Posts by Pascal Monett 18221 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
How much worse is it when you're framed for paedo stuff you really didn't do, in this day and age ?
I mean okay, maybe he IS a scumbag lowlife getting his kicks out of the suffering and mental scarring of helpless children.
But maybe he actually isn't. There seems to be a few scenarios in which the guy could actually have nothing to do with the problem.
Either way, his name is posted on these here Intarwebs, along with the crime he has not yet been found guilty for.
I'm not one to protect a paedo, hell I'd be just as happy to watch one hang as the rest of you, but this guy is not yet tried and found guilty by law - yet his life is already harder because, in the years to come, his name will forever be associated with paedo pics.
And if he's innocent, and there is yet a chance he is, that is a terrible burden to bear.
So, next time El Reg, even if other sites are not so delicate, could you please refrain from editorially condemning a possibly innocent person of the currently abject crime of kiddy-fiddling before a judge has officially said "have at him, this useless piece of shite paedo is guilty" ?
I totally agree. I want my books in paper format, I want to "see" my video and music collection, and I have no interest whatsoever in giving the entertainment industry the possibility of spying on me.
Make no mistake, I read a lot of stuff on a screen. But reading for leisure and reading for work are two different things.
And besides, it's hardly ecological to insist on doing everything we usually do with electronic thingys that require batteries. There is no such thing as an eco-friendly battery.
You want green computing ? Don't buy an e-reader, buy a BOOK !
I think that, given the fact that the team is "rubbishing its own results", they set out to prove the cancer risk, found nothing significant, and said to themselves : "not possible, we're dopes".
Since they still had to publish something, they decided to destroy their own credibility instead of recognize that there might be no measurable effect.
Um, sorry ? I don't mean to be rude, but how can a political party founded just 4 years ago already provide stuff to "activists around the world" ?
What financial boon do they have that allows them to throw money willy-nilly without a thought or a care ?
If financing bandwidth is a drop in the bucket for this new organisation, what is their warchest and what do they destine it for ?
I'm a tad curious.
The other people who "generally think[s] "meh" and ignores everything going on on FB" are the ones who do not have a FaceBook account.
And, for email, FaceBook is now an email system ? If that is the case, then why on Earth do you specifically choose the most sewer-laden system in the world when you go with, heck, even Hotmail would be better at this point ?
Finally, concerning the "bitching", well, we're on the Internet. What did you do here if not bitch as well, but on another tack ?
You're talking about Diebold voting machines now, aren't you ?
Paper balloting is not perfect, just as about anything that humans are up to these days, but the traceability and indeed the very lack of technology ensures that the results are verifiable and accountable.
Voting machines, such as the ones made by Diebold (who has since distanced itself as much as possible from the problem), are another problem entirely. To the various security issues that are purely hardware and software-based, you can add lack of traceability and the very possible ability to fudge results without any control.
I prefer paper ballots any day.
It's important to note that they are making progress, rediscovering ancient truths and understanding their implications.
In another two or three decades, they'll have grown up and understood the importance of good administration, and will be knocking on the Web 3.0 kids who will be, in turn, discovering that you need to control user authentication.
It's a learning process, guys. Let the kids learn.
Heat the surface before writing data - yep, it's done on CDs, DVDs, HDDVDs and BRDVDs. And probably some other I don't remember right now.
So they are saying that hard discs are about to go optical. To write data we're going to have to wait for a laser to heat the surface and then let a magneto-thingy change polarities on perpendicular nanoscale thingamajigs.
Do they still guarantee sub-10 millisecond write times ? Or are we going to have hard discs rated at 5ms read/150ms write performance ?
The US Christian extremists are expert in wanting to abolish any sign of what they don't want people to be doing.
Letting the .xxx domain go through unhindered is acknowledging the existence of porn, and that is simply not possible.
So they hem and they haw and they scream at the top of their lungs that there should be no .xxx and that will stop all that porn from happening.
There would normally be some irony in the fact that the US is responsible for over 89% of porn websites on the Internet, generating over $2 billion in revenue yearly, but given that we are talking about the US, it is redundant and therefor not worth mentioning.
What I really think is that there is probably a good share of that $2 billion stash that is due to US Christian anti-porn extremists going for a wicked ogle in secret, and if the .xxx TLD becomes real, they'll actually have to block it from their Internet access, thus cutting off their supply of sinful joy.
Hm, strange, I thought that happened a while ago already.
In fact, I'm not sure I ever remember a time when "motorists" actually supported the scheme.
Political pundits, for sure, but regular motorists ?
Oh, but this "support" is undoubtedly the same than that of the ID scheme, right ?
Okay, okay, I'm moving along, don't push.
In MS-land, we learn that people have 10 PCs for every TV in the house.
Now I don't know about you, but in my house there are 2 TVs and 2 PCs and I'm a gamer and something of a tech freak.
In a normal household, there is the TV, period. In many households, there is probably a TV and a console, maybe 2 TVs and a console. In houses where the occupants are a bit more tech-savvy, there might be 2 TVs, a console or three, and a PC or two.
But for the life of me, the only house where I can imagine that there are 10 times more PCs than TVs is the house of that madman with 40 WoW accounts.
So, "PCs [...] in the hundreds of millions" and "TVs [...] in the tens of millions" strikes me as quite an unrealistic view of the household situation.
Let us take an extreme example : Belgium. That country has a 99% TV penetration, which means that practically every single household has at least one TV.
Who is going to say that every one of them also has a PC ? Not going to happen.
But hey, this is MS-land, where anything good for MS can happen. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid, Mr. Dallas.
They're improving their weather-forecasting power ? So long accurate forecasts, then.
When they doubled the weather forecast points in France and improved the hardware, they started making 5-day forecasts.
Ever since then there's a 50/50 chance they get it wrong for the next 24 hours, and no sane French person will ever trust what they for 5 days hence.
Good weather forecasts have been lost with all hands.
Oh, wait ...
"We believe anonymizing IP addresses after 9 months and cookies in our search engine logs after 18 months strikes the right balance."
Oh yeah ? Well I believe that anonymizing my IP address after 9 days and not retaining cookie data in your search logs strikes a perfectly reasonable balance in my eye.
In fact, I don't see why you need to log my IP address for more than a day. Once you've had no connection from me for more than 3 hours it means I'm in bed and you should anonymize my IP address right away.
Sorry to insist, but I have rebuilt my computer a number of times, and reformatted the OS dozens of times.
Checkout is simply not possible when you've nuked your OS partition, and that has never kept me from logging on Steam and playing my games.
Your technical arguments on Steam appear to be a bit out of date.
And the fact that you don't INTEND to infringe is no longer - unfortunately - part of the deal. On that point, I must concede that you are right.
As for ownership of the games I have, be they under Steam or on DVD, there is a marked tendency of the entertainment industry to believe that the individual only has a license, on that point I concede that you are also right and I very much resent this direction.
However, I maintain that, of all the nuisance schemes that exist today, Steam is certainly the one that has bothered me the least and has given me the best impression that it respects MY property.
The day they throw a switch and I can no longer play any of my Steam games (like EAGames already did to me with Battlefield 2142), then I will agree that you are totally right and I never owned them.
Until that day, it seems to me that Steam is playing fair. Yes, they potentially have the ability to lock me out of my games, that I cannot deny. But the days where games could not call home to check in are long gone, and nobody can go back on that.
We have to make do with the situation now, and right now Steam and StarDock are doing it best.
In my opinion, of course.
Did that with Painkiller.
Came back home with a shiny, collectors edition of the game and it never wanted to install.
It's quite a shock when you slip the official, paid-for disc, launch the setup and get a "Please insert dics 1" error message !
Painkiller was so locked up nothing would do to get it work, and the store has a policy about open games meaning it gives itself the right to refuse returns of open game boxes, so I was stuck with my game that refused to install.
Result ? I torrented it, and was finally able to play MY game.
Disgusting.
I simply cannot agree with you on this point.
Steam is by far the least annoying of all online game selling stores.
Let's be clear on one thing : if YOU sold games online, what would YOU do to ensure that the person accessing your services was the one that had the right to do so ?
Steam does have online checks, that is true, I cannot deny it. But you can play offline.
More importantly, when you upgrade or change computer, you do not have to reinstall Steam OR your game folder from scratch. Steam lets you port your whole Steam setup to a totally different PC - all you need to do is log on with your credentials and bingo! - your games are there and playable for you.
Contrast that with EAGames, whose download center is absolute crap and needs to be reinstalled from scratch - and games re-downloaded (all 12BG of them) every time you so much as patch your graphics card. I abandoned that one in a hurry.
Ubisoft has certainly proven itself to not be even able to think of its paying customers in pursuit of failing to prevent piracy, so count them out of the user-friendly universe.
The only other service that has any chance of standing with Steam on the same level of useability and user-friendliness is StarDock with its Impulse service. Anything else is just a nuisance that either takes over your PC without any right to do so, or is so paranoid about piracy that any change to your PC configuration makes it fall dead.
No sir, I'm sorry but Steam lets you play your games with far less hassle than anybody but StarDock, and over multiple PC reconfigurations to boot.
In my book, that is called user-friendly, and proper customer service. The only real issue is the difficulty that Steam has in letting you give one of your games to someone else. That is pretty much impossible. But give them time, I'm sure they'll think of something.
First of all, management wants people to work quickly without much training. Instead of creating a Linux network with a bespoke application and spending money on hours of training to use the platform, they prefer the idea of a Windows network with a bespoke application and spending money on a small booklet that will explain the salient points, leaving users to guess the rest.
Second, there is the support issue. And today, whether you like it or not, consultants and technicians who know Windows are a dime a dozen. Those who know Linux are . . . well nobody even knows how many there are.
6 more minutes ? So now we have Star Wars-type rewrites that are implemented in less than a year after the original screening ?
Good Lord, at least Lucas was polite enough to wait until most fans had worn out their VHS tapes of the originals before creating his "definitive vision" release.
Anyway, are we going to get a shark moment in Avatar 2, what with all the ocean stuff ? I mean, Pandora it may be, but there's not much chance that water pressure will be taken into account any better than it was in Phantom Menace, now is there ?
when you wire two batteries together without any resistor, you get current flowing so fast the batteries heat up and end up melting.
So what's to bet that this "power exchange" thingy will end up in two lumps of very hot metal floating in the ISS ?
Suddenly that doesn't sound so funny.
Thank you, El Reg, for keeping me informed of all these malware services I do not want to touch with a 20-foot bargepole.
On a related note, who the hell thought it was a good idea to never even ALLOW password changing ? In what IT universe does that person exist ? Does he use Hotmail ?
In order to protect our precious children from paedos in the streets, we'll give pic-snapping capability to so-called safety products so that we can have our kids oogled at by IT workers in our schools - positions now undoubtedly extremely sought after by . . . paedos.
So all is well now, right ?
Facebook, as much as I despise the rank stupidity that it exhales, just might turn out to be useful after all.
As an experience in managing large hordes of idiots continuously assaulted by large hordes of malfeasants, that is.
I look forward to more accounts of how Facebook gets hacked in various ways, what solutions are found and how many people that obnoxious 'bitch' kid manages to piss off in the process.
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