Posts by Richard

Suprise at spelling snafu sanctions

A vision of the future

This reminds me of the old joke email (http://cloudybay.netfirms.com/humour/newspeak.shtml).

Worryingly, entering "Ze drems of the Guvernmnt vud finali hav kum tru" into google, it asked Did you mean: Ze drems of the Government vud finali hav kum tru?

It's clearly spreading...

I was delighted to learn (admittedly on wikipedia, so pinch of salt mode is ON) that "Buckinghamshire New University owes its existence, at least in part, to a tax imposed on beer and spirits towards the end of the nineteenth century". This explains a lot.

Snoop more, share less - Home Office spurns EU advice

The *real reason they're holding back

"The British rightly object that such a database would be as secure as the weakest access point to it – an argument that oddly doesn’t seem to hold much weight with the Home Office when it comes to its own plans for a centralised UK database containing details of all citizens."

Of course it does! The Home Office is doing its very best to ensure that _it_ is the weakest access point. Unfortunately they think that some crafty foreign power is planning on printing their database on toilet paper to be used in all govt buildings. And another is going to give DVD's away with whatever their version of the Daily Mail is. Until Jacqui's crack squad of data loss specialists have come up with something better than "losing it in the mail", then the scheme is a no-goer.

BTW, why is meal preference forwarded on? Is it so that the guards can waft the smell of said meal into the cells?

Knights Templar to Vatican: Give us back our assets

I can see the response now...

The money's yours when you tell us where you hid the Grail.

Mine was used as a prop in Foucault's Pendulum ;)

Greens: Abandon economic growth to beat CO₂ offshoring

People getting richer isn't the problem

It's the variant in off-the-balance-sheet reporting that means exporting the manufacturing and carbon emissions but only importing the manufactured goods.

The chutzpah of some countries' "Why bother, China and India are just going to keep on emitting..." stance is truly spectacular.

And I still can't see why we can't send nuclear waste into space to blow it up at New Years.

Apple swipes £121 for 'free' MobileMe trial

Does this mean?

That Apple are striving to outdo Adobe in the currency conversion stakes?

$1 = £121

No buying from Apple's online store for a bit methinks...

Info commissioner says comms database is leap too far

I can think of a use for it

Taking the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" and "People in glass houses" maxims to the limit, if the lying, self-serving weasels ^H^H^H members of HM.Gov want unhindered access to telephone and internet logs, then I want said data to be cross-checked with their expense claims.

Going north through Doncaster and York while claiming you drove? Moonlighting for National Express East Coast were we sir?

The problem with the Parliamentary debates on the matter hasn't so much been a lack of debate as a lack of members of the Commons actually listening to the debate, choosing rather to spend the evening clubbing or suchlike before tipping up to vote, or simply giving carte blanche as soon as the magic phrase "prevents terrorism" is used a la the Manchurian Candidate.

Putting a mule on a cloud: one man's battle with Amazon S3

Formatting

Good grief, that code sample looks awful! And that's even before you realise it's PHP...

Can I suggest that "computing" is a pedund - a special class apt to cause pedantic grammarian arguments over what kind of word it is?

South African survives exploding fridge attack

The housekeeper

...didn't look like Sigourney Weaver by any chance?

Vodafone prevails in £2bn UK tax spat

Tax harmonisation

There's a particular irony in HM.gov being one of the primary resisters to tax harmonisation within the EU. I don't know enough on the subject to even vaguely know whether it's a good idea or not but one suspects that the table rigging, err rejig, from HMRC will have to be along the lines of a tax hammering once the assets are merged ie said money returns to Blighty.

The Moderatrix will see you now

Destruction list

When are you going to let Andrew Orlowski have his Optimus Prime back?

Now that he's destroyed Terminal 5 and Croydon, where will the Moderatrix be sending him before a final showdown with Megatron? Based on his current trajectory, I'd be worried if I lived in Sevenoaks...

Tech giants team for online ID cards

Online cards - like those in your wallet?

I don't have any online cards in my wallet. Unless you count other people's business cards with a web address on them; in which case it sounds rather worrying that I'd be able to pretend to be someone else.

I know it's just a slightly fluffed up press release, but that particular description, directly pasted from their site, is so vague as to be fatuous.

Brown pledges annual commons debate on surveillance

Clearly a typo on Gordon's notes

Brown claimed, “It could be said that for too long we have used nineteenth century means to solve twenty first century problems. Instead we must have twenty first century methods to deal with twenty first century challenges.”

I bet his notes said “It could be said that for too long we have used 19th century means to solve 21st century problems. Instead we must have 12th century methods to deal with 21st century challenges.”

Certainly rolling back habeas corpus gets back to the start of the 13th...

I'd be intrigued to see where he's getting his definition of liberty from - it's definitely not Montesquieu, who argued against thought-crimes and for making it as easy as possible for the innocent to prove their innocence.

Stunned commuter finds more secret papers on train

public class GlassHouse

"Our first duty is the protection of national security. We fail in our duty if we do not take preventive measures. I say in sorrow rather than anger that it is no use having opposition for opposition's sake. We must take no risks with security."

Gordon Brown, PMQ's 11 June 2008

Becta schools deal stuns British open-istas

Am I dreaming?

UK.gov agency snubs US-based interests for a UK company that isn't BT.

*Gasp* and they actually /Specialise/ in education.

Now, I've no doubt that there may well be some snouts in the trough but, call me jingoistic if I'd rather it were British snouts with some nominal expertise in the subject matter than a bunch of generalists in programming philosophy.

AJAX browser wishlist call goes unanswered

They obviously don't know much about feature calls on the web

Hmm, let me see: Selective support for CSS 2, which has been around for 10 years with 2.1 still only a candidate recommendation.

Heaven help us, wikis took a good few years to be properly noticed.

So, what on earth made them think that a project announced to the world ON APRIL FOOLS DAY FFS!!! would generate anything even vaguely useful in a couple of months?

We seriously need a Way of the Badger icon. If this isn't a classic example of Sett Theory I don't know what is.

ESA: space tourism greener than ordinary airline flights

Low CO2 footprint

They're probably right on that score, but rocket fuel isn't exactly eco-friendly once you get away from the liquid oxygen/hydrogen blends.

The Kazakhs have been whinging about it for years.

Spanish chanteuse strips for anti-bullfighting campaign

And how's this going to stop bullfighting?

PETA: We'll keep doing pictures of improbable naked women until you stop killing bulls.

Everyone else: OK, OK, we'll stop! Anything but that! Wait a second - did they say improbable naked women or John Prescott?

Mine's the one artfully moved at the last possible second.

Heathrow T5 security tackles Transformers t-shirt threat

One has to wonder

Whether this principle will be extended to other items on the prohibited items list:

Thermometers (but only if they're mercury based)

More than how ever many ml of liquid it is these days.

Fake Passports

Common Sense

Mine's the one with SECURITY? on the back. Clearly, the ? is offensive.

The New Order: When reading is a crime

It's all a bit ironic

The education section in yesterday's Independent had a lovely letter from Nottingham's great and good saying how friendly and crime-free it was...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/education-letters-happy-in-nottingham-835579.html

The economy: A big Arab did it and ran away, claims PM

It's not my fault

It's the wail of government since time immemorial. If you can't blame a dirty foreign Johnny, it must have been the previous administration.

The problem is that we are shifting to a resource-limited economy and there's going to be no way back - even if OPEC magicked up the entire world reserve and dumped it on the market, there's still supply issues with food and most mined resources as China, India et al rapidly improve their living standards and infrastructure.

Seeing as our political elite like banging on about how things are so much better in Sweden and we should be copying them, it is perhaps worth noting that, during the last major oil price shock in the 1970s, the Swedish government made long term plans to eliminate their economy's dependency on oil and is on course to be oil free by 2020. What did we do? Struck oil in the North Sea and sold it in huge quantities while it was cheap (while the Norwegians didn't go hell for leather on upping production). GB is only bitter since we returned to being a net energy importer.

@ Graham Dawson: The "I see no..." trick was done by Nelson, not Wellington.

Phlashing attack thrashes embedded systems

Better name

Surely the bad kind of flashing should be called Dirty Mac-ing. A botnet of such would be a Dirty Mac Brigade.

Advantages:

1) no ph abuse

2) It'll wind the cult of Jobs up

Apple sued over Mighty Mouse

Trademarks != Patents

Trademarks are issued with relation to specific zones of interest. Hence Apple Computer's spat with Apple Corp. over who got to be Apple with regards music distribution.

CBS probably (and this is just a guess based on where cartoons get used) only have the trademark over clothing, food products and broadcasting. And possibly cat repellent.

In the realm of computer peripherals, M&M may well have more right to the Mighty Mouse mark. Unless some judge decides that their mark only applies for specialist computer peripherals. It all comes down to whether the mark is diluted by the presence of the other. M&M /have/ to fight it - trademarks are defend it or lose it.

<aside>For some reason, there's a bucketload of case law over dolphin based marques. </aside>

Hello Kitty gets claws into UK electronics

Ferrero Rocher

Now that Hello Kitty is a Japanese tourism Ambassador, would one be able to claim diplomatic immunity on the contents of a Hello Kitty branded laptop? Admittedly you'd therefore be ceding it to Japan but it's a small price to pay ;)

And Disney is much worse. Copyright in the US keeps getting extended lest a certain eunuch-voiced rodent enters the public domain.

Games consoles not green enough, claims Greenpeace

Phthalates, schmalates

Greenpeace would be a lot better off ensuring that said toxins, nasty chemicals etc are disposed of and produced responsibly rather than moaning that they are used in something.

On the same logic, Greenpeace should be campaigning against Church Roofs. I'm sure that would get a hell of a lot more publicity.

But that's not the point, is it? There's always been a certain amount of insinuation that technology is inherently bad in and of itself and if people would just stop hankering for it then everything would be alright. It's this lazy kind of activism that really winds me up - let's get something that's totally not important all over the media in the vainglorious hope that we'll get some crossover coverage on the other stuff, like large scale pollution of groundwater due to the cynanide leaching method of mining. Does it happen? Of course not! All the media consultants and PR flunkies are busy working on the next non-issue press release and pretty soon that's all you become known for. The sad thing is that Greenpeace used to put out the odd nugget that actually made sense and set one thinking. I haven't seen one for nearly a decade though.

On a side note, chemicals stopping people having kids is surely good for the environment as population pressure is one of the biggest threats to it.

Life a mess? The Moderatrix can help

Some Questions

1) When will the Playmobil dioramas be available on Cash & Carrion?

2) Can the moderatrix questions/answers be done in the form of a Playmobil diorama?

3) Why don't we ever hear of 418 fraudsters? Is that the section covering selling an animal at the fair that's trained to return to you?

Have to say though, the moderatrix sounds like someone who'd jury rig a taser out of a harpoon gun and a scalextric controller

Neighbourhood Watch 2.0: Your tensions are being monitored

*Bad pun follows*

Will the tension monitors be governed by Taut law then?

Set-top box modders sent to prison

Re: This is insane

"If I buy a fridge and by my own extreme cleverness turn it into a time machine, how is that illegal? The fridge is MY property. I CAN DO WHAT I LIKE with it."

No you can't, nor have you ever been able to. You can do with it what you like SO LONG AS the law doesn't explicitly state that you can't (OK, or there is precedent to that effect).

You cannot for example take your fridge and throw it out of a tall building. Nor can you strap it onto the front of a Range Rover for improved penetration in a ram raid. Well, you can - but you'll be apt to find yourself up in front of the beak.

I agree that Patent Law has some madness involved, but this isn't where it is. In this particular case, had they somehow managed to cleanly reverse-engineer a set-top box out of stuff they'd bought at Maplin or the like; they'd probably have still got done on conspiracy to defraud - this was just the easiest one to prove.

Private sector saviours wanted for desperate ID scheme

And now for the Daily Express version...

A swift adding up of the estimated units over the 10 years yields nearly 80 million.

GIven that said cards are valid for 10 years, this surely implies some/all of: a lot of lost/replaced cards, a lot of Johnny Foreigners coming over for 6 months and more at a time, or a hell of a lot of breeding by the British population.

Also, to do the interviews, they'll need to average 20000 a day. That's a rate that only Japanese council workers can achieve; and even then only when breasts are involved. I await the updated ID card photo guidelines with (heavily) bated breath.

Japanese council worker in 750k smut site pornathon

[Gets the calculator out]

(And not just to enter 5318008 and look at it upside down ;)

It's actually 20 sites per minute during his peak in July. Still 9 per minute for the 9 months is still pretty impressive.

Police likely to ignore Brown's cannabis changes

Re: Lethal? I though that was alcohol... :P

"Funnily enough we didn't get any cannabis-smoking patients. None that were there for that reason anyway."

Surely it's obvious why you didn't get any. It's just like after an armed robbery - the countless victims didn't seek medical attention for fear of going to jail.

Sorry, I seem to have pierced my cheek with my tongue.

Of course, back in my day it was easy to make fake skunk by painting a white line down the back of a cat...

Texas man tries to cash $360bn cheque

Re: You have to wonder...

There was a similar case in Nigeria a few years back where a guy got overly abitious forging a payroll cheque.

3 more zeroes = nice little forgery

9 more zeroes = guaranteed jailtime

@M Brown: the UK billion is 3 more zeroes although UK bureaucratese switched to the American version in the 70s, which is a shame as US 1000 trillion was called a billiard.

Backlash starts against 'sexy' databases

Re: Horses for courses

"-- They s*ck at storing any hierachical or tree type structures.""

I don't think that this is an RDBMS problem per se; on a table level you're just storing parent & child columns (amongst other things). The issue is really that the syntax to get the hierarchy back sucks big time. Sql2k5 has had a bit of a sugaring attempt with common table expressions but it's still rubbish.

It's probably too much to ask to get a nice bit of syntactic standardisation: imagine

SELECT * FROM hierarchy TREE JOIN on parent = parent_column, child = child_column

Mind you, once that's sorted, the flipping convert a hierarchical dataset into something that's vaguely useful web-side algorithm needs a bit of work too, so it's not like it's just RDBMS that's the problem...

Web 2.0: All your favourite problems and some new ones as well *sigh*

Mel Gibson to star in Edge of Darkness

Mel Gibson _could_ work

After all, everyone said he'd never be a believable Scotsman. Now look at him: drunken, abusive...

Quietly dreading an Eddie Murphy remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Spy regs used against dogs, litterbugs

The bit I don't quite get

From RIPA:

28 Authorisation of directed surveillance

(2) A person shall not grant an authorisation for the carrying out of directed surveillance unless he believes—

(a) that the authorisation is necessary on grounds falling within subsection (3); and

(b) that the authorised surveillance is proportionate to what is sought to be achieved by carrying it out.

How the hell does surveillance for littering prevention get authorised as a proportionate response? I'll bet the paperwork alone is more than the miscreants would have littered.

This is clearly from the same school of thought as the justification of Will's borrowing a chopper to get to a stag party as "valuable training".

US lag sues over prison crash diet

140Kg is STILL pretty fat

He's only whinging because cannibalism will mean extra years on the sentence.

Mine's several sizes too big now...

Harman hack horror has blog backing Boris

Sad lack of originality

It would have been far funnier pointing here:

http://www.frank-dobson.org.uk/ (which I note is for sale...)

Spike Milligan goes mobile

Goon show ringtones?

Here's a song that I recall,

My mother sang to me.

She sang it when she tucked me in,

When I was nine-teee-threee...

Ringtone Ringtone Ringtone Ringtone Ringtone iddle eye po

Ringtone Ringtone Ringtone Ringtone Ringtone iddle eye po

Ringtone Ringtone Ringtone Ringtone Ringtone iddle eye po

Repeat adwords infinitum...

The terror dam of doom that looms over Boise, Idaho

Feet-Acre

Surely that's the Reg Unit for consultants?

As in a 1000 Feet-Acre project, which requires 1 BOFH to fix (1 BOFH = 1 kilo feet-acre)

YouTube divorce rant vid wows the crowd

Stupid stupid stupid

Especially seeing as a couple of minutes in she says that they haven't had sex. That would be grounds for annullment, not divorce.

Getting a pre-nuptial agreement from a smart lawyer: $a few k

Your estranged wife telling the world you were never married before the case has even got to court: Priceless

Intempo Rebel DJ and ad-zapping FM radio

I'd be intrigued

to see what it does to Radio 4 but I'm not about to pay £70 just to find out.

Would it just end up with the Archers theme tune and Big Ben's bongs?

CPW broadband targets feel the crunch

Re: Bloody city analysts....

But the analysts think 20,000 is a really important number at the minute. Seeing as there's probably going to be 20,000 less of them in the coming months. They didn't forecast that one either :o

Mine's just like the Emperor's new one.

High Court quashes decision to release secret ID card reports

Change of plan

How does one go about getting all of one's personal details into a Gateway Review?

Actually, it's not civil servants in the old sense of the word whose view HM.gov want to keep out of the equation. It's consultants from the BAe school of contract winning. What the concern is is not that the mustela kathiah conubiae (that's yellow bellied fuckweasels ;) will lie in the Gateway Reviews. It is that they will _be shown_ to be lying. Although with regards government IT projects one can almost picture the scene

Consultant: Late, over budget or crap?

Minister: How much for all 3?

Have to say I love the way they're worried about breaching ancient rights. *cough* habeas corpus *cough*. TBH though, I actually agree with the judgement - the ICO should be perfectly capable of making their own decisions; they were uneasy with making a blanket exemption so why couldn't they have a quick ask around as't'were and come up with some parameters against which they could make a determination? I suspect that that's what they were trying to do, but managed to ask the secret policeman - despite him wearing a big hat marked "Secret Police". FFS all they needed to do was match the govt tactic: claim that you've checked around, go with gut instinct and hang the consequences.

Minister: Waste wood is 'huge potential resource'

I'm just waiting for the advertising campaign...

Got Wood?

US cops taser groom, cuff drunken bride

Re: Bootnote

Sounds like a huge error by the planners to me. The wedding isn't going to be in a quaint little village called Crocctella by any chance?

Mine's the one that doesn't rustle when it moves...

Phorm admits 'over zealous' editing of Wikipedia article

Phorm update quote

"We will endeavour to make sure that this does not happen in the future."

I just love the ambiguity in that sentence. Is "this" referring to the articles being reverted by Wikipedia or the editing happening in the first place. I know which one my bet's on...

HSBC pops thousands of customer details in the post

It's going to keep happening

Until someone gets some jailtime, a whopping great fine or (better yet) a ban from doing business here. Especially with regards banks - surely data safety should be a condition of a banking licence.

I vaguely recall that solicitors & the like have a dedicated post service for legal documents. It's about time that the banks were forced into the same sort of thing.

Black helicopters - not just for heists!

Brown ignores scientists and pushes pot reclassification

"Experts"

On PM last night they had one of the more Quisling-esque MPs commenting on the subject. When asked why HM.Gov looked like it was going to ignore independent expert advice he said that they were following expert advice - from ACPO.

Now I don't give a rats arse about the classification - what worries me is that the police are cited as experts on any given subject. Surely the only thing they are supposed to be experts on is upholding and enforcing the law of the land. Last time I looked, Class C drugs hadn't stopped being illegal; so why is it that the police should have any opinion on the matter?

Is it that nabbing a few consumers of Class B substances improves their statistics more markedly than Class C?

As the politikos are banging on about being really concerned about the high-THC varieties, would it not be possible to classify high-THC cannabis as Class B and leave the rest as Class C? A differentiation is made with regards alcohol taxation so I don't see why it wouldn't be albeit that that /could/ cause an implementation issue that the police would struggle with.

Pregnant man to hit Oprah with ultrasound

Never mind the genetics

I'm a little confused as to how junior is coming out. Don't they, erm, re-engineer some of the plumbing? I'd be guessing a Caesarean will be the order of the day; however, I'd imagine that there would be significant problems in the event of a miscarriage. Also, aren't hormonal adjustments one of the main things involved in gender reassignment? Could an atypical hormonal balance cause issues in foetal development?

Confused, slightly disturbed and fascinated all at once...

CIA demands UK halts interrogation tactics

Cruel and unusual

Heh - typical Yank idiocy, but then what do you expect with a president who can't spell 'Guantemanomo' without the aid of My First World Dictionary, eh?

They're even giving this technique a name: Billboarding

Brown: Jack Bauer spook horde to tackle terrorism

There's 3 more horsemen to deal with!

I find it strange that our Glorious Leader cites the usual war, pestilence, famine and nature as the huge dangers yet only tells us how prepared we are for war albeit with a quick local-councils-will-have-to-deal-with-floods-and-the-like. Oh wait: Is that a military-industrial complex or are you just pleased to see me?