Posts by Pascal Monett

Net sleuths spot poker site cheat code

What is a "hole" card ?

Could it be "the whole cards" ?

I'm not a player, and less a gambler, but I've never even heard of a hole card, let alone see one.

</pedant>

Apple bans App Store heartbreak chatter

NDA after the fact ?

Where exactly did the developers sign that ?

I call bollocks. An NDA, as disgusting as the concept may be, is to be presented BEFORE handing out the information that you want to protect.

Sending an email that includes "this is under NDA" is not only useless and ridiculous, it's also probably illegal. I didn't ask for your stupid email, you sent it on your own initiative. You can't shout things at me and then take my arm and say "by the way, this is just between us, okay ?"

Somebody call the archeologists, public relations has become a dead science.

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

a short drop and a sudden stop

It's a lot more difficult to request asylum when you're hanging.

Or when you've got a bullet through the head, for that matter.

What is the world coming to ? The remnants of the worlds' greatest Navy have all become yellow in a generation ? Since when does this kind of debate take place at the task force command level ?

It should be a debate in the political arena, where the softies can wring their hands repeatedly while the hardliners rebuff them with economic logic, then everyone stops for tea. Meanwhile, the Navy just keeps on blowing the buggers out of the water.

Meaning the pirates, of course, not the politicians.

Gay sheep romp turns Tyneside blue

Sounds like fanbois material to me

Even presented with hard proof, the farmer went off on a tangent and invented some other excuse to continue clutching to his beliefs.

Yep, that's a fanbois for you. Almost a religious integrist.

Boffin brews up 'Jurassic Park' beer

Better stay on alert

Soon the people that have sampled this jurassic beer will begin sprouting tails with pointy ends, a bone ridge on the head and extension to the jaw with an increase in jaw muscle. Their arms will shrivel to half size while their legs will double their muscle weight, then they will go on a rampage in the office and surrounding countryside, chasing down marketing execs at a blistering 25MPH.

Let me be the first to welcome our jurassically-modified dinosapiens overlords.

NASA, USAF in $30m hypersonic boffinry push

I've got to say it

"who slap the pendulous jowls of established wisdom with the gauntlet of disregard"

Priceless !!

Met Office: Global warming sceptics 'have heads in sand'

I'd like to see some real figures

I would honestly like to know how the climate is changing, unfortunately, there are a few things that prevent me from forming an educated opinion :

1) every time a claim is made, a counter-claim follows that "demonstrates" the opposite

2) it would be nice to consult past temperatures, but they have been fudged by somebody under orders from a so-called government body with an agenda

3) in my personal experience, the last twenty years have seen less and less snow where I live, but summers have been more and more lousy, rainy and cloud-covered

4) we've only been gathering data and modeling the weather for the last one or two hundred years, and thermodynamics is arguably the most difficult branch of physics to study and comprehend

5) nobody can possibly explain or demonstrate scientifically exactly what is the impact of human activity on the Earth's climate, outside of a vague "all those CO2 emissions have to be doing something"

6) modeling the climate of the entire world is a few orders of magnitude harder than simply forecasting weather at a given point - and they can't even do that reliably anyway

So, bearing in mind these points, I conclude that there isn't a chance in Hell anybody really knows what is going on and I think we'll have to wait a good, long time before anybody can effectively model the Earth's climate with any semblance of accuracy.

EA in Spore DRM climbdown

Switch to consoles ? Bollocks !

Switch to Steam.

Steam is Valve's version of online purchasing, and it works fine.

It works so well that if you have to reinstall your PC after changing mothrboards (wipe the OS and restart from scratch), as long as your Steam folder is intact all you need to do (once the OS is properly installed again) is launch Steam (hear that ? just launch it from the exe - no reinstall required) and input your personal access code and voilà ! All your games are once again available.

And you can play them as long as you like - no DRM hassle, no CD (he, he, they're download, remember ?) and no problems.

There's no need for consoles in such conditions. There is, however, need for Valve to become the default download platform of choice so that ALL new games become available via Steam.

And the crappy EA Downloader will become just a bad memory.

A very bad one.

US pilots will go to VR drone ops straight from training

Just a minute there

Given my hours of flight experience (fighter and helicopter) on BF2, I'm sure that I could hold a Predator flying level over an 8-hour shift.

I'd take the job, no problem ! I'll even stay in a nondescript, blue-coverall outfit - no need for shiny wings that I do not merit anyway.

Bill Buxton to change Microsoft from within, hug Steve Ballmer

Buxton is just a diversion

Whatever he says won't change the fact that MS is currently DRM-enabled and beholden to the MAFIAA - which means that Vista was doomed to be the pile of crap it is.

Mr. Buxton is just a PR bunny, spouting feel-good soundbites in the hope that some skeptics will actually be convinced by his charm. I seriously doubt that he has any chance of impacting development in a way that is favorable to the user.

The situation will only change when the major shareholders decide that the downward spiral would be best stopped by removing DRM and cutting the blubber that is continuously growing on the frame of the Windows whale.

And chickens will fly.

ePassport tests put biometrics through their paces

higher-entropy biometrics ?!?

Dear God, it seems that there's a new entry in the BullShit Generator. Either that, or the BSG has had a close encounter with the LHC.

If anything, these new biometrics is going to make things easier for high-tech criminals (forget terrorists - they don't need to pass inspection, they're already on site).

I can't wait for the day when some border control officer is going to be strung up as a scapegoat for letting a dangerous criminal through.

"Do you acknowledge having allowed Mr. PsychoticMurderer to enter US territory ?"

"Well, yes, but his passport said he was Mr. NiceGuy:"

"But his face, did you not look at his face on the Wanted poster next to the window ?"

"Yes but his passport said he was really Mr. NiceGuy ! It checked out ! Honest !"

All the biometric craze is going to do is give properly-equipped criminals with gold-plated, steel-armored excuses to get into whatever country they want. The more tech we add, the more we risk blinding border controls with over-hyped "impossible to falsify" claims.

Remember : the Titanic was there first.

Did the width move for you, darling?

Almost fine for me

No really. The layout is fine, I can still find my way around, I'm okay with it, really.

But fixed width ? "greater control over the look and feel" ?

In a word, BOLLOCKS !

Fixed width has nothing to do with controlling the look and feel, and everything to do with making a computer screen behave like printed paper. Makes the managers feel better because they think their "control" actually has an impact on how I peruse the site.

Well it doesn't. And you could have just as much control by fixing the width of the side columns and leaving the center column proportional - that way us users that read other publications than The Sun could continue using our widescreen TFTs to their maximum extent.

Fixed width ? EPIC FAIL.

For rest, carry on. I'll be back.

EU wants to add another notch to ITA belt

Good Lord !

The EU hammered out a proposal and it's been 12 YEARS since anybody did anything with it ?!?

Talk about European time !

At this rate, by the time they actually take any decision it'll be next century.

Great efficiency there, people, just great. If I handled my job like that, none of my customers would get a program to test before I retired !

Hey, that gives me an idea . . .

Gemalto glues DVD onto a SIM

Eco friendly ?

Sorry, but any company who's main product is a chunk of plastic is off the green list for me.

Wall Street shudders under Lehman collapse

Move to Russia

Bollocks. The banking system is riddled with the kind of mentality that allowed this sub-prime fiasco to happen in the first place. Moving won't help.

The only thing to do is make financial managers of all walks understand that you cannot indefinitely make money out of thin air.

There are enough examples already to make that a basic point in financial studies.

1) The Internet bubble (Y2K people, not that long ago) showed that pretty websites and free deliveries did not a business case make. That mistake cost billions to idiotic investors (hey, it's financial Darwinism, right ?), so they went on to

2) Enron and playing both sides of a virtual issue against each other under the guise of "insurance". Throw in a large chunk of "creative accounting" and you end up with hundreds of thousands of 401K plans shot to hell, and people old enough for retirement having to go on (or get back to) working. That is a lot less fun, especially since this time the victims didn't actually have anything to do with the problem.

And now we have

3) Banks, the very staple of the economy, those who guarantee the concept of money in the eye of Joe Public, who start going for virtual gains as well. The sub-prime crisis is nothing but an Enron-style Internet bubble - lets put this down as an insurance problem and get people to subscribe - something no banker worth his Armani suit should have underwritten.

The whole economy is permeated through and through by the mentality of "let's invent some insurance for this and we'll be rich", forgetting that insurance deals can be called upon to be realized. The insurer does not always walk away with the pot.

It is high time we removed "insurance" from financial deals and left it with insurers. Banks should be banks, end of story.

Robot airliner anti-missile escorts proposed

Re: KAL Flight 007

Bad example for three reasons.

First of all, KAL Flight 007 was at cruising altitude when it got shot down, so it was neither taking off nor landing, which therefor puts it out of reach of terrorists.

Second, it was shot down by Soviet fighter planes, which does not compare to ground-launched missiles of any kind.

Third, and most important, it wasn't terrorists that downed the flight, it was the military forces of an independent country - which puts the means to the end way out of reach of terrorists as well.

I mean really, if any country decides to shoot down a commercial airplane, do you really think there is a chance in Hell that the hapless passengers have a chance of making it back home alive ?

The subject is terrorism, not state-sanctioned termination. You can argue that the then-USSR was guilty of a terrorist act and I will heartily agree, but you must also admit that the USSR had a bit more tools at its disposition than any terrorist organization has or will ever have.

Apples and oranges, sir.

Child abusers adopt blackmail tactics

Isn't that progress ?

Instead of catching them on not-always-obvious grooming charges, the cops can now do them in for blatant hacking and extortion - crimes which are rather easier to judge.

I'd say that qualifies as progress.

Northrop offer supersonic robot stealth raygun cyber-bomber

laser 9/11 ?

Sure, a planefull of fuel exploding in a tower would certainly not be enough - the conspiracists had to imagine lasers to "melt" the steel supports.

What they won't come up with.

I'm surprised nobody has accused aliens. Not "in" enough anymore, I suppose.

Google's IP anonymization fails to anonymize

Browser fingerprints ?

What on Earth is that ? When I surf on a page does my browser mark its unique serial number or something ?

I use Firefox v2.0.0.16, like millions of other people. Are you saying that one can target my specific session based solely on "browser information" ?

I'm sorry but I simply cannot believe that my browser in itself can be used to sort out my data from someone else using the same browser on a different IP address.

Blame game over United Airlines stock crash rumbles on

Storm in a teacup

If the Tribunal is certainly in a bad position, given that they complain about spidering but do not take the measures to stop it, I think that the only people to blame are the speculators.

Personally I am convinced that the good one will have realized that UA was not in a position to go bankrupt. They will have followed the downward spiral, and started to buy shares when the price fell low enough.

Now that the overblown mistake is on its was to be corrected, these astute speculators will have sold for a profit (like the first commenter apparently did).

This simply validates the fact that Wall Street is not for the simple-minded idiots. It takes a steel nerve and a steady head to not flounder, and that is certainly for the best.

So I don't really care who the masses want to pin the blame on. The speculators that sold in a panic are the only ones to blame - and they have already paid the price.

That is the one good thing about speculating : the idiots always lose.

I fail to see why that should change.

Disclaimer : I have no stock of any kind.

Hilton documentary reveals hidden side of Paris

"to see a new side of her"

Wait, there is a side of Paris we haven't yet seen ?

In another dimension, maybe ?

French storm the bastille over 'Sarkozy's Big Sister' database

As a French citizen

I must say that the fallacy by which it was "not useful" to have a public debate over this point is perhaps the most irritating point.

My government tried to sneak this very important monstrosity through the legal process, and now that it has been called to task it acts all innocent.

Sorry, but that just doesn't feel right. Putting a new twist on "if you have nothing to hide . . ", my countrymen are now demanding to know just what it was the Fillon had to fear.

Personally, I am happy to see that sometimes the French are indeed capable of actually noticing when their government tries to pull a fast one.

On the other hand, I have little doubt that said database will exist anyway - with or without approval from the population.

Ah, democracy. It's a nice dream.

Motorola gets down with the kids

"pause a show and continue watching elsewhere"

Good luck getting a DRM scheme to work with that.

Yes, there was a viable liquid bomb plot

my dad was an Organic Chemist

That is the main difference between most of the commentors on this kind of thread and you, then : you actually have a rather good idea of the subject matter and can therefor follow the article, understand its conclusion, and make up your mind on whether or not the author did his job right.

What astounds me is the amount of people who will not hesitate to comment on anything and everything as soon as it bothers their limited preconceptions of the universe, without knowing the most basic thing concerning the subject that got them so riled up.

It can be funny sometimes, though.

EA Europe struggles squeezing out Spore

It's EA, people

And It's online too. So that gives me to gold-plated reasons to not spend my money.

I'm boycotting EA since they so thoroughly screwed me with BF 2142.

Crimeware giants form botnet tag team

Re:logged by Da government

It may be logged, but what makes you think that it is done for your safety ?

It's just done so that, the day you complain too much, the black helicopters can swoop in and take you for your one-way vacation to an undisclosed location in a torture-practicing country.

Logging is done to capture terrists, and if you ain't happy, yousse a terrist.

You copy ?

Yahoo! shares! hit! five! year! low!

Easy peasy

It sure is a lot easier to increase shareholder value by 25% when you've already knocked it down 50%.

It's morons like that that make me think I could screw up the job just as good as he does - for half the price !

And thank goodness all the whiners that complain about all! those! exclamation! points! don't have a chance in hell of seeing any change. Keep it up, guys !

Seriously.

EU parliament says yes to hydrogen cars

@Cindy Lewis

I'll believe your PR piece when I see the goods available for sale and have the independent reviews that analyze your "solutions" and agree with your take.

Until then, I'll remain skeptical about any vendor that promises to have found the ideal solution.

Please do not take it personally, I really would like to get out of fuel permanently.

MS doesn't set world alight with Office Live Workspace

Re:please explain yourself

No explanation needed - as soon as your connection to Microsoft's servers fails for whatever reason (Internet down, ISP offline, Microsoft offline, virus cutting you off, DoS attack, ...), I'm sure you'll find some reasons on your own.

Medical isotope scarcity as Dutch reactor goes titsup

RE:muslim extremists have penetrated the media

Utter and unmitigated bollocks.

The media have no need to be taken over by any kind of extremist to go all hysterical over nothing - its been doing that for over a century without any kind of external influence.

Blaming extremists is all nice and good, but what do you do when you've finished nailing them all to the wall and shooting them dead, only to discover that the press is as hysterical as it was before ?

Oh yeah, I forgot : you invent another exterior threat.

Stupid me, I always think that solutions should be applied to problems, not to urban myths. That must be why I'm not a manager.

Blu Christmas coming, format fans forecast

Nothing wrong with Blu-ray ?!?!!

What are you smoking ? How about remote shutdown ability ? How about intrusive and unwanted DRM from the company that has a documented history of totally crap DRM implementations ? How about the need to replace all of my video elements for this crap to work because of HDMI restrictions ? How about simply too expensive for what it's worth ?

I have a video library of over 400 DVD titles, all legit. I will go for upscaling before I start forking over the cash to replace all that.

Hell, I don't even have Dolby at home, I'm on stereo Bose speakers.

I'll upgrade that before I buy an entirely new video room.

Blu-Ray is certainly great for the young whippersnappers that don't even have their own appartment, or barely just left their mothers' house, but for anyone over 35 that is not subject to the Gotta-Have-The-Latest-Shiny-Toy syndrome, it's not worth it - yet.

Judah 'Visual Voicemail' Klausner sues Google, Verizon, Citrix...

In other words

This Klausner guy is a parasite on society. To have a patent and not use it for production should automatically make the patent invalid.

Makes me suspicious that this guy does not have a working product for one of his 25 patents. I wonder if his patents are not just all a bunch of pie-in-the-sky word fillers, without any actual code to work with.

Remember that a patent is supposed to accurately describe the entire process, so that ANYONE can reproduce the object of the patent ? I wonder if his patents are that precise and, if not, I wonder why the Patent Office insists on granting patent applications that do not follow its own rules.

Scumbags punt Trojan with baby kidnap lure

One step too far, most assuredly

A message like that could, I think, be construed as a threat and thus, I believe, fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI, which is a sight worse than being in the crosshairs of local law enforcement.

I wonder if anyone could try and get the feds in on this to catch the spammers and, if so, woe to the ones who live in the States !

Pirated movie downloads offered as Zango sweetener

Why is this surprising ?

Scum partnering with criminals is normal as the sun rising in the morning.

Dollar surge helps software vendors soak customers

"VMware strongly disagreed with such a notion"

Well gosh, they would say that, wouldn't they ?

Apple confesses MobileMe vanishing contact bug

What's that ?

So Apple first adopted Microsoft hardware (the Intel platform), and now it has also adopted Microsoft debugging tactics ?

What next, a special iPhone Reset edition with a Ctrl-Alt-Dell button ?

Ex-Googlers reinvent web search

"illustrate the vastness and the variety of the Web"

Well let's see, the web is comprised of 35% junk (pics of pets or kids), 30% porn, 20% news, fake news and tech news, and the rest is either purely commercial or useless.

So if your search site wants me to discover the 70% I'm not interested in, don't bother.

Emirates takes delivery of its first A380 super jumbo

Quietness

Not to rain on the parade or anything, but "quiet" applied to any kind of self-propelled airplane whatsoever is very much pure nonsense.

I am quite ready to salute the achievement, and the A380 may be quieter than its predecessors, and it may even be quieter than any other commercial airliner in use today, but the use of "quiet" to qualify any one of those flying behemoths is simply ridiculous.

Just ask the people who live under the landing path.

Oops - SF prosecutors put city passwords on public record

So now he "could have"

Looks like they're going to try to tack some pedophile charges on him next. And $5 million bail ? How many people did this guy kill already ?

I don't know the hows nor the whys, but SF sure is starting to walk on thin ice with this kind of stunt.

American data pimper exposes ad equation

"the prevailing industry practices"

I am sure they did, since said industry practices mainly include screwing the customer as deeply as possible without any forewarning, then bringing up a lengthy, impossible-to-read pseudo-legal document if any complaints arise.

Yeah, they certainly followed prevailing industry practices. I'm sure Al Capone did as well (as soon as he finished writing some new ones, that is).

There are times when I really wish I had some C4 and knew how to use it. I'd show them what "opt-out" REALLY means !

Sabre-rattling Europe threatens US diplomats with visas

They should indeed

I'm all for Americans being subjected to the same hassles that they impose upon others. Should have done that the very day they started it.

Cannibal's legal objection hamstrings German horror film

What was that ?

"That right allows the author of a copyright work not to have his work treated in a derogatory way"

Wait a minute, you mean that if Gigli was made by a German guy, nobody could pan it in Germany ?

Do you seriously mean to say that, if John Romero was German, no one in Germany could have stated just how awful, lame, unoriginal, uninspiring and bug-ridden Daikatana was ?

If that in indeed true, then no customer satisfaction forums are possible in Germany.

The mind boggles.

File system killer Reiser rejected 3-year sentence

Minimum goes to 15

So what ? Maximum is still life, and that is what he deserves.

It's not like it was an accident.

Ballmer hails services death and glory for partners

Services that are online

are only available when the entire path between you and the service is available.

Google, despite its massive online ability, just recently learned that it's not that easy to ensure.

And Apple has just demonstrated how easy it is as a customer to have your data compromised when your primary hosting organization falls for a mundane social engineering trick.

By not placing my data online, I am keeping it 100% available when I need it and I am ensuring that no one else can access it without my express consent. That is good enough for me.

Microsoft tells SMBs Vista isn't a risky business

@Aodhhan

Every product has a market, and you are obviously either part of that market, or part of an MS astroturf marketing team.

If Vista is good for you, great (for you). We're all very happy for you and wish you the best of luck.

Undoubtedly Vista does have one or two features that will indeed appeal to a certain part of the global market. Unfortunately, it also has two or three "features" that greatly displease a certain part of the global market. And right now, you have to admit that the latter portion is bigger than the former.

As for your remark "learn to use the system before you bash it", sorry but no. I don't need to learn to use a DRM-infected system to know I don't like the idea, just like I don't need to try hard drugs to know they're not good for me.

A vast majority of the market does not like Vista and you're just going to have to live with that.

Google evaporates Docs and Spreadsheets cloud

Just waiting for it

A nice reminder that, when you're walking on a cloud, the slightest puff of wind can plunge you back to Earth in a painfully quick manner.

Those of you who accept that as a risk, fine. I don't. I'm already taking risks with the reliability of 1) the hardware I'm using, 2) Windows and 3) the office software suite I've got.

I think that's enough risks already without adding a) my ISP's downtime, b) fishing trawlers that cut undersea cables without warning and c) the availability of said "cloud" servers, with their own hardware and OS issues.

Pioneer proudly pitches 400GB Blu-ray optical disc

Great news !

Windows 7 finally has its distribution format, AND they have time to finalize it before the behemoth actually goes on sale.

Microsoft flogs subscriptions to the unwary and confused

MS software for rent

Yeah, sure I'll do that.

As soon as I get a major sledgehammer to the head that makes me forget the (outrageous) price I already paid for Office 2000.

I will never willfully give money to any corporation that embeds shoddy DRM into the products it intends to foist upon me, for one. That cuts out Vista and any related software pretty quick.

Next, I see no reason to pay for office software that Office 2000 does fine. If I really hit a compatibility wall, I'll just use OpenOffice or, at worst, request an open-format version of the file from the sender.

Frankly, relying on the regular authorization of MS or any other provider in order to simply do day-to-day work is nonsense of the highest order.

Somehow, though, the dark part of me almost wishes for this to come into being. The day the authentication server is down and a whole continent of clueless companies cannot work, the lawsuits will be fun to watch.

AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6

That's it, I'm making another omlette

I've been using AVG happily for the past few years.

I've not at all appreciated the nag screens telling me to upgrade to AVG 8. Tell me once is okay, tell me every time I start up the PC is a nuisance.

Now it is official : AVG is nuisanceware.

Well I agree that you have to break some eggs to make an omlette. AVG is now in the process of being uninstalled from the 3 PCs I have. I am going to install another product and tell all my friends to do the same.

And since I am their IT expert, they're going to do it.

So, Mr. Thompson, how do you feel about breaking some eggs now ?

UK gov publishes 'kids and videogames' action plan

One thing I find interesting

In every article I read about a scheme to impose ratings on games, there is always a rather large consensus that the rating is rubbish and the parents are the ones ultimately responsible for what their offspring does.

If this really is a majority view, why then does the government continue to push something no one really believes in ?

Is it because it's easier to do that rather than take care of real issues, such as fighting crime and maintaining the economy ?