarifies location of England

John PM Chappell
Thumb Up

Yay!

Yay for the moderatrix! That is all. :¬)

Google says sorry as Gmail plummets out of the cloud

John PM Chappell
Flame

Google reliability

Actually, Google's pretty damn reliable and unless you have an SLA contract that guarantees the mythical 'five nines' quit whingeing. Good luck building your own alternative, too (not because it's especially hard but rather because anyone stupid enough to use a Beta as mission critical and then complain about a *day* of downtime, is not going to be up to it).

MS hit with Red Ring of Death lawsuit

John PM Chappell
Happy

What could be better than legally bashing MS?

"Seriously"

Microsoft shipped a fatally defective product, in full knowledge of its defects, at a considerable market price. Damn right they ought to suck it up now they're being called on it. Many of us knew back then what we can prove now, the XBox 360 is a pile of shite, hastily cobbled together and very poorly designed, even down to the level of cooling provided in the chassis. FAIL.

Daily Mail cites video game as proof of terrorist doomsday plot

John PM Chappell
Happy

The real story here is..

... Fallout 3 looks cool :¬)

Can't wait, myself, in fact I think I'll dig out the two previous titles and get in the mood...

VMware dollars swarm into B-hive Networks

John PM Chappell
Flame

@Austin

Presumably you meant "its flagship appliance"; there's no apostrophe in the possessive.

I Was A Teenage Bot Master

John PM Chappell

@ Matthew Anderson (again)

They were not 'kids', one was a teenager the other an adult, when sentenced both were adults. Cowardice (hiding behind their screens, doing things they would never do in person) doesn't work as an excuse or a legal defence, either.

We've all experienced 'these kids' by the bucket-load, what on earth makes you think you're somehow more qualified than the rest of us? Mostly they are fairly average boys (very few girls) with a disturbed personality and an over-inflated ego. They tend to rely on tools made by others but claim all manner of 'mad skills' and typically have a very shaky grasp of even such basics as networking protocols.

The author mostly did what was required to keep a dialogue going, but in any case, sympathy is not the same as excusing the behaviour.

John PM Chappell

Hmm, I'm not convinced..

..but I'm not going to trawl for precedent either. I think this one's a dead duck either way. What topic shall we do to death next? <grin>

John PM Chappell
Happy

Crossed wires...

.. I was assuming we were both talking about the UK :¬)

In the UK what I stated stands, in the USA it seems it depends how good your lawyers are and how well informed other parties are.

Assumptions are silly, I know, however I made it clear a few times in other parts of my posts that I am from the UK and was referencing UK laws and mores, so I felt safe in assuming and thought you were from the UK too, actually.

As for your ABS example, in the UK, I am liable. I have a separate but related claim against you for criminal damage or possibly murder, attempted murder, manslaugher, etc, depending on the actual outcome.

All that said, IANAL so I might have missed some other subtle implications, though I am certain about immediate liability.

John PM Chappell
Happy

Sorry, JonB

My last comment, on this aspect at least, but you're wrong about liability. If your car has a fault, even if you could reasonably not know, you are liable. Specifically, the driver is always liable for ensuring that a vehicle is safe and legal and is always liable to penalties for any offences committed by driving it in a condition that is not so. It doesn't matter, in terms of liability or whether an offence has been committed, if you were misled, could reasonably assume all was well, etc. If you did not realize that, you do now. This is precisely why I like it so much as an analogy for the compromised PCs; I think similar issues of responsibility and liability should apply, legally.

@ Chris Adkins: if you don't like them, don't read them. If you don't understand the difference between an exchange of views and discussion of points raised and a useless black vs white 'internet argument' you might want to stay off the Reg comments too ;¬) P.S. Hope you find your shift and caps lock keys soon.

John PM Chappell
Happy

Hmm...

Matthew Anderson: You're talking out of your arse, mate and it's been pointed out quite a few times. Even 16 is not a child; here in the UK, a first world nation, that is old enough to consent to sexual activity, marry, work full time and without restricted shift lengths, etc, etc. At 18 he is demonstrably an adult and US law agrees wholeheartedly, at least wrt criminal acts. The 'pwnage' scale is significant, easily enough to get him headlines in IT press, as it did. As for the criminal penalties, fraud and criminal damage on a large scale, without remorse and over a long period, warrant custodial sentences; he got quite a light one, all considered.

JonB: Not quite; tackling the car situation first - aye, negligent fitter, but you remain liable for the state of the car, in terms of working features. You have a case against them but you're not absolved of your own offence. Moral: be vigilant, it's your car and your responsibility. Do I even need to draw the analogy wrt the PCs? ;¬)

John PM Chappell

@GameCoder

"Back in the 13th century, a women [sic] could walk, naked and draped in gold chains, from China to Hungary. [If] Anyone touched her, the Mongol army would 'discourage' them and make sure that they never, ever, repeated their crime." - famously true, mate. A little research will dig it up for you; it's probably even on that great social experiment, Wikipedia, somewhere.

John PM Chappell
Happy

@ Robin, Tom, AC and others

Robin (and Danny): I'm calling bullshit on that one, sunshine. It's perfectly possible to secure a Windows NT5 based home user system, somewhat harder (and inherently more risky) with Win9x (for those keeping count, NT4 is awkward and was never really home user). The first step, if you use an always on connection is to set networking so that you do not run protocols and services you do not need, the next is to use a router firewall and make sure your IP address is in a private non-routable range. These things in themselves will make many, many exploits impossible (old ones but still regularly attempted just in case). I could go on, but suffice to say that whilst slightly 'technical' it's perfectly possible to secure a Windows PC and the average user can easily be led through the steps.

Tom: I'm pretty much with you on this one. I think multiple murderers (whether in a single incident or repeat offence) should be eligible for execution. I do think we'd need suitably good procedures to make sure but in essence, kill them. As for rape, it tends to get seriously over-hyped. It's a horrible crime, but so is _any_ assault of person and dignity and at the end of the day, rape is pretty much equivalent to serious assaults, it is _not_ in and of itself on a par with murder the way some people seem to want it to be. However, lengthy prison sentences, which actually have to be served, would seem to be the way to deal with rapists and thugs (I'm not saying don't try and 'fix' them, too, but they should still spend a long time deprived of the freedom they obviously were not fit to exercize).

AC (who first replied to Tom): 'Kids' ruin their own lives, the punishment is what they get when they commit crimes. Perhaps if word gets around that the cocky arrogant kids committing crimes left, right and centre are now serving long sentences, their younger siblings won't think it's a bright idea to emulate them. Inexperience, stupidity and ignorance are not valid defences before the law. Oh, he wasn't that bright either, as indicated by the way he went about his activities, his arrogance devoid of competence to back it up and even the fact that he was clearly no coder, just able to edit code (he missed a chunk of code implementing a back door, for Eris's sake!).

AC (who replied to Tom second): I don't think he was suggesting excuting Skiddies, although.... ;¬)

JonB: I get the impression you are trying to challenge the suggestion that those whose machines were hijacked are in no way responsible, if I am wrong I apologize, if not - you probably ought to know that if you are the driver and/or owner of a car whose brakes are faulty, you're legally fully liable, regardless of whether they were improperly installed, imperfect products or anything else. You can sue the installer/manufacturer later but you, the driver, are legally liable.

John PM Chappell
Happy

@ b

You're welcome to try, but first you have to find it and then you will be disappointed because when I am not there, typically others are and when noone is home, the house is secured (the windows, along with the doors, are secure not just some plywood sheets or wooden struts). Also, where I live is a relatively busy neighbourhood with plenty of people to notice strangers prowling around or trying to force doors and windows.

So, translating this back into an analogy for the original article topic, if my house were a PC it would be running a secure OS, sitting behind a properly configured router (i.e. firewall) and I as the user would not be doing stupid things like downloading supposed videos of C-list celebrities, pirated copies of expensive software or clicking on URLs sent to me in email by strangers. Oh, how interesting, that's pretty much exactly like my real PCs :¬)

Nice try, no cigar.

John PM Chappell
Linux

@ AC

Actually, a victim can be considered to have supplied provocation or mitigating circumstances, so aye, pretty much.

Where I come from (Scotland) it is a more serious offence to steal from a secured vessel or premises than from one which was not. This is because the law recognizes that when a person takes steps to secure their property (and privacy) those who then commit offences against it have shown a determination to do so not merely stumbled upon it and taken advantage ('opportunity crime'). I think this is directly applicable as an analogy for what happened with these botnets; through ignorance or casual disregard many of the bot hosts failed to secure their machines and were compromised.

It's not fashionable to point this out in the present world of "Teh IntarWeb" and "Web 2.0" but connecting machines to a network is inherently risky unless you control all the machines on that network and/or trust all the users. Connecting your machine to a global network via an 'always on' connection and leaving it powered on for most of the day is quite literally asking for trouble. If you want to do this you need to take some common sense measures, ideally you make sure you are sitting behind a real firewall (software is _not_ a firewall, folks, no matter what MS or MacAfee tell you) with your machine using a non-routable address and that the firewall operates proper port access protocols. This used to require some savvy and a bit of cash but today you can get it for free from an ISP or shell out maybe 40 quid at Tesco.

All that said, you ignored the fact that I clearly said the skiddie's actions were not excused, rather I pointed out how an unremarkable teen can commit these actions easily because of the failings of others, including the user of the compromised machines.

[Penguin because it goes a long way towards stopping this kind of stuff]

Life a mess? The Moderatrix can help

John PM Chappell
IT Angle

Lust-hound for an educated girl..

.. yup! That's me. Why else would I be signed up to Guardian SoulMates, eh? LOL

;¬)

John PM Chappell
Heart

Something

I just wish to add my own comment to the general surge of admiration for Sarah ;¬)

This probably counts as "Me Too" in the nascent classification system.

IM represents 'new linguistic renaissance'

John PM Chappell

Well...

Kurt: You seem to be under the misapprehension that 'Standard English' is 'Queen's English' as well as ignorant of etymology. Shakespeare's language was progressive in the extreme, at the time it was written and until recently English monarchs could barely speak any form of English.

Ian Mills: Talk to you later.

Abbreviations are all well and good so long as they actually save time and retain clarity and meaning but some of the more irritating ones actually take longer to enter on a standard phone keypad as well as obscuring the meaning. When text messages (where most of the more recent ones originate) were quite severely size limited, cost more per message and phones could only handle a small number of stored messages at any one time, shortening as far as possible without loss of meaning made sense. Now, what really is the point? On IM clients I can't really see that there was ever any point, aside from those expressing emotional responses, since in an interactive environment that matters.

Hippies reclaim summer of code

John PM Chappell

...watching 'roaches climb the wall...

I have firsthand experience of the University policy - kept all my code on a zip disk, told them they could have a copy and use whatever they managed to get by decrypting it (everything else, like assignments, was totally derivative and of no real interest) ;¬)

John PM Chappell
Coat

Bah!

I meant "you'll" not "you've", teach me to skip the preview.

John PM Chappell
Happy

@ Sarah Bee et al.

And still you've never get it right? ;¬)

Windows XP SP3 sends PCs into endless reboot

John PM Chappell
Happy

Spot on :¬)

Ign R. Amis: Aye, Apple definitely sucks, mate, agreed. "... a lot more cheap plastic doodads, blue LEDs, and a bajillon buttons on the keyboard ..." - sounds like an Apple, alright.

John PM Chappell
Thumb Up

And.... success! :¬)

Downloaded fine, verified fine, installed painlessly, silly prompt for auto-update told "no" and dismissed, boot completed normally.

No obvious changes to the way XP works but certainly no complaints from me about the rollout of SP3.

Kenny Millar: Apple stuff is overpriced, underpowered, proprietary (hardware and software) and looks like shite. Why on earth would I want to bother? Especially as the "no security flaws, no crashes" is bollocks that actually equates to "fewer problems but when they occur, boy are they bad

To others: "who's" is the contraction of "who is" not the posessive of "who", which is "whose". Getting basic English grammar wrong damages your credibility when trying to slag off others ;¬)

John PM Chappell

OEM Images

I've had bad experiences with craply done OEM images in the past, including the bundling of every single driver regardless of suitability and the usual bloatware applications installed.

I now routinely wipe the drive and use an unbranded 'OEM' version of the relevant OS distro to reinstall, supplying the key that came with the hardware at the relevant point. Result: no problems in a long time and the installations go smoothly.

I'm about to apply SP3 to the OS on this laptop; an Acer with AMD Turion64 X2 and XP MCE installed as detailed above. I expect no problems but will post again either way.

DWP still sending out passwords and discs together

John PM Chappell
Dead Vulture

@ AC (who works as a Civil Servant)

Good on you, mate. Now please try and get other departments and organizations in ".gov" to act similarly or replace those who won't with competent employees.

US lag sues over prison crash diet

John PM Chappell
Flame

@ Slaine

You apparently don't do English grammar or well written comments either, however it's the ridiculous content that really caught my eye.

It might be fashionable (with the rise in Tory sympathy and increasing BNP support) to talk utter bollocks about those on benefits and particularly to claim anyone 'forrun' is some sort of criminal mastermind simultaneously stealing 'our jobs' whilst living a millionaire lifestyle on benefits but the reality is actually a lot more sad than that.

In the UK we have an appallingly low (real) average income, when you consider the cost of living and the kind of money certain indiviudals are paid. This is a problem that the minimum wage was meant to tackle but due to a general lack of spine it was introduced at a pathetically low level, many people actually saw their pay frozen or even reduced _down_ to the minimum wage rate.

Taxation is not really that high; many nations pay a good deal more in income tax (the only tax that workers pay which others will not) and our present government is quite keen to let anyone who might pay a serious amount of tax dodge it with some shady residency status anyway (not that the [other] Tories will change that). The genuinely high taxes (which ought to be challenged as illegal, since the money they are paid with has already been taxed) are those on commodities such as tobacco products, alcohol and especially petroleum products.

Single Mothers get preferential housing assignments (though usually in really nasty areas) because the welfare of the child is rated higher than that of a single adult on their own. They receive benefits to assist them with the child, just as any other mother on low income would. What exactly is your beef with this? Aye, she got pregnant and there's no father in sight, big deal.

Non-English speakers? And? It's not a requirement that we speak English, you know? I assure you that mono-lingual Gaels would take your jingoistic comment as an invitation to rearrange your facial features and to be frank, quite rightly so. Primary language is irrelevant and any EU citizen has full rights in the UK just as any UK citizen does in another EU nation.

As for the chronically stupid... they are smart enough to realize they can get by more comfortably on benefits than they can at the bottom end of the job market. This is a problem and aye, they are lazy. Humans _are_ lazy, all our technology ultimately comes back to "how can I do this with less effort / more quickly / better?". Are there individuals who could take jobs which will pay them more than their benefits? Certainly. Should they be made to either take the job or come off the benefits? Aye. However, the system simply does not work like that and it should. These people are choosing to have a lower but livable income for no work rather than a higher (though not massive) one for a lot of effort, which is hardly stupid. Until this loophole is closed they would, arguably, be stupid not to take advantage.

In short, your anger should be directed at the government, especially the DWP, and a relatively small number of benefits claimants. The rest of them, for all that they may have made stupid life choices, are trying to make the best of what they have and are sensibly taking advantage of the benefits system which is, after all, there to assist people in financial need.

Canadian geeks to turn off the tech

John PM Chappell

They've got a point...

Specific technologies have altered the way many of us in 'developed, industrialized' nations interact. I'm pretty sure that I spend less time on my laptop and certainly less time on my mobile phone than many of my friends and there are times when the amount of time I've spent looking at the laptop screen frightens me.

Of especial note is the way many of my friends seem to have most of their "social life" online using sites like OKCupid and to a lesser extent, FaceBook.

I don't think these are inherently bad things but I do feel that the amount of face-to-face interaction has dropped even as the amount of online interaction has increased, in my circle of friends and acquaintances.

Page: