Posts by D

Israeli TV star ordered execs beaten up

I'd watch him devotedly

just on the off-chance that he was going to beat the crap out of someone on air. Get rid of Ant and Dec and bring on Dudu Topaz to boost those viewing figures.

Paris has a "hands-on" approach to staying famous.

Welsh mum amazed by Marmite Messiah

Seeing god on a marmite toast

is just natures way of telling you to take your medication.

Toddler snaps up mechanical digger online

Dad's a stoner

And after a heavy session on the bong, decided to buy the best toy ever. The next day, in the grips of reality, he blamed his indiscretion on the little one.

Dominican lad suffers six-day stiffy

Nothing to add.....

but Paris, because she knows what to do in this kind of emergency.

Who reads The Register?

If the boss asks

I read the register to keep myself up to date with what's happening in IT. I just hope he doesn't examine the spyware logs too closely and find out that I spend 90% of my time here keeping myself up to date with Ms Hilton's reflections on life and all the rest of the irrelevant dross in Odds and Sods.

Paris, because she's really why I'm here.

Spinning the war on the UK's sex trade

Prostitution, cannabis, binge drinking,

high fat foods, gambling, the essential ingredients of a good night out, have all been targeted by Brown's government.

I think we should let Paris run the country.

Mac fans see MS porn everywhere

Can I get AOL on my i-phone?

I was trying to think what the single most annoying thing anyone could say to me was, "Can I get AOL on my i-phone?" would probably push all my buttons so effectively that I'd be driven to beating them to death with the nearest blunt object, preferably something ;with an "i-" prefix in it's name.

Perhaps I just need to cut back on my caffeine. Mine's the one with the wrap around arms.

Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover

Virgin Media have censored the article.

returning just a blank page with no explanation. Looking at the page via a proxy service it isn't porn by any reasonable definition. In fact I think you have to be a bit of a kiddy fiddler perv type to even think of it as a sexual image.

Daughter cremates mom on improvised barbecue

"although there is no suspicion of foul play"

They made a necklace out of granny's skull and then went all web 2.0 on it as a trophy, surely that's enough to make the police slightly suspicious of the whole thing.

Dixons Group still suffering

The only news that tops this news this week

is the announcement that 30% of estate agents are likely to loose their jobs.

45th Mersenne prime discovered (possibly)

You can see why finding these numbers have such a cult following.

No, I really can't.

Paris because she'd rather suck dick than waste time on Mersenne Primes.

Linux risks netbooks defeat to Microsoft

There are at least 100* more copies of Vista than Ubuntu out there

It really is about time that the linux devotees started asking themselves why they can't give away a free product, at least to all IT professionals who "should know better".

All I want is a stable OS that will give me browsing and applications similar to Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I tried Ubuntu, it had nothing like dreamweaver and the OS ran painfully slowly and kept hanging. I looked around for reasons why but after six hours gave up. I could have persevered, and have no doubt that if I had it would have eventually run at blinding speed. But why should I bother? I was able to reinstall XP in less than an hour and it worked just fine, I never use more than 10% of processor capacity so efficiency isn't an issue. I run thunderbird, firefox and open office as default apps, so have no aversion at all to OSS.

I'm not interested in learning the guts of a PC operating system, any more than I'm interested in the operating system that my washing machine or playstation 3 run on, I just want to switch the bloody thing on and start working just like the washing machine and the PS3. The fact that some anoraks no doubt think that I'm "lame" for giving in so easily does not bother me in the slightest. If linux can't win people like me over it has got sod all chance of success in the open market.

There's no reason why linux has to be so inaccessible, it's just a reflection of the mentality of the people who build it who seem to have no grasp of the needs of the average end user. Without a philosophy based around making it a turnkey solution linux is destined to remain a badge of geekiness and nothing more.

John Glenn blasts Moonbase-to-Mars NASA roadmap

I thought the moon was packed with tritium?

Based on a Horizon I saw some time back, a couple of pounds of moon rock would pay for the whole space program and give you change for a couple of nights out as it's apparently easy to make a functional fusion reactor powered by the staff.

MS products just too cool to comprehend, say MS geeks

M4 are screwed

@Mike

I've got to join the chorus. I'm on XP SP3 and have yet to hear a single argument for moving to Vista. I've got the processing power and the memory on the machine, but don't see the rational in devoting all those resources to the operating system when I don't have to. I'll be with XP for a long time and after that I think me and M$ will be parting company Ubuntu gets nicer each time I look at it.

I've also recently moved over to open office. It's excellent, and gives me everything that I need in an office package. It's much easier to install and update because it's free. Once the public and small businesses catch on to this the only people who'll be buying office will be businesses with workflow systems built around M$. For everyone else there is no argument for spending money on an inferior product. I think M$ are screwed and the death of Vista is the beginning of the end.

Paris, because like Microsoft she's rapidly approaching he "best before" date.

Malware authors declare start of World War III (again)

Iraq's controversial decision to continue building a nuclear plant?

I'm pretty sure that was Iran's decision to build a nuclear reactor in Iran. Unless you know something that we don't?

Nut launches death threats at Debian women

we really need a wide eyed axe wielding penguin icon

to cope with this recent flurry of open source nut-job stories.

Ohio table-shag man gets six months

so to punish him, they're going to lock him in a cell with only

a bed and small table for company?

Paris, because I'd rather do a bike than a table any day.

Devil dog laughs in the face of Taser

I ate a smarter animal for breakfast

and really don't see the issue. Yes the police could have hung around feeding the beast chocolate and tried to make friends with it, maybe one of them could have taken it home and rehabilitated it. On the other hand as we kill thousands of equally smart animals daily for snacks, it seems fair to say that by even threatening to bite a copper this little fella had gone well across the line of good doggy behaviour and there is only one penalty for being a bad dog.

Could pen-sized GPS jammers paralyse UK shipping?

I want one of those pens

so I can while away my lunch hours sat outside a cafe, drink in hand watching the chaos that ensues.

Do you know how much of your porn is extreme?

This story is useless without pics

or at least a link to a site with some nice examples on it please.

Mines the dirty mac

US school cheat hack suspect faces 38 years jail

38 Years, that'll be two years for hacking and 36 years

for having a dodgy middle eastern sounding name.

Teens use technology to party in strangers' pools

Hi folks, thanks for calling by and

welcome to the swimming pool of death.

Getting chavs to jump into pools of bleach could become a new national pastime.

AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic

"wasting disk space with large amounts of unnecessary lines in log files"

this may have been a concern 15 years ago. When did El Reg start hiring reporters from the Daily Fail?

Paris, because even she would know that it would take decades to fill a present day disk drive with server logs.

Disgruntled admin gets 63 months for massive data deletion

The new sysadmin should join him in jail for criminal negligence

He/she took over the job knowing that their predecessor had been frogmarched out of the building by security. Anyone with a minimum of competence would assume the worst and lock down the system, certainly not leaving any admin accounts with their original passwords.

Paris, because she knows what it's like to do hard time.

UK culture sec wants a public service web

It really is time to stop voting for these people

we are only encouraging them and they just keep embarrassing themselves.

Top Tory resigns on principle over 42 days bill

I find it deeply worrying

that I'm congratulating a tory online for doing anything other than ending his own life whilst at the same time I'm condemning the fascist labour government.

Can we please encourage all 600 + of these dipshits to resign, and get some people in who don't piss their pants and cancel our basic rights because some pratt sets fire to himself at an airport and gets punched in the gob. Back in the day we used to have competant terrorists like the IRA (funded by the USA), who really knew how to blow the shit out of a city and we still managed maintain most of our basic freedoms and right to privacy despite the fact that there was a much more significant threat to our lives and property.

Gamers not social misfits, after all

The bar seems pretty high on this one

I admit that I've played over 48 hours myself straight through, but I did recognise it as an unhealthy practice and nearly got me dumped. Anyone spending more than 20 hours a week at an absolute maximum is in serious need of a life, by the time it gets to 50 they're beyond help.

Paris, because if you spend 50+ hours a week gaming, watching her online videos will be the nearest you get to having a girlfriend

God makes you stupid, researchers claim

There's quite a few claiming high IQs who don't even seem to have a grasp of basic maths

.... you may be a very smart person with a high IQ. However, as this study is making claims about trends within a population rather than individual absolute rules, the fact that you worship god/mohammed/sky pixies or whatever ridiculous bronze age superstition that you've latched onto because you can't cope with reality/your own mortality has no bearing on this other than to remind us that people can have a high IQ and still be gullible.

Mines the one with "heretic" on the back.

Virgin Media and BPI join forces to attack illegal filesharing

Changing ISPs is a faff

I've been putting it off now for a while since VM started withholding the service that I was paying for by throtling the bandwidth. I'm tempted to hang on for the first letter so that I can tell them to shove it where the sun doesn't shine, guess it depends on how long it takes BT to put in a phone line.

A quarter of UK adults to go on child protection database

This is a none story

I've been working on and off for years with vulnerable adults, and CRB checks have been part of taking a new job for many years now. All they consist of is a PNC and Interpol check to confirm that you've never been successfully prosecuted for anything nasty, not just kiddy fiddling, but things like fraud and theft, violence against the person, animal cruelty etc. As many have already pointed out all this database will do is remove the need for multiple checks on one person, potentially saving a fortune for organisations like the NHS that have to do CRB checks every time someone moves to a new post.

It's a very sensible idea that involves no loss of privacy or rights for anyone involved. It really doesn't merit the knee jerk reactions that it got with at least two posters indicating that this was going to make them pack up and leave the country.

Paris, because she has a relaxed approach to privacy.

9/11 an inside job, says Irish pop folkster

LIke most I'm dependant on expert opinions

however, both sides seem to have credible experts. The fact is that it could have been an inside job, it could have been a third party or it could have been Al Qaeda. I wouldn't dismiss anyone as an idiot for having any of those beliefs.

When I look at it in the context of the Bush administration and their actions since 11/9 it does start to sound plausible if not likely. I found the way that they identified the hijackers as just a ridiculous lie. (they found a passport underneath one of the towers, below burning wreckage of the aircraft). It seems clear that the government who should have still been trying to work out what was going on had made their minds up who was going to take the wrap for this, within an hour of the first plane hitting.

I also find it difficult to swallow that the billion dollar air defence network that protects US airspace wasn't working that day because they'd been sent off on a training exercise. Why was nobody ever roasted for letting this happen?

For me it boils down to Dubya and Cheney and whether I think that they're capable of lying, and taking innocent lives to further their own agendas.Well they certainly had no issues doing this when it came to Iraq and more than enough US troops have died in Iraq to show that they don't even have much regard for the lives of their own countrymen.

There's more than enough motive there as the US economy is being raped to pay Haliburton for their "logistical support" services in war zones. A few poeple are getting very rich out of all this, and I don't doubt for a second that Dubya is one of them.

I don't see anything to support all this New World Order claptrap though. But the best way to discredit a conspiracy theory is to link it to nutjobs like David Icke.

Overall I'd say that the evidence for an inside job is compelling enough to at least make it a possibility for anyone with an open mind.

Daily Mail cites video game as proof of terrorist doomsday plot

it must be terrifying to be a Daily Mail reader

yesterday it was killer mosquitoes that were coming to the UK to kill us all, today a group of Arab goat herders in Afghanistan are planning to build a nuclear weapon. Oh I'm shitting myself already.

It would be nice to see the Daily Mail focus on something sensible rather than have a different horseman of the apocalypse charging across the front page each day. I don't mind the occasional Armageddon prophecy, the millennium bug was entertaining in it's day. However, I really can't be bothered with being forced to face the imminent collapse of Western civilization every single day.

The poor bastards who believe all this crap are living in a perpetual hell, expecting their homes to be overrun at any minute by hoodie wearing, skunk smoking moslem transgender asylum seekers on a Jihad. It's really not a humane way to treat the congenitally stupid. Scaring stupid people should become a criminal offence.

The New Order: When reading is a crime

@What happenned to moderacy?

there's no such thing, it's a word that you've just made up.

"They cleared him, but in the course of the investigation......"

I think that people are not so much upset about the investigation, more the nature of it. I've got nothing to hide but I would be really pissed off to have a dozen coppers turn my home upside down and intrude on everything that I hold personal. I'd be even more pissed off if I had to spend six days living in a police cell whilst they found out I was an innocent law abiding citizen.

likely to be useful to a person preparing an act of terrorism.

this covers probably about 10% of the stuff in book shops. Surely the sensible approach now is to not take any chances and burn all the books. They only turn people into spectacle wearing dangerous intellectuals anyway.

Irregular heart rhythm? Try a Taser

It may look cleaner and more humane

but there's not really much difference between tasering someone and giving them a bit of a kicking, apart from the fact that the good kicking would be a lot safer than a massive electrical shock. However, for some reason we stopped the police from being able to beat the crap out of someone or using other forms of excruciating pain when arresting people. Why was that?

The other point that nobody seems to have considered is that we really don't know what the long term effects of electrical shocks can be with humans. It's never really been seen as ethical to subject people to repeated electric shocks for the purposes of research.

We can say with certainty that unlike many other trauma's electric shocks are a completely new phenomena and one that there will have been no need to build evolutionary safeguards. People and animals generally don't survive lightning strikes. There's nothing to suggest that our bodies have mechanisms to protect us against electrical trauma.

Every day in hospitals across the country electro convulsive therapy is still being used, sometimes on an outpatient basis, to treat depression. There's still much controversy about the mechanism by which it works, but a general consensus amongst psychiatrists is that the disruption of the electrical activity of the brain can for some people have a profound impact on their mental state, often a positive one. Studies have shown that repeated treatments can leave scar tissue in the brain, similarly to the kind of trauma that boxers suffer with repeated concussions. So they do generally try to limit the number of treatments an individual can have.

There's interesting research looking at the strong link between heart disease and depression, and speculating that the link may be in the change in the electrical activity of the heart that impacts on the electrical fields in the brain.

There's no telling what series of massive electrical shocks would do to the central nervous system. Not to mention the heart, the digestive tract, the sexual organs etc. But I guess if the police continue to taser people with such enthusiasm, we'll start to find out. I hope it's not anything too nasty.

Until then, I would like to be the first to welcome our new Taser yielding, jack boot wearing overlords.

International copyright talks seek BitTorrent-killer laws

My six year old daughter started singing a song from the charts

whilst we we driving along in the car. Normally I would have just thought "that's cute", however after reading ImaGnobbers comments I immediately called the police to have her arrested for what was clearly a breach of copyright. She told me that everyone at school was singing it, but I told her to save it for the judge, theft is theft and there's no excuse.

@Ima Gnuber

If you want to keep calling it theft, don't expect to be taken seriously. Theft is the act of illegally depriving somebody of their property and no matter how desperately you want breaches of copyright to qualify for the the label with it's more dramatic connotations, they don't. It's just a rather pathetic ploy used by the recording industry for what is a trivial breach of laws that only a tiny minority have any respect for.

And then you set up a straw man argument with

"Unfortunately you indicated that, apparently, you feel you are entitled to steal anything that costs more than you think it should"

Which was a sad but predictable.

All that it lacks is the accusation of supporting terrorists or drug dealers or whatever other group of social pariahs the recording industry likes to associate with music pirates. That's because most people know that the recording industry is simply a parasite that takes from the music industry and adds nothing of real value.

It's a shame that you said you appreciated my honesty and then went on to make such a dishonest argument yourself thereby disgracing yourself.

Paris, because even she could probably spot the flaws in your argument.

@Ima Gnuber

I've not bought software for over five years and have a 200GB mp3 collection that I've not paid for along with hundreds of movies and books. However, since you told me to STFU I've seen the error of my ways and deleted it all. Not.

It may be wrong it may be immoral it may be supporting terrorists and kiddy fiddlers but I don't give a crap and the reality is that the majority of people don't give a crap either. The RIAA and MPAA have been trying for years to stop pirating and it's simply not working and it never will work. Even if they managed to achieve thet technically impossible and destroy file sharing on the internet, then people will just go back to the bloke with the shop full of dodgy DVDs that I used to buy off.

Until publishers get their heads around this reality they will continue to flog a dead business model all the way into oblivion. They could have a lot of money off me, by just charging a few pennies for a song and a couple of quid for a movie, but instead, they try to take the piss and charge silly money and as a result get nothing.

Mozilla guns for Guinness world record with Firefox 3.0

I've been using RC2 a lot over the last few days

and not had a single problem (running XP). It's just that little bit slicker than 2.x and it looks nicer as well.

Reg readers split on Vista readiness

After reading this and other articles

and installing vista on a couple of machines I am still completely clueless about what the advantages of Vista are. The disadvantages as compared to XP are not difficult to see ranging from software and hardware not working to poor performance.

There may be some advantages to users in large businesses, although I've not seen anything to really indicate this. I really don't understand why anyone wants to upgrade when XP sp3 works just fine?

@stu

" " Vista broke my software": .......there is just better enforcement of the rules that always existed to stop people doing bad/wrong/stupid things. In most cases if your software doesn't work its because it is trying to do something it shouldn't.

This is a similar argument to the one everybody used when speed cameras were introduced - it was always illegal to speed, just 'cos they didn't give you a ticket didn't make it alright."

If I'm happy with my software and it does what I want it to do, why should I give a stuff whether it breaks the arbitrary rules set by Microsoft? Like most people I just want a machine that works. Speed cameras are a different matter because if I drive at 60mph in a 30mph zone I am likely to kill people. If my software works but not in the way that microsoft want it to, nothing really happens as long as I don't install Vista.

Paris, because even she could see the difference between complying with MS standards and dangerous driving.

Unmanned Aerial Manhood outrage at Kasparov rally

I'm dissapointed

that the bodyguards didn't pull out their handguns and open fire on the huge flying cock, which would have made it the coolest youtube clip ever, instead of just standing there looking perplexed for a couple of minutes and then a right hook.

Paris because she shows no hesitation in dealing with this kind of threat.

Five misunderstood Vista features

Vista is definitely the new ME

I installed it on my two home machines, and had to backtrack and install XP. Vista was a complete nightmare and offered nothing new that I actually wanted. I saw the blue screen of death, a number of times, for the first time in years. There were so many irritating and unnecessary features like the sidebar, that I found really irritating.

XP does everything I want an OS to do and no there's shortage of device drivers, open source software and games. Using Open Office, VLC, Firefox, Thunderbird Apache and a few other bits and pieces and relying on an hardware firewall alllows me to run XP with minimal drain on resources. Once XP has run it's course and they aren't making drivers for it any more, and assuming that Amiga workbench hasn't made a comeback, I will probably switch to linux.

Google under fire again for handing user info to police

it's an IP Address, not an IP number

it's four numbers (eight if you include the subnet) so it would be IP Numbers. But nobody says IP numbers because it's an IP Address and always has been.

Paris because I've seen a video of her sucking someone's dick.

PS3 update fails to fix Grand Theft Auto IV woes

This video details the problem, it's transitory nature

and reflects the experience of all the PS3 owners I know.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

I know half a dozen people who have been hammering their PS3s

since the launch of GTAIV and all anyone has experienced was a glitch that stopped you loading the game, because of a change in their servers on the Saturday following the launch. It seemed to disappear after just a few hours and I've not had a single problem since. I've left the game running for over 24 hours (by mistake) and it's not had any other problems at all. I had a lot more issues with the game freezing and overheating etc on my PS2 and PS1 versions.

@BatCat

There's no comparison at all with the heartache of trying to run a games PC and the minimal effort required to setup a PS3. Occasionally it asks me if I want to update. I click yes and watch a progress bar move slowly across the screen. Then it installs and then everything works fine. That's as difficult as it gets.

Paris, because even Paris could operate a PS3

Dixons admits 'it's even worse than you thought'

That's just made my day

My experiences have lead me to conclude that they're a bunch of clueless lying retards who blatantly take the piss and have done for the last ten years. Last time I was in there they tried to charge me £20 for a 1m Cat5 cable. Full credit to the assistant though who directed me to the nearest maplins.

Neighbourhood Watch 2.0: Your tensions are being monitored

I would like to be the first to welcome our new community warden overlords

and point out that the guy in number 37 regularly overfills his bins, shoot the bastard. I'm glad that I don't have to think any more for myself and that this is all now done for me by the council, like schools and roads.

Mine's the one with the "Nightwatch" armband.

@shable

"P.S. Does this post count as 'social tension'?"

That's something that you'll have plenty of time to reflect on as you gaze out of your cell window between waterboarding treatments. Don't think we haven't had our eye on you for a while....

Welsh Darth Vader dodges jail

they devote their lives to being living the Jedi life spend hours practicing

light sabre duels all for that moment that they can rise to the occasion and use their sabre rattling skills to deadly effect. Then a lunatic drunk comes charging at them with a vaguely sabre shaped weapon and starts and unprovoked attack. The deadly response that we see is a petulant mumble of "actually that really hurt". It's just not very jedi is it.

Paris, because she can handle a man with a large weapon.