Posts by Anton Channing

Texas teen jailed for four months over sarcastic Facebook comment

Jail time?

Punishment should fit the crime.

So how about 1 custard pie per word used in the font, plus 1 prat fall per sentence?

US: We spied on you Europeans but we can still be chums. Right?

True

But its better to open your eyes late than never...

Upturned boat sails to Shed of the Year title

Re: Nothing to contribute

I had a similar idea, but it wouldn't float.

Who ate all the flash pie: Samsung, 'course, but hang on... GOOGLE?

Re: Research is hard

Dunno if its because Google are 'personalising' my search, but the first hit for me isn't very informative on the matter.

Telly psychics fail to foresee £12k fine for peddling nonsense

Re: Would it have been better for the mail...

Only as I understand it, Randi has been caught out as a fraudster himself so he's hardly a 'long standing seeker of truth'. Just another huckster parading as one.

Ruby on Fails: Zombie SERVER army built thanks to Rails bug

Re: So, basically....

To be fair, the article did also mention a recent exploit in WordPress.

Microsoft and pals: Save the global economy by NOT ripping us off

"What the thinker thinks, the prover proves" ~ Robert Anton Wilson...

This was not an objective survey. Such an organisation started out trying to prove what they wanted to believe. They had decided what they wanted the result to be in advance and then found a way of making the numbers work in their favour.

Norkoshop: How Pyongyang well and truly forked Adobe

Re: Not a bad review comrade

Norko typographers really hate that one...

'Online sex abuse of children is growing trend', warn Brit net cops

Re: Isn't it :)

Funny comment. Hope you're joking though because really good sex is nothing like the "sexual stunts" performed in the average porn flick... ;)

'Gaia' Lovelock: Wind turbines 'may become like Easter Island statues'

Re: Easter Island

Guilt of any kind is counter productive to making positive change and tends to lead to a 'what the hell' effect:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/03/the-what-the-hell-effect.php

Given what we know of the effect of guilt on human behaviour, "Eco-guilt" is likely to provoke people to actions perceived to be less environmentally friendly, and "White-guilt" is likely to make white people behave worse towards non-white members of the human population.

I'll gracefully leave leave the other part of the argument with regards to 'failed civilisations' because we are obviously working with different definitions and I find it fruitless to argue over the definition of a word.

Easter Island

Only the heads aren't monuments of a failed civilisation. New evidence shows that the civilisation of the island was working quite nicely right up until the point it was wiped out by diseases introduced by Europeans:

http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/jan/17/statues-walked-what-really-happened-easter-island/

The only way it can accurately be described as 'failed' is if you take the broad view of any civilisation that no longer exists is automatically failed by default. So the Parthenon in Greece is the monument of a failed civilisation?

Brits are so outraged by Amazon, they voted it TOP for shopping

Re: Why do we like it ?

Either that or she paid her neighbour to source all the stuff from Amazon...

Boss wrong to demote man over anti-gay-marriage Facebook post

Re: I dont know what is more disgusting

What? People living together and not having sex? Goat boy finds that disgusting!

Facebook's stock rally may be shortlived: Small advertisers enraged

Distributed networks...

Distributed social networks like Friendica and Diaspora will eventually take over from big centralised corporate networks. I think now might be a good time to set a few up as I can see it becoming easier to convince friends and family disgruntled with FB to make the switch.

Eventually, only distributed networks will be able to offer users the information they actually want.

Motörheadphönes ears-in review

How long will it now be...

...before Iron Maiden release their 'Eddie the Edphones', and the Lars and co release their 'MetalliCans'...

Pastafarians: Get your noodly appendages off that Facebook suspect

Re: Every time...

Which is odd. Because by the time he mentored Israel Regardie, Crowley had long been kicked out of the Golden Dawn. Although Regardie did join an order that had a lot of the by then defunct Golden Dawns documents and subsequently published them.

Christian footie match ends in almighty brawl

Re: Influx of non-Christians

Yep, the real Christians only went over there to peacefully preach the gospel.

And Torquemada and Matthew Hopkins were both really Satanists making human sacrifices...

AntiSec leaks 'Feds' credit cards' after Barrett Brown cuffed

They may be dubious but...

"The AntiSec crew's claim that all the records are of FBI agents is dubious due to the fact that the email addresses aren't @fbi.gov addresses - and that's before other factors are taken into account."

So you're saying you don't think FBI agents ever use non @fbi.gov email addresses when working undercover?

I'm not saying the list isn't dubious for other reasons, I wouldn't know. But if it is dubious, it certainly isn't so for the reason you cite here.

Was Russia Today hacked - or did it just forget to renew rt.com?

Richard Stallman

They had a really good interview with Richard Stallman last month:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFMMXRoSxnA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFMMXRoSxnA</a>

I say really good. I mean the interviewer was clearly out of his depth and was clearly in a blind panic concerning what Stallman was saying politically, but that's partly why I found it so amusing... >:)

Party like it's 1999: CDE Unix desktop REBORN

Cubuntu...

...its now inevitable and just a question of when.

Amazon erects 'digital hub' near Silicon Roundabout

Re: Amazon's UK headquarters remain in Slough.

Worse. I heard an American train passenger asking 'Is this the train to Eden-Berg'.

On the other hand there are plenty of place names in the US that I had my pronunciation corrected on by a friend that came from there. Apparently, despite one being spelled that way, you don't pronounce any of the US states as 'AR-KAN-SAS'. Turns out you have to say 'AR-KAN-SAW'. Who'd have known?

The Beatles Yellow Submarine restored

Re: The Sixties

Whereas the hippies of today are in #EtherSec and #ProjectMayhem2012

Counter Culture has never been stronger. The only difference is today the media try to down play it and say it all happened back in the 60s.

Does the existence of Facebook really merit a rewrite of data law?

Enlightenment

It says a lot that the establishment see Enlightenment events as some form of crisis that needs to be stopped at all costs.

Standing NEXT to an HTML coder is like standing NEXT TO GOD

Re: Shoddy...

No, it's a markup language. The clue is in the ML.

Lucy in 3.4 million-year-old cross-species cave tryst

Re: A foot skeleton?

I concur. I heard they've made great strides in that kind of research. I might have to bone up on the latest break throughs.

Re: A foot skeleton?

I'm sure current evolutionary understanding will help flesh the theory out, one step at a time.

A preview of SOPA: Web shut down before my eyes

NameCoin

Well, the Dot-BIT project are currently experimenting with p2p dns in the namecoin project. It applies to .bit domains only but who knows, maybe one day all domain name will work that way.

http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

Did Vatican commit Cardinal sin over Wikipedia bios?

The writings of the Gnostics...

...apparently

BBC One and bureaucracy spared in Auntie cuts

Barcharts that don't start at zero

Whilst normally an anarchist, I'm tempted by the idea severe draconian punishments for those that use "deceptive presentation of statistics" techniques to make a point, such as making bar charts that have zero as the baseline to exaggerate differences.

ICON = Pedantic statistics nazi alert?

LibDems call for gov 'IT skills' office

Forking the nation.

Actually forking the nation may not be a bad idea. Whose up for creating LibreBritian?

Adobe bets on Flash 11 to fend off HTML5 invasion

HTML5 was a smoke screen.

Jobs never wanted developers to move from Flash to HTML5. He wanted them to write apps. And they did...

Search visionary retires from Microsoft's Bing battles

Rats

Sinking ship...

Christ appears in phone advert, secular authorities act

Catholicism

WOW!

Reg reader lost for words over blank HP keyboard

lol

rofl

Death threats against 'worst song ever' YouTube teen

Muzak Killer

Marty Zpok got a time machine?

Twitter airport bomb joker loses second job

Hypocracy

From the Greek prefix hypo- which means under or below and the suffix -cracy which means strength or rule. So this new word seems to imply bottom up government. Perhaps this could be applied to the idea of emergent behaviour...

Wikileaks publishes secret CIA memo

'Exporter'

What the hell kind of Orwellian language is that anyway? So what would be an 'Importer' of terrorism? A country that finances terrorism from one of the 'Exporters'? Which would make an 'Exporter' of terrorism a country where terrorist brings money into the economy?

So basically all this talk of Exporting Terrorism is an acknowledgement that in the modern world, terrorism is a black market business, with some countries funding it, and others selling it. Some may even engage in both. Of course, this does not mean that the seller can't sell to a buyer in their own country, in which case the transaction involves no importing or exporting.

The country where the terrorism actually takes place may be the Exporter itself, or it may even be the Importer, but could well be a third party otherwise unrelated to the transaction.

So this just leaves a question, to be 'seen as' an Exporter, the US would have to be seen as a selling terrorist activity to countries that wish to purchase it, as opposed to its current status as an Importer, of funder of terrorism. Maybe for this to be the case they would need to be, or be close to becoming a 'Net Exporter'. Why is one seen as worse that the other, since both are equally necessary for the transaction?

I suspect that whilst public opinion matters to an extent, it isn't really what they are talking about when they say 'The World'. They only really mean 'World Leaders' (ie International Governments, Banks, Big Corporations etc.), those with influence to actually make a difference. Collectively the public could make a difference, but lately they have managed to quite successfully 'divide and conquer' us along left-right economic grounds. We'd have to really wake up collectively, and work out a way to act, before they took notice of what we actually thought again.

Beeb deploys ISS as unit of measurement

What's 157 miles between friends?

About 1827.1864 Brontosauruses.

India to place $11bn order for AIP hi-tech submarines

Some pics of the Indian Sub...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3374/3267161251_bb1e740016.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4OYGjUrdllo/STryehuf2FI/AAAAAAAANEA/A9joE7Y6w5U/s400/Nautilus.jpg

Pig plague could crash interwebs, say US feds

Bandwidth Hogs?

...okay, okay, its that leather one over their with the cover of Green Jelly's "Three Little Pigs" single painted on the back.

Gmail turns into label junkie

I like the changes...

My list of labels was getting too long. Most of them are just for filtering stuff of low but required importance so they never appear in my inbox. I rarely use the chat feature.

@Why?

I agree that manually putting messages into labels is a waste of time given the ease of searching for what you need. But labels really come into their own when combined with using filters.

@DJ 2

You can change the amount and preferences for which labels show by default by simply dragging them into the display area. Can't say the same about the chat box location.

@Fraser

In gmail you can create a list of 'labels' and you can either manually apply these to messages, or use filtering rules to do it automatically. Clicking on a label shows all the messages that have that label applied. Messages can have multiple labels applied to them, making labels more flexible than folders for instance.

The A-Team flies into Hollywood

Why should we care if its good or not?

It might be an entertaining film, it might not. I don't know. I'm not going to invest emotionally in the idea that it might. To be honest for 2009 I'm more looking forward to 'King Shot' by Joderowski and David Lynch and 'Watchmen'. Although Alan Moore graphic novels don't have a good track record of movie conversions, I still think it will be entertaining...

But there will always be films that disappoint. Especially when they are based on something that has come before, like a book, comic or old tv series. Or even an older film. Whilst at other times there are pleasant surprises...

Iron Maiden axe cut ribbon on 'rock’n’roll' hotel

Room of the Beast.

There should have been a 'Room of the Beast' for £666 per night...

...located in the lowest basement obviously! (Flames for obvious reasons)

Browsers fail password protection tests

What?

"...it is tempting to think that users would be well advised never to save passwords for sensitive websites."

People do that?

Apple more closed than Microsoft

Stifle Competetion

The reason Apple don't get to so much stick is because they haven't yet obtained any kind of meaningful monopoly that allows their more closed nature to stifle competition. I have no doubt that they would try if they attained the kind of monopoly position Microsoft had. Corporations are anti-democratic authoritarian dictatorships by nature.

That they are adding some competition to the market is a good thing, regardless of whether they are 'more closed' or not.

Of course, I will continue to mostly use Linux for anything other than film editing...

New .tel domains bid to be world's phone book

Contact page?

Why would we need a whole new domain just to host a contact page? Seems pointless...

Robo-flower wilts as power burns

Cue the children...

...switching everything on in order to see the flower wilt!

Deleted

Brave New World

Maybe she was decanted? Aldous Huxley's vision may well be turning into reality...

Anal whitening biz drops one million clams for Vibrators.com

Porn exploit?

As an ex-porn model I can say that as an insider to the industry I don't remember seeing anyone exploited. Maybe somewhere there is a seedy corner of the industry that does, but if so I didn't see it. All I remember is getting paid a decent sum of money for a couple hours of fun. Best job ever.

Now if only I could have gotten enough hours to make a living out of it...