Posts by Richard

Welsh Tories ask taxpayers to pick up iPod tab

If you can't beat 'em

Some new rules might be in order:

All members must have a designated animal within 15ft of them at all times. Designated animals: WIldebeest, Hippopotamus, Rhinocerous. Said animals must be fed by the member at own expense.

There should be a special "If it appears to anyone with an IQ over 60 that a given expense looks like a member may be milking the expenses like a giant udder then that expense is not allowed except if the member successfully defends it in mortal combat" rule.

Just because you get to make the rules doesn't preclude you from being able to see that they're wrong. Black helicopter because apparently Apache gunships aren't forbidden on expenses either.

GPLv3 to reinforce FSF open-source license position?

Surely though

Real Programmers don't comment

Open source projects have comments

Therefore:

Real Programmers don't work on Open Source Projects

OR

There is at least one non-real programmer on many Open Source Projects

Well, that's that myth busted. Well done Black Duck!

Openreach reaching for more cash

Less is surely more

"This isn't nearly as much as Openreach wanted, but is _less_ than competitors argued for"

DARPA seeks Hitchhikers Deep Thought program

Not skynet either

More like FUCKUP from Illuminatus! - computer generated synthesis of conspiracies

All Hail Eris!

NYT scribe: No bailout for Tesla-buying 'centimillionaires*'

*Whoops indeed

You probably mean hectamillionaire or decimillionaire

Hecamillion = 6,000,000

Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers

Standard Internet Protocol lifecycle

1) Designed

2) Works well for some time

3) Subverted

4) Other things are too reliant on it to change

5) BOFH searches for cricket bat jerry rigged with cattle prod and 100F capacitor

6) Fzzt, Bam, Fzzt, Bam

7) BOFH profit.

Lord Lamont joins Phorm board

Sock Puppet welcomes Sock

To be fair to Lamont, Black Wednesday wasn't his fault - he'd never agreed with going into the ERM; he simply had to implement a deeply flawed policy rate. Perhaps he's got the right sort of experience after all - he knows it's screwed but is quite happy to make money out of them while the ship sinks. Nice work if you can get it.

Counter-terror police arrest Tory frontbencher

It's about time!

In a perverse way I'm rather glad that this has happened, not because I know anything about whether he's done anything or not, but because it's about time that Parliament realised that _anyone_ can be affected by the security climate that the Government has set up over the last few years. Many in the Commons have either been woefully complacent or too easily swayed by rhetoric along the lines of "It's only bad people that we're targetting". Unfortunately, I suspect that the Government's uber-loyalists consider the Tories to be in the bad people category so it may well have no effect. One can but hope.

Satanic net neologisms - nominations invited

Where to start?

Version numbers for the Web, especially when said in that stupid 2 point Oh manner.

User generated content - most of the time meaning User fenced content

The Google definition of "Beta"

Google as a verb.

MySociety puts e-democracy up for sale

I'm disappointed

There's no requirement for the money to be delivered in a brown envelope

/mine's in here somewhere ;)

Aussie government muffs plans for internet filtering

Aren't filters wonderful?

In my last job, our sales department nearly had to learn how to spell and roughly where places were after every internet dictionary and online map got blocked (thanks to a certain village in Austria that keeps getting its sign nicked)

Juror dismissed over Facebook poll

But posting on the internet isn't talking...

... oh wait, I see what you mean.

Moronic _well within_ belief these days, sadly.

US couple sue over McNudes

@Lloyd

The prosecution stands quite a good chance not because anyone other than the McDimwits could have handled said phone but because they were the only ones who could reasonably have known that those pictures were linked to that name and address. Obviously one can imagine someone who knew the Shermans finding it in the "restaurant" and maliciously posting the pictures, but I would think it likely that that would mean that they and not the McEejits would have given him his phone back.

Should the Shermans have had nothing to fear, one wonders...

The Pope predicted economic Armageddon back in 1985

Zwanzig:Zwanzig vision

If anyone deserves credit (no pun intended) for predicting ethical problems in the market it is one A. Smith esq of Kirkcaldy, Fife, who had worked all this out when the US of A was only months old. I hope the erstwhile Cardinal Ratzinger put him on his bibliography list...

Tron sequel already in production

Gah

Erm, Flight of the Navigator.

I was getting confused with Thomas Hardy's lesser known foray into sci-fi. Spoiler: They all die ;)

Tr2n indeed

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse with a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still - that looks like it will be more pants than MC Hammer. Unless, Jeff Bridges gets to type "7h3 d00d 4b1d35", in which case all will be forgiven ;)

I swear, if they even think about touching Explorers or Return of the Navigator, I quit...

Batman sues Batman over Batman

What's their problem?

Batman fights crime. They have unsolved murders and girls committing suicide.

Now, if the town was called "Joker" I might understand their point.

(The icon is missing an R here ;)

Half of Brits abuse apostrophe's

Londoners...

The success Londoners have with apostrophes arise from the hopeless state of their pronunciation. Dropped letters and glottal stops all over the shop. The more you use 'em in other contexts the more you're likely to get your head round their possessive use.

Gary Glitter expelled from GCSE paper

"You turned my kids homosexual"

Criminal behaviour should not be a prohibition on study. We might as well get rid of Hitler, Stalin (mass murder), Guy Fawkes, George Washington (treason), Hanson, Steps (crimes against music), Sylvia Plath, Alan Turing (suicide).

Particularly ironic from a paper who whinges on about political correctness gone mad...

Replicating DNA

Right then

I'm off to rename this as "Series decay in Modern English Literature: A Lamarckian Approach". Should be a required OU text in no time ;-)

Ex-IBMer and new iPod boss ordered to stop work

Don't sign what you don't understand

I was asked to agree to something similar in my last job as an addendum to my contract. I refused until they defined "competitors" as I could see it being broad enough to include "anywhere with a computer".

To think, my boss at the time thought I was being stupid... looks like I wasn't being paranoid enough.

Webcast quango: One-third of UK teachers are creationists

Funny though...

That this is filed under Science rather than Odds & Sods or Public Sector.

Just as there's a semantic issue with the word "theory" as in Darwinian Evolution is "only a theory" / "the best scientific model we have on the subject at the moment", there's a problem with the word Creationism.

Admittedly neither old Earth (comprehensible synthesis of religious belief into scientific understanding) nor young Earth (Noah kicked the dinosaurs off the ark or God is using fossils to mess with our heads) Creationism belong in science lessons - especially not the latter or Intelligent Design (pseudo-scientific gloss on young Earth creationism) - but this is just the kind of tar baby that the 4004BC club love to wind rationalists up with.

Also, I bet Teachers TV would never dare to do a "should we bring back corporal punishment?" survey or, if they did, wouldn't give it quite as much prominence.

Yang! tells! MS! to! buy! Yahoo!

If you listen very, very carefully

You can hear the milk coming out of Steve Ballmer's nose...

Gordo entertains a couple of lapdancers

Fair enough

Why not introduce a "Smutty encounter establishment" label, to be joined by any cinema showing re-runs of Carry On films... see if they can lithely wriggle out of that one :)

Mine's the not quite flasher grade mac.

Rigged e-voting machine snacks on Homer Simpson

Re: Open Source Plug

"I'd feel much better about the machines if the source was open and the vendors of the machines would accept outside help and implement it speedily."

Hey, they've met you halfway! Outside (self-interested) help and speedy (ie full of bugs) implementation ;)

Fancy nipping for a quick two-thirds of a pint?

Never mind 2/3

Those old 1/3 pt bottles that were used for the school milk could be put to good use - a mandatory mid-morning beer break.

Mine's the one with the "Beer Monitor" armband.

Designer touts 'super sight' sunglasses

Improving Peripheral vision isn't going to fix much

Until drivers get their basic forward vision sorted out.

Mine's smeared over the front of the red car in the picture...

Trainee teachers score F all in maths tests

Can we have _all_ the numbers please

It's interesting that a report on maths tests is surprisingly light on numbers that actually mean anything.

Come on el Reg, you can do better than this: if the average number of tests for Maths teachers was 2 in 2001 and is now 2.4, and the average number of tests for literacy was 3 in 2001 and is now 3.48 (which would fit in with the figures), it could still demonstrate how the teaching profession is stuffed full of English graduates unable to get jobs as poets. And also that the number of extra tests is 0.4 per maths teacher and 0.48 per social science graduate, which I'm presuming is the same pool from which journalists are drawn ;)

Das überdatabase: Inside Wacky Jacqui's motherbrain

How to catch a terrorist in Britain

(With apologies to "How to catch a lion in the Sahara Desert")

The Jacqui Smith method:

1) Construct a huge database containing as much information about Britons as you can get.

2) Observe that the set of terrorists in Britain is not empty

3) You therefore have as much information on terrorists in Britain as you can get. Finding that information is left as an exercise for the reader.

Verity's further education

Is it just me?

Or did a paragraph from this article end up in the Loebner prize coverage instead?

"However, one of the organisers did suggest that the obvious machines didn’t really answer questions - they were quite vague or definitely evasive, obviously picking up on key words, and building an answer around those, rather than what they had been asked."

Captain Cyborg to chew the fat with Ultra Hal

<Sigh>, another year, the same competitors in the Loebner prize

10 Write Program

20 IF Intelligent GOTO END

30 Patch

40 GOTO 20

Pretty standard 80's AI paradigm really. Big claims, patch and pray programming, funds dry up. Some researchers got past this. Others implanted themselves with the history repeat chip...

Virgin rejects $1m space sex offer

Some people have no imagination!

Now, a sex-in-space snuff movie...

Scene: Silhouetted writhing to Fanfare for the Common Man

<grumble noises>

Psssssshhhhh noise as the airlock slowly opens

HAL (fitted with the Andy Burnham voice module): "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you do that. And don't even think about putting this on the internet"

;-)

Damien Hirst buys Paris porn collage

Share and share alike

It's hardly fair that Paris alone should get the proceeds of the poster sales. What about the, erm, jazz artistes without whose work the image could not have been composed?

I'd be very worried about anyone who says that their kid could have done this picture - doesn't it imply a rather large pr0n collection?

Fire-breathing black cabs: Shock eyewitness photo

Cyborg Hybrids??

This sets a truly dangerous precedent.

What next? Margaret Beckett to meld with "A camper van? What the hell did the matrix do to Hot Rod?" Rodimus Prime?

Tony Blair + Soundwave: Soundbite?

Royal Navy won't fight pirates 'in case they claim asylum'

Would they *have* to take them back to the UK?

Haven't we got some pink coloured islands in pretty much every ocean?

I notice an appropriately named Danger Island in the Indian Ocean Territory. Uninhabited, plenty of coconuts, what more could a pirate want?

Labour minister says 14 year olds should get ID cards

Don't Worry!!

My only consolation is that they're forecasting brownouts by about 2013 - I'm guessing that "must work when there is no power" isn't part of the spec. I suspect Brown Out may be a lot sooner. It galls me that the sodding Tories have to get in to repeal it

Noel Edmonds defies BBC's jackbooted enforcers

I'l bet I know what's happened

The bearded eejit paid by Direct Debit, which is 6 months in advance and 6 in arrears. His licence is probably valid for the next 6 months... *sigh*

Of course he's got another option - not watch any sodding TV. I use the 2 weeks or so per year that I'm visting the folks to check whether I'm missing out on anything and all I tend to see is the likes of Edmonds spouting banalities and calling it entertainment. Can't wait to see reports of a Jeremy Kyle "I'm not paying for a licence just to watch people like me" special.

BT's secret Phorm trials: UK.gov responds

Que?!

Now I may be taking a leaf out of the Bill Hicks film review book but:

"Pile of Shit!"

Just because HM.gov is using a great big fan to keep the flies off doesn't mean we can't recognise fecal matter by other means.

Fabio Colasanti should refer to Paxman's book and ask them again. And again. And again. Until they answer the question (which we all know they won't but it should be fun to watch)

I hope that FOIA request has been phrased to preclude the "that is commercially sensitive information" response that has been used all too often with regards ID cards. Now that I think of it, THAT would be quite an interesting response in and of itself. Carry on, nothing to see here...

Mine's not personally identifiable so I have to check them all.

Obama strumpet-sex scandal ruse spreads malware

Monica == Reggie Perrin's mother-in-law

"Curiously, the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal never became the topic of a malware attack"

Presumably for the same reason as the non-existent Curry/Major sex tapes. Dare one say that no attractive women (-ish, or at least moreso than a hippo) were involved?

(Still shuddering)

Doctors rally for right to call UK.gov quangonista a 'sh*t'

Sledgehammers... Nuts

It's a bit disappointing that they couldn't have just moderated the comment, but knowing Govern-mental IT this feature probably wasn't written into the contract.

If it's the "unrestrained abuse" rather than the swearing that they take issue with, then it sounds as though he may have been pretty restrained in relation to his true feelings if it's got to the point where he's using those kind of terms on a professional forum. Would calling the Dame a copulating stool have been OK? I thought doctors were supposed to be famous for their veiled invective; does this only come to fruition once training is complete?

Ooh, white & strappy at the arms...

Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility

If OSes were guns

... then Chrome is the old "Bangety Bang Bang", "Stabitty Stab Stab" joke.

Mythbusters RFID episode axed after 'pressure' from credit card firms

Whatever happened to..?

Publish and be damned?

I know mythbusters sometimes simplifies a bit, but surely there's a principle involved whereby if they haven't done anything against the law then the knowledge is redistributable (with certain exceptions, like how to make nuclear bombs - which is a bit stupid given the widespread availabliliy of uranium from Niger ;)

Where's the "the other side is talking utter bollocks and are plainly making this case to protect a vested interest" verdict. Why is it not cheap to get one of them?

[Apart from the obvious "lawyers are involved" answer]

Homeland Security backs deportation with Wikipedia

@Greg Fleming

Isn't Wikipedia not being an authority precisely what the point of the story is? It's definitely bad that it is being used as such (although it will be very entertaining if Jimbo ever has a trial with this happening)

Lag log leaks - Home Office contractor loses entire prison population

How hard can it be?

For a clause in the contracts to include punitive damages should data loss occur. In fact, it shouldn't be on data loss, it should be if the data is allowed to leave the network of the minister's mate ^H^H^H independent consultant's network. This would cover USB fobs and laptops that leave the office.

I'm willing to bet that "processing purposes" means fannying about in Excel and the like. It's not as though there's a skills shortage for Excel fiddlers, so how is it that it's a case of "the transfer of further data to PA has been suspended pending an investigation", rather than "PA has been dropped (from a tall building) and will not work for the state until it proves it has got its arse in gear (or has separated it from its mouth)"???

UK.gov loses 29 million personal records

Data loss, data schloss

One suspects that this isn't quite what they meant by "Open Government"

Downing Street rejects 'Clarkson for PM' petition

Re: Alas

Technically, JC doesn't have to form a party or even be elected.

It is only constitutional convention that dictates that the leader of the largest party in the Commons in invited by the Monarch to form a government. The Royal Perogative gives the Queen the right to plonk whomever she wishes in the hotseat. Admittedly, doing so would cause some degree of havoc.

Similarly, it is still possible to govern from the House of Lords, but this hasn't been done since Alec Douglas-Home for a few days before he renounced his peerage to fight a by-election. It hasn't been done in anger in more than 100 years.

/pedant

Russell Crowe to play Bill Hicks?

To paraphrase Bill

Watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is Gladiator.

Windfall taxing big oil: how to make the gas crisis worse

Missing anything?

Deliberately leaving out the effects of OPEC when talking about oil is like leaving out the US when talking about defence spending.

Mind you, it's funny how defence companies never face a windfall tax in times of war. A letter to the Grauniad may be in order... ;)

Brown's website is Web2.0tastic

Feeling catty...

Interesting to note in the history section that every PM but the last has a profile of their spouse as well. A bit of Troosers' dislike for Madame Blair creeping through?

Clone dog mistress denies she is 'sex in chains' McKinney

Of course...

when police questioned the mimes, they said nothing.