Posts by Christian Cook

Hoax Facebook virus makes more trouble than a real virus

In some ways this is a virus...

The wasted time that is caused where intelligent people have to wade through the same message copy and pasted in a huge status-stupidity-stack makes this as bad as a virus. Also, having to explain yet again to someone why they shouldn't forward everything just because someone said their toes would fall if they didn't is extremely annoying and can derail your train of thought from whatever bit of work you were trying to ignore in the first place.

This sort of behaviour is viral and is the hacking equivalent of social engineering. It's more gullibility-engineering. So maybe we need a new phrase for a social virus spread by idiots with a damaging payload of stupidity.

Google must have enough info on everyone by now to know their IQ. Perhaps everyone could have an app similar to anti-virus software that would filter out all email and web content below a certain level of intelligence. If you ever read something stupid anywhere then you would know that either:

a) you need to update your IQ definitions

b) you wrote it

Goat hangs self in Canadian zoo

Here's the only link everyone was actually looking for in the article...

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=aBc0HgW2zHw

Though only a two-second near-subliminal glimpse of idiotic Darwin goat dangle right in the middle of the report.

Nuke plant reborn as 'green' data center

This is the only way...

1 and 1 will ever get glowing reports.

It's the lead-lined one, cheers.

Government Gateway login details found in pub car park

Everyone has missed the real story here

In the Daily Mail article, the accompanying screenshot of a browser window includes a bookmark in the bookmarks toolbar for a site called 'Doggahs.' - I have no intention of googling that, but I am left wondering why the art department at the Daily Mail might be frequent visitors. Someone should start a sensationalist moral campaign about that, surely!

Royal Society of Chemistry requests 'Italian Job' ending

To make the coach lighter...

Couldn't they just blow the bloody doors off?

Hoon: Not building überdatabase would be terrorist licence to kill

And another thing...

If he wants to start throwing calm debate to the wind and get all emotive then how's about this...

In the two World Wars, millions of people gave up their lives to save our freedom and civil liberties. Now this government are giving up our freedom and civil liberties due to the misguided belief it might save a few people here and there.

They are spitting on the graves of everyone who gave their life to defend democratic freedom.

Civil Liberty order of preference

"The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist," the minister concluded, finger wagging.

He's got that slightly wrong. The biggest civil liberty is not being chastised by a confused wildebeeste. Then it's not being cavity searched by ant eaters. Then it's not being crushed by a falling Welsh caravan. Then it's not smelling of bricks. And then it is not being killed by terrorists, closely followed by not being molested by a long reach stapler.

Gov seeks UK nuclear competition for EDF

Great choice of words

“This report illustrates why I am so determined to press all the buttons to get nuclear facilities built in this country at the earliest opportunity," Hutton told the Times, ahead of announcements at the Labour conference in Manchester.

When discussing Nuclear Power, never, ever use the phrase "I am so determined to press all the buttons."

I think someone at the Chernobyl site made a similar remark once.

NASA: Mars is good habitat for Terry Pratchett dragons

So where was the playmobil mock up?

Of this:

"The chance that we are following this correctly is roughly equivalent to that of a man with no arms throwing a handful of jelly through a falling doughnut at fifty yards without touching the sides."

Knights Templar to Vatican: Give us back our assets

Nothing exists?

“Please don’t expect to be enlightened with some supposed ‘secret’ knowledge, because nothing exists.”

What? Nothing at all?

Sounds like their PR people had a 'Baldrick, deny everything' moment.

UK comms intercepts up by half - and it isn't the council

RE: Hold on!

Since when was 519,260 roughly 10% of 50,000,000?

I know that Big Brother teaches us that 2+2=5, but that's stretching it even for Gordon Brownshirt's dodgy stats dept.

Wacqui-Bacqui Smith

"In his report, Sir Christopher says that council officers... have gone too far on occasion... Some councils using these surveillance methods against council tax dodgers and so forth had shown "serious misunderstanding of the concept of proportionality", and that oversight had been "poor" in some cases."

And she interprets that as providing "reassurance that these powers are being used appropriately."

She is so out of touch with reality that she doesn't even know it exists, let alone which direction it is in.

I think she needs 'intercepting' by 'intelligence.'

Climate protestor claims glued self to UK Prime Minister

Have no idea which side was the more stupid here.

Next week I shall be going to 10 Downing Street to receive an award for punching Gordon Brown right in his stupid face.

Expect Gordon to be quoted as saying, "I now present you with an award for... hey! wait a minute, you haven't actually ever... ouch!"

Judge points laser dazzler man towards prison

Here's what it looks like

I hate the authorities going overboard as much as anyone, but in this case they do have a point... a green one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Runway_flashblindness_anim.gif

If I was trying to fly a helicopter and kept getting that in the face then I might feel a little cheesed off.

Biggles battles Yanks for right to sport tash

I am failing to accurately picture the showdown...

without a Playmobil reconstruction.

Kremlin pushes Cyrillic alphabet net

I personally...

Would like domains written in wingdings. You could see what a company did a lot quicker then... especially if they sold very fat fountain pens, old-style telephones or US Mailboxes.

Navy sonar dolphin 'massacre' - the facts

I hate dolphins anyway...

Does this world really have a need for cute sharks?

UK cops arrest six alleged BitTorrent music uploaders

RE: New York

I am sure it was once all new and shiny, but as it is now many hundreds of years old, I think they should drop that whole 'New' bit from 'New York' as it no longer applies.

It should now be called Newer York, Younger York, Son of York, Not Quite As Old As The Other One York, York Jnr. or York 2.0

Bill Gates unveils interactive wallpaper

Oh great...

Notice there's about a 3 foot gap between the screen and the projector behind. So if this is your wall then all of your rooms will immediately lose 6 feet off their dimensions.

And after a long day at the office stuck in front of the office, how nice and relaxing to sit down in the evening while your whole house bleeps with spam and prompts you to install the latest service pack.

And let's not even start the 'windows' jokes... well, okay, go on then.

Lancashire plodcopters in laser dazzle outrage outbreak

Here's how it would look for all those wondering...

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

Transcript disappears minister's 'hack-proof' ID register claim

We will certainly need secure IDs...

Now that we've declared war on Oceania... sorry, I mean Eurasia. We are at war with Eurasia, we have always been at war with Eurasia.

Thumbs up to say "Go BB! and all other glorious members of IngSoc."

Has your shifty foreign neighbour got 16 mobes?

I think Joe K is just trolling...

'Joe K' is obviously an anagram me thinks...

Then again, if he's a troll, how do I know he's a genuine troll and not just under the bridge to plant bombs? And those three goats have beards... that looks dodgy.

Forget the coat, I need to make a call...

Enraged vegan spitroasts Reg hack

The IT angle...

If Mr. Jobs was (openly) partial to bacon, then I wonder if the 5 iMac flavours would have been any different?

instead of:

Blue - blueberry

Red- strawberry?

Purple - grape

Orange - tangerine

Green - lime

We would have had:

Blue - Blue Steak

Red- Spicey Rib

Purple - Liver

Orange - Roast Chicken

Green - erm... Garnish?

Let him stew?

Does she really start fantasising about stewing him halfway through that? Is her tofu halo slipping a bit? I bet she got so worked up that she polished off 3 bacon butties immediately after she hit 'send'.

Skull and bones to depict a Lester stew.

Veggies a 'perversion of nature': Official

@Zoya

I also cannot believe how many people here are flippantly throwing around ignorant hearsay as if it were scientific fact.

I also cannot believe no-one has yet mentioned the fact that veggies smell of turtles and sleep with their knees facing the wrong way.

Clarkson's 'steal my ID' stunt backfires

Are signatures actually checked anyway?

About 10 years ago I got utterly bored with my signature (too long to write each time) and so decided to completely change it overnight. The very next day I began using my new ultra-condensed and totally different looking signature and my bank did not ask any questions over any new cheques or direct debits at all?

Of course, things might be different now but, in my experience, that generally means they are now a lot worse.

Microsoft pleads ignorance on 'one interweb per child' pork barrel

@Andrew

"Knowing things like ctrl+c copies something and ctrl+p will paste it etc."

Erm, Andrew, do you find that your printer's tray is full of lots of pages, each with a single random word printed on it?