Posts by Slaine

Public ID card support holds steady - says gov report

A Majority of what?

In a random survey of people who had already applied to be the first to receive the new ID cards ....

Of a random selection of people found in well heeled public houses who expressed an interest in the widescale adoption off electronic survailence of the population ...

In a survey of people given a choice between carrying and ID card or having to wear an electronic tagging device constructed into an unsightly ankle strap and weighing in at circa 2kg ...

... support holds steady.

Ballmer: MS not getting into handset biz

a phone made by microsoft

1 - you have to restart it after every phone call received

2 - you have to type in your 32 character pass code before it connects to your network

3 - the software will require weekly updates, some of which will disable your device entirely or wipe your address book

4 - all calls will be re-routed via an American telephone exchange

5 - the EULA will include a disclaimer that enables M$ to record any of your texts or telephone conversations

6 - Next year you will be expected to buy mobile 2.0 as mobile 1.0 is no longer supported

BAE's man in the MoD taken aside by feds in Miami

Too many cooks appear to have their fingers in this pie.

"the transactions were entirely proper and consistent with his role as a Saudi official": quite true, from my own experience of travelling to and working in Saudi Arabia in the past.

In Saudi, overt, blatant and pervasive bribery is THE WAY. Everything, from the queue at customs upwards. Everything is greased with a little "local currency". The entire economy, the entire society is organised and governed that way, it works beautifully. That is the way that it is - OVER THERE.

Here in non-muslim UK and, presumably also the US, bribery takes on a completely different role and there are quite specific penalties for those who knowingly and deliberately breach these rules. Well, there are penalties for "little" people anyway. Lets just see how this one pans out, given the unmistakable stench of UK central government collusion embroiled through the middle of it.

EU mulls intervention over BT's secret Phorm trials

BT open letter - first draft

Dear valued customer,

We will shortly be commencing the third secret trial of a brand new snooping system that monitors your browsing habits so that we can make lots of extra cash selling that information to any disreputable con artist who wants to sell you crap that you don't want using adverts that count towards your capped downloads. Please note that this will not affect the bill we send you for the dismal service that you have received of late.

We will also shortly be appearing in the European courts because the British legal system is so corrupt that they let us get away with it and to date not even the data protection act has caused us even one sleepless night. The system, inextricably linked to a former spyware producer, will be run from our own servers so that you won't have to install anything on your computer and should you wish to opt out of the scheme you will need to repeat this exercise every time you empty your "temporary internet files" (we advise this is performed regularly due to the risk of virus infection).

We have absolutely no intention of apologising for this blatant abuse of our powerful position as a monopoly organisation because of the vast sums involved and the fact that one of our senior employees has already taken up a new post with the company that masterminded this private scheme.

Yours,

BT

There - wasn't so difficult was it?

Gates threatens to buy millions and millions of servers for Microsoft

LooXXX C4n B dD-ceptive

SoundD adDvice My LieGE: I for One, wwWill Fight AlongSidDe the New Alien OverLOrdDs to RidD this Beautiful pLAN-ET of the Fat-bETaTest of the FeliNe LOuses.

SMARTer than AppeaRANces... seldDom dDOes that Happen hERE. Tomorrow I Turn 43, andD fear tHE Answers wwWill Also Vanish, OnsET MEMory LOsss InevITable.

ResPonSe V

amanfromMars: I talk; Out, not At... who listens? Not BillyBoy; of That I Am Most Certain. He dDoes Enjoy Vast Followers of WellPaid and Souless Characters, I XXXXPect That One Will Find They sStand upon the Mark to Catch The CurveBall in Hiz Stead, Eyes Closed and aArmz OutStretched; Another LuCky Break. Life, Pathetic and Struggling in Uphill Fashion, Continues Unaffected. How Near Now B4 All Our IT Moments B-gin With A CredIT Request To Play at the SuperServer? :o) RespeCT

Gates threatens to buy millions and millions of servers for Microsoft

Took me while to work this out but I got it now: It's a going away present from BillyBoy to his beloved company in the form of increased sales of Windows Vista.

Original Sin

?M$? DOS ??? - as I understood it, BillyBoy tweaked a small piece of code to enable IBM hardware to communicate effectively with the Kernel. It was all so very long ago and in a Galaxy far, far away so I really don't remember but might it have been the shortcut fix that used the date field as a flag or restricted it to 2 digits or some crap and thus began the "Y2K" debarkle in the first place?. I doubt BillyBoy remembers either but I'm sure someone will call me a retard and correct this statement before the end of the day. "Original" anything from Micro$haft would be a first. Mind you, "working out of the box" anything would also be a first.

However that is not the reason for typing...

This, as Douglas Adams might have penned it, is...

In the near future all M$ operating systems will access only M$ internet content, carefully re-written to exclude all references to operating systems that associate themselves with penguin icons and searchengines that begin with the letter "G". Of course this will require a lot of hard disks to backup the entire internet and more than a few rather powerful processors to run the "replace" function on it and without a shedload of servers hidden throughout the globe it would be impossible pull this little coupe off.

Every time I install windows I have to tolerate MSN news popping up before I can tell it to eff off, I use M$ search for "google" and then change my default page... this has to stop, and of course the logical way to stop it is to have "google" unavailable from a computer that runs a M$ OS.

Given the alternatives (ie actually doing something "original") it is probably cheaper for BillyBoy to completely replace the internet with M$ approved content. Then at least he can claim with all honesty that they have obtained a significant rise in the number of "Vista computers using M$'s search facilities", although by then I suspect we will be hearing in other news that the penguin has been installed on the other 99% of all home and office PC's.

Just a suggestion, BillyBoy, RETIRE - GIVE UP - World Domination is no longer an option.

Dell touts Windows XP to 2009 - and 'likely longer'

Thank You

Step 1 - admit that your customer is correct

Step 2 - provide what your customer wants

I build my own, so the Dell deal isn't going to affect me directly, but I applaud the common business sence and the prospect of a few more years for M$ to finish building and testing Vista , for the hardware manufacturers to get proper effective drivers designed and for software writers to be able then to take full advantage of a 64bit environment on dual, quad and more-cores.

I NEVER thought I'd use this icon.

Blighty admits 'national shortage' of nuke engineers

Two useless degrees in Science

@AC 12:19 on 9/6: because if I wrote M*sl*m the thread would NEVER be accepted. What IS HYS anyway?

@joe: Daily Mail? no mate, the register, the winds of change and some ancient rune bones.

implied racist comment

...given a choice, i'd much prefer to have a frenchman in charge of the Unclear power station, than some of the alternatives.

Isn't that great - if I actually say or type the truth, as is my right to do, the post will need to be deleted because it will offend someone. What price the truth eh?

So, this is how the Earth dies, not with a whimper - with a dubious job vacancy, limited takers, idiot government policy states "we must fill the position, even if none of our own home educated people would touch it with a barge pole, lets have that chap over there that we know nothing about and who just jumped off the boat from God knows where, even if the applicant is foreign and bearly understands English, and outwardly advokes his total lack of respect for our religion and our way of life"... hurr hurr, what does this button do? BOOOOOM!!!!! mushroom cloud, massive blast radius, retaliation, annihilation.

Icon: you, me and them - give or take a decade.

Manchester's congestion charge: pay-to-leave

after Stuart Butterworth

It's soooo true mate. Manchester is just brimming over with pubs and brewerys and I have never seen anyone from the local council successfully organise a piss-up in any of them.

I smell a Quango

I only go into Madchester if I absolutely ABSOLUTELY absolutely can't avoid it and even then I will use the train unless it is absolutely unavoidable. The roads are crap, the standard of driving is reminicent of Paris, the "no right, no left turns" around town are insane, bus and tram routes and timetables are confusing (the biggest understatement this side of calling the ever increasing Altantic a pond), the traffic wardens are cults (not as bad as Rochdale it's true but they are all now armed with digital cameras), the parking is diabolical and if you CAN find a space the charge is extortionate (third after Central London and Edinburgh's George Street unless you know different). The best part of town is the M60 ringroad, whereby you can drive just a few brief miles from the centre of town, point and say, "oh yeh, and that's Manchester... lets go somewhere nice instead". Apologies to Rusholm (the curry mile)... probably the best restaurant curry I've had outside Dundee.

Bravo to the local council for proving yet again that they can be just as narrow-minded, vindictively persecutory, blatantly moneygrabbing and terminally short sighted as their BigBrother down in Whitehall. There's a credit crunch going down... WTF are they doing wasting £3 billion (and thus depriving the cash from legitimate credit requests) on a useless data logging system ? Let's face it, in another 6 months no-one will be able to afford the petrol to drive into the centre anyway.

What's that smell?

Economist: girls actually better than boys at maths

Pounds and Pence, Dollars and Cents

Interesting sidenote...Since the majority of marriages now end in divorce and the nett result of a divorce is that the female gets the bulk of the valuables and since it costs more to be married than it does to be single, what other way is there to look at a woman's primary chosen role than as "having sex for money", which... come to think of it, probably shouldn't get past the censors.

Paris doesn't do it for money... dat's a girl ;o)

I wanted to have the last word

Mark, I don't dispute what you are implying but can you qualify those figures? Are we talking about 0.0001% of all men, single white men or anything with a p3nis? Do you include priests (who have a p3nis but, presumably don't actually use it for anything that requires blood), do you exclude homosexuals or bleeding heart liberals ?

If (and I do stress IF) 0.0001% of the human male population of our planet has managed to gain total control (doubtful given the amount of power women now seem to wield), how do you quantify the female 0.0009%?

Is this 9/10000ths of a percent (9 millionths) of the population (implying that there are 9 times as many women wielding power or that women wield 9 times as much power as men - NOTE these are NOT the same); or is this 0.0009% of the power that is wielded by the remaining 99.9999% of the human male population that you initially defined (implying merely the washing up)?

Don't fret mate - I'm just messin' with you; after all, with all this women's lib going about it's bloody difficult to get the last word in.

and finally

A Mathematician can be a good Economist, but even a brilliant Economist is not necessarily going to understand maths.

Anything published by someone whose greatest achievement is to be "an economist" should relate only to economics. They, as writers, should avoid at all cost dabbling with heady issues such as "equality of the sexes" as it is this type of misguided thinking that got us in this mess in the first place. They should limit themselves strictly to economics and do not, in any parallel existance, rate sufficiently highly to comment reliably on statistical analysis, especially of figures garnered from such a subjective and random field as the education system. Any half decent Teacher, Scientist and Mathematician will concur.

Ofcom slaps MTV with £255k fine

I'm surprised all that made it to this fucking thread

Feeling better everyone?

Don't ask me what the thumb's for ;o)

So, Lisa Scott-Lee has been associated with the words "fuck", "fucked" and "fucking". Cool - way to go hunni.

Chinese 419er punts a whopping $8

419teacher says

... not bad for a first attempt, but reeally must try harder.

US FTC cracks open anti-trust investigation on Intel

64... 32 bit OS?

c'mon guys, windows is a 2-bit operating system.

Climate supremo deploys knitwear in war on patio heaters

research oversight - what a surprise

Anyone factored in the effect of all those extra sheep?

What hell hath science wrought lately?

Graeme Sutherland: some helpful advice

To be assured of your safety, you should wear the only yellow T-shirt and get the rest of your "landing party" to wear red. Everyone knows that senior bridge crew return from all away missions whilst the spare engineer gets it.

quick - throw 1d6 for surprise

Scary GM Number 1: Given that the average humanoid shares 85% of his / her / it's DNA with a cabbage, the idea of the sheep / human hybrid really doesn't seem so bad.

Scary BigDog number 2: OM(f)G - Would all future Mr and Mrs Connors kindly avoid calling their daughter Sarah.

Scary Bridge number 3 - Dat's gorgeous that is, especially with the little "Tracey Island" in the middle... but looking at the map, regardless of the saline content of the water underneath, that is an estuary it crosses, not the sea. Mind you, they could close it to traffic and use it as a pretty relentless marathon. I doubt I will still be here in a hundred years... is William Hills taking bets that it won't either?

Scary Reception number 4 - "I've got a cold, I tell you... it's just a freakin' c........"

Scary Financial Records number 5 - Well - have you LOOKED at what that heap of junk cost and how they justified it?

The absolute top scary prospect for the future HAS to be ...

<click>

<carrier lost>

Ofcom asks ISPs nicely to stop mis-selling broadband on speed

Maybe we should pay "up to" £15 per month.

In the old days the penalty for "short selling" was hideous and brutal. Bakers found themselves with a bit of a dilemma in that they could not be absolutely sure that every single bun was sufficiently "large" to conform to the very strict rules applied to purveyors of bread products. Hense the 13th roll in a "baker's dozen".

By the same logic, an ISP "selling" a 4meg connection should provide 6 or 8meg, just to be safe. The internet stazi, rather than wasting time and money persecuting low paid individual people for sharing the odd file, really ought to be out there with "at least" 6inch nails, crucifying directors of companies who constantly "fail to deliver" even half of the service that they are charging for, those who are deliberately hiding behind this "legal-spin". The alternative is we all start getting used to buying loaves with "up to" 15 slices and fishes with "more than" no bones. The wine will be "less than" 16 proof.

How popular would I be the next morning if I bragged about having "less than" £20million and "up to 18 inches"?

UK is not a surveillance society, MPs claim

Never Believe Anything Until It Is Officially Denied

<quote>minimum data, held for the minumum time</quote> by definition is ZERO data held for Zero time. Ironically that is exactly what we will get. Not one piece of data is likely to be deleted immediately.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday promises seven fixes

pmsl @ both AC's

Icon ... "fitness for purpose" in answer to both of you.

question1

is this before or after service pack 3?

question 2

is this for Vista AND XP?

ah - the answers are here

Microsoft disclaims all warranties, either express or implied, including the warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose

Virgin Media and BPI join forces to attack illegal filesharing

The Sad Truth...

...is that until VM, BPI, phorm, etc, whoever... actually get around to taking people to court and just ONE of those people is sufficiently clued up to cite legal / privacy / contract and human rights issues the power will remain with the cult that sends letters threatening legal action.

Once the precidence is set however, everyone can cite that instead and you will quickly find that your T&C's will be altered quite dramatically, in the same way as the EULA is now technically impossible to agree to. Obviously, this will in turn invalidate everyone's current contracts but since they are not worth the paper you didn't sign I can't see how anyone will be inconvenienced.

Bottom line - these companies do not exist without customers. Hard cash subscribers to ISP's (joe and jane public) are only half the story; the irresponsible, money grabbing, growth obsessed, advertisement reliant, shareholder brownnosing conglomerates are the other half. It is an issue of oil and water - they simply do not mix.

Back to the EULA briefly before I go and pour another big glass of red... in it you give up your right to control what information your computer uploads to and downloads from the internet... mmmm there may yet be some milage (kilometerage) in that too.

Icon, because she's still got milage too and I haven't used her all week.

yes - the 10 day number change turnaround was a pain (actually, only took 4 days)

Dear Simon, you were concerned that the "physical line would remain the same from the exchange to your home and its on this that the broadband (adsl) is provisioned"... but your MAC address is tied to your telephone number, not to your physical copper cable. The last remaining helpful man on the BT helpdesk was quite adamant about that and it worked a treat. Promise.

read the second bit carefully

"It's a bit of a judgement call for us to be making threats of disconnection or account suspension" ... given so many of our customers are already leaving in droves because of the way we handled phorm, the lack of support reported by our many customers and our steadfast refusal to address the con of quoting "up to" connection speeds that cannot be realised unless you are inside the data centre or on the other end of a darkfibre.

Now then, the second bit; anyone wishing to make a one or two fingered gesture to their ISP (particularly in this case VM subscribers who have an alternative option). No contract is legally binding unless it specifies exactly what the deal is that you are entering into AND carries your signature. No contract is legally binding if it has been changed in any way since it's inception. Any letter advising you of a change to your service (including changes to T&C's, free upgrades, extra email addresses - ANYTHING) is also an admission that your contract is no longer valid. No ISP will admit this because they know that they haven't got a leg to stand on and that is why they immediately drop your details off with "Hound, Grabbit & Run" debt collection and threat dissemination agents rather than chase the bill themselves

If you can show the slightest change in your service, change of supplier, deterioration in the quality of your connection or the removal of any facility that was part of your original agreement then you have the right at any time therafter to contact your ISP and inform them that their contract with you has been broken by them and that on this basis it is no longer valid or legal. They CANNOT dispute this fact. Provision of these details to the abovementioned "Hound, Grabbit & Run" will also see them off.

Then if they fail to play ball, call your bank and halt the DD; call BT and have them change your number (to free up your MAC address); call your alternative supplier and give them the new BT number.

Worked a treat for me when Tiscali tried to fuck me over.

Bletchley Park activates online donations

419 er

But first, John - Bletchley Park was THE foremost codebreaking establishment of the 2nd World War, based here in bloody Blighty and fully operational long before Pearl Harbour dragged the US into the conflict and without which we'd all be speaking German now.

Now, the joke... "Dear concerned patron, wee are desperately needing to rebuild and protect owr valuable historikal asset and need to atrakt donations worth 1,000,000 pounds sterling and because we have been told that you are a sensitive and caring member of the public we are asking you to help. Pleese send us yourbanking details and I am sure that we can sneak you in on the cheap next time you visit."

TfL hands out contracts for congestion charge tags

what utter tosh

there is already a perfectly adequate logging system in place... they try to wash my bloody windows every time I leave town

Besuited cubicle monkey trashes office

So - where are the mice?

Power lead - okay - fair enough, they pop out for bugger all reason but... I tend to tidy the cables away in such an anally retentive manner that pulling the mouse too hard makes the speakers wobble. I've noticed too that the screwing in bit is at the back of the base unit, and normally I find that at the back of the monitor the signal lead is a permanent fixture, not something with a "screw it in/leave it loose" option.

Breach disclosure laws have 'no effect' on identity theft

and in other news...

Owning a cat doesn't change the weather.

Two top posts at NPfIT are still empty

and why do you think you are the right person for the job?

there isn't a "right person" for the job. There's one applicant - do I get it or not.

Cool, I can see it now.

Interviewer: "And how do you see your first year in the post?"

Response: "Well, I'd sack the first three tiers of this hideously top-heavy administration and re-route the newly released funds to provide every hospital with an additional 50% more nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, porters and ancilliory workers (janitors, security, receptionists etc); shift cleaning back to in-house where it belongs, buy back the carparks so that visitors no longer get charged for helping us to entertain their loved ones; then I'd double everyone's wages, buy every doctor, nurse and trainee their own laptop and set up a small data centre in each hospital to network them using a simple spreadsheet for taking bookings from surgeries over the telephone and syphon off the other half of the money to a secret Swiss bank account.

Interviewer: "I see. The Swiss bank account seems quite reasonable but I have a few problems with the rest of your statement. Thank you, don't call us"

Spanish chanteuse strips for anti-bullfighting campaign

Ole

Illegal image - good point - well made.

Don't agree personally with this bull fighting lark... for a start, they don't give the bull a gun and the numbers are a bit uneven too, but I love the idea of throwing goats off high cliffs. Anyone know the whereabouts of BillyBoy?

City of London pilots national fraud project

Ooops - my mistake

I read the title, "City of London pilots national fraud project" and naturally assumed that this was a historical piece about the origins of parliament.

RSPCA calls for dog chipping

ebony, ivory, living in the doghouse constantly

It's been a long time since every single decent joke was used up before I got here - well done everyone.

Dogs, cats, and even hamsters have all lived in perfect harmony within my childhood... in fact, whilst we had the hamsters (a sex identification, caging and breeding error that resulted in 26 of the little buggers and for which the responsibility lies solely with my little sis, althtough she still blames the vet), we also had a cat and 2 dogs. The cat was in charge though. The dogs always knew this.

Oh - and just to give a little balance to this RSPCA bashing. In the old days we NEEDED the RSPCA to prevent the hamster population being repeated by the dogs. So - thanks guys, retrospectively. Hope you find your ideology again soon.

Comcast rolls out brand new bandwidth throttles

@ Richard Bennett

I do not see the term "Black Listing" within the article and since you attack the author and not his sources you are yourself apparantly now in error. Your accusation of a "lack of integrity" on the part of the author completely fails to address the concepts of 'artistic licence' and 'inspired creative writing'. Your comment borders on libel.

Has the article been re-written after your comment? or are you, Dick, simply full of sh1t and desperately in need of a dump?

If the former, perhaps an apology is in order for the vicious nature of your spite, if the latter I suggest El Reg dump you sooner rather than later because when I make a half-arsed inflamatory comment like yours Sarah Bee normally censors it for me and stops me looking like a complete jerk. (Thanx Babe, keep it up).

World+dog ignores Sweden's Draconian wiretap bill

just ignore the lower case

CANibal THEse TErribleXT BOTtleS WOnderRooK OvertUnderTaking WHangerAT I HAValEne TYpexPED tHERrElaxation?

what's the swedish word for semtex?

France, US and the UK already intercepts EVERYthing that I touch so why shouldn't the Swedes have a peek too.

Time to move on from Chinook to the real MoD cock-ups

cloisterfuck was that? oops sorry - that's a priest and choirboy thing

Can we have some new entries to the conversion calculator please - I'd love to know the conversion factors for comparing "Chinooks" with, say, "Unclear Submarines", "2012 Olympics", "BAe Bribes", "Fully Trained Doctors" and perhaps, "Politician's 2nd home bungs", "Average UK salary", "Mean UK salary" and "Mode UK salary".

A quarter of UK adults to go on child protection database

Strange but True (now with added sarcasm)

You need a licence to own a dog, but any fool can approach a dog.

Any fool can have a child ...

You need a licence to own a TV... but any blinkered, uninspired, self-opinionated talentless, halfwitted, misinformed, poorly educated, powerhungry emotional retard with a random axe to grind and a complete lack of intellectual spark or moral fibre can be a politician.

UK begins probe into aeroplane air quality

Behave, citizens

After breathing recycled air, the next logical step is... "Eat recycled food, it's good for the environment and it's okay for you"

US imposes 72 hour pre-reg for Visa waiver travellers

reminds me - the FFFB's

Wonderful cartoon images spring back to my fevered mind of a hapless trio trying to get through customs (mexico to US I think the parody goes) and they pass the passport control, and they pass this and that and the other and meet up with "The Attitude Inspector". And one remarks in a gruff and rude term his disapproval of such a test and of course is immediately barred from entering.

Dear V.Srikrishnan

I really do not understand the reason for all these sarcastic comments. -> Sarcasm is friendly ribbalry, well it used to be anyway.

The USA has every right to impose regulations as it sees fit. -> absolutely, I agree and also I have noticed in travelling to other countries that the UK customs are by far the worst bunch of morons that I have ever had the displeasure of sharing air with (but I've never been to the States so I cannot compare)

regarding the US being a paranoid country...the British chaps at the Heathrow airport were immeasurably rude; -> I apologise on behalf of my terminally retarded simian countymen. Unfortunately anyone here with an IQ greater than that of a cabbage is actively discriminated against here due to a subtle but abject fear that something clever might actually be achieved.

I generally like(d) the Brits -> so did I mate, and I was born here

So, why is this news giving rise to so many nasty comments? -> I think to be honest what you see here is the thin edge of a large wedge, the first wave of a tide of venom, two countries separated by a common language who refuse to accept the fact that they both live in dictatorship (by proxi) states and can only maintain any sense of righteousness by poking holes in the policies of the other.

Can someone kindly explain, without sarcasm? -> nope - but no offense.

I trust you made if safely back to India. My sister went there a couple of years ago and said "the unique experience" gave her, "a wonderful perspective". Thanks for that too.

Windows XP given additional resuscitation

Meanwhile, in a dirty shed behind Redmond...

Staff: Look, if we don't keep supporting XP we are toast

BillG: But I want the whole world to run on Vista

Staff: You don't get it Bill, if we keep pushing Vista, we're doomed. Even the pre-installed machines are getting wiped in favour of anything but Vista

BillG: Noooo - it's my life's work, all those security holes for me to browse in my retirement

Staff: Look mate - your outta here in 3 weeks - just piss off and let us try to salvage something from this mess.