* Posts by William Old

114 publicly visible posts • joined 26 May 2008

Kindle users get Zorked out

William Old
Pint

OK, can't beat a PDP11, but...

... the DEC MicroVax that was installed at the machine halls at the James Clark Maxwell Building (University of Edinburgh, King's Buildings) was only regarded as fully SAT-tested once everyone had made sure Adventure was working properly on it...

:-)

You have been eaten by a grue.

Police IT quango chief to quit

William Old
Megaphone

It's worse than that...

... it gets "grossed-up", so that the balancing payment - after tax - provides the net amount to cover the original tax liability. Otherwise he'd pay tax on the repayment of tax, on which he would pay tax on the repayment of tax... you get the idea.

Faster BT broadband on starting blocks for Olympics - maybe

William Old
FAIL

HM Gov still can't make their systems standards-compliant... :-(

This is just so much hot air... the Government is paying only lip service to REAL progress with its "Digital Britain" White Paper.

For example, the page http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/broadcasting/6216.aspx contains a link to a copy of the final version of the "Digital Britain" report that is in a closed, proprietary format that I can't access (MS Word), but the links to a Rich Text Format version and a Portable Document Format version are dead. Is this part of the ongoing support by HM Government of Microsoft's predatory and criminal monopolistic practices, or might there one day be some way that I can access a *readable* copy of the report?

And when I tried to use the DFCM&S "contact us" page to ask how I could access a copy that I can actually read using Linux, I was wrongly given the message "Please enter a valid e-mail address" when I tried to submit this with the perfectly valid address with the local part "dfcm&s" - because the ampersand is perfectly acceptable within an e-mail address - see RFC2822.

Of course, if you are a Government department, and your Web site is horribly broken due to being hosted on a Microsoft platform with huge security holes that make it vulnerable to content using the ampersand ("&") character, then there's no hope of conplying with Internet technical standards. I wonder when HMG are going to get their web sites fixed to make them accessible to taxpayers other than those who also paying the Microsoft Tax (Windows)?

Teardown team open-sources gadget repair guides

William Old
FAIL

Falls at the first hurdle...

Numerous parts of the site don't work at all when accessed with FireFox.

So, I tried to use the site to sign up to find out how to access the service with FireFox, and...

[Wooosh! Disappears in an infinitely-recursing loop...]

HMRC calls for more care with tax log-in details

William Old
Gates Horns

I can't even use the online filing...

... because their systems are Microsoft systems that are horribly broken, and don't comply with RFC2822 - so as the local part of my e-mail address as used for HMR&C correspondence is, yes, you've guessed "hmr&c" (perfectly legal as defined by RFC2822 but declare an "illegal e-mail address" by Microsoft's electric Meccano), I can't register or log in.

Of course, the HMR&C tech support droids couldn't appreciate the irony of the long exchange of e-mails about this issue to exactly that e-mail address, with (of course) no difficulties on either side whatsoever... :-(

Their position is that "this is as specified in the GovTalk standard in the UK", GovTalk being not a "standard" at all, but a Microsoft specification for public sector systems to protect their amateurishly-written operating systems, to allow for the gaping security vulnerabilities in Windows arising from use of the ampersand (&) character.

I don't see the issue, Microsoft could just produce a (much more secure and reliable) Linux-hosted system... :-)

Silverlight and open-source Java love has its day

William Old
Gates Horns

Meanwhile, in other news...

... Microsoft attempts to crush Linux by suing TomTom for alleged patent violations by the GPL code it uses in its sat nav devices...

"Embedded Windows"... :-) As in, embedded in the bottom of the river, where it ends up after users have had enough of the crashes, viruses, and the shoddy "user experience" that is the inevitable consequence of using Microsoft's fifth-rate software offerings...

Yech....

MS coughs to hokey-cokey IE8 option in Windows 7

William Old
Unhappy

Great...

So now you get all of the vulnerabilities, without any of the functionality...

I suppose that's progress... :-(

NAO calls for better crown court IT

William Old
Jobs Horns

One reason why Xhibit is so unreliable...

... is that it only works with Microsoft Explorer, it's not eGIF (eGovernment Interoperability Framework) compliant, a standard that requires browser independence.

It was a major embarrassment for HMG when Xhibit was brought out and it was discovered (too late!) that many of the intended users couldn't use it... CJIT (Criminal Justice IT) had just assumed that everyone was a public sector employee using MS IE (duh!) but this was a mistake. For example, the Witness Service is provided by Victim Support, a charity, under contract to the Home Office, and many of their staff use FireFox, for all of the usual reasons - better security, more reliable, yada, yada, yada...

So much for Government denials that they are joined at the hip with Microsoft and have lots of warm and fuzzy feelings about Open Source... :-(

Armed cops contain Wild West Leicestershire toy gun menace

William Old
Flame

@AC "plod stikes for once"

Not true... not even remotely true... anyone involved in dealing with a surrendered unlicensed firearm is not, repeat not, going to deal with this situation as described, because he/she knows full well that in a very short space of time, the said firearm will travel down the administrative chain towards its destruction and reach someone who might not agree with such a liberal response to the person handing it in... irrespective of whether it has copper piping hammered on to the barrel, or not.

And if you are such a numpty that you can't spot your typo in the title of your posting, why would we believe you anyway?

Superworm seizes 9m PCs, 'stunned' researchers say

William Old
Gates Horns

@Mike and Andy Worth...

> I've heard it all before and it's a common misconception that you "can't" get a virus on a Linux machine.

No, it's not. There are no Linux viruses, and never will be. However, shedloads of malware exist for all platforms, including Linux - trojans, worms, miscellaneous security vulnerabilities... the list is long.

The problem is caused by the likes of Sophos, who will admit (in direct correspondence) that there is no such thing as a virus (executable malware that propagates through self-replication without user intervention) for Linux, but will then explain that, for marketing reasons (because they are selling their products mostly to non-techies) they now use the word "virus" instead of "malware" because (as is the way of the world) they sacrifice accuracy for the need to "dumb down" in talking to their customers. Presumably, such users are too stupid to understand the word "malware", but comprehension dawns if "virus" is used instead. Sigh.

Language is designed to convey meaning, and so accuracy in the use of language (including the use of correct spelling and grammar) is important. Hence this post.

So, in summary - lots of malware exists for all distributions of Linux. But there are no viruses for Linux. If you think you've found/invented one, use it to attack a properly-configured machine run by Eddie Bleasedale at NetProject, and thereby claim the prize of (whatever) thousands of pounds that he's been offering for years for this impressive task.

And don't bother to post if you find advertisements for the "Linux anti-virus software" that actually runs on Linux to remove Windows viruses passing through in e-mail messages and attachments, and think that this proves the converse.

Sigh. Again.

EU says Microsoft violated law with IE on Windows

William Old
Gates Horns

Paranoia rules...

Hey, El Reg... has anyone checked the originating IP addresses of the suspiciously-high number of AC comments bleating pro-MS propaganda? Almost without exception they obfuscate the hard issues: failure of IE to comply with open standards, MS continuing (illegally)to abuse its (legal) monopoly by continuing with its embrace/extend/extinguish strategy, MS deliberately failing to comply with Court of First Instance determinations or to pay the mega-millions of Euros fines for its unlawful practices, etc.

Thanks Wayne, André, RW et al for concise, clear posts... and Sarah Bee, stay in there, we love you - don't let the MStards grind you down... ;-)

NFC sees future disappear in a Tag

William Old

Microsoft and "standards"...

So...... there is an ISO standard, in the form of QR Code, and now Microsoft wants to replace the open standard with its own proprietary "standard", for its own commercial purposes rather than for philanthropy or for the good of Mankind?

I see.

What goes around, comes around - when the ISO standard ODF (Open Document Format) became a target for Microsoft, who wanted to supplant it by bludgeoning key standards organisations into supporting its own "standard" (ha!) OpenXML, who would have believed that they would manage to pull this stunt off?

Still, anyone's support is guaranteed if you pay them enough... :-(

Revenue pledges data security...by 2011

William Old
Gates Horns

Impossible without standards...

... and HMRC can't even meet basic open standards, e.g. RFC2822 for e-mail.

Just try entering a perfectly legal e-mail address containing an ampersand (&) in the local part into one of their systems, and see what happens... you can happily swap e-mails with HMRC using that address (isn't the Internet kind?), but (Microsoft) GovTalk bans them. They're frightened that their Windows systems will fall over with fright at the thought of entering such heinous data into HMRC records as your e-mail address... :-(

Apple anti-virus advice was nothing new

William Old
Flame

Sophos and their disreputable marketing scam

I was very, very disappointed to see a respected company such as Sophos being a party to the promotion of continued misunderstanding of key concepts in computer security.

Whilst precise technical definitions are not necessarily important for end-users, that is not an excuse for the use of imprecise language when discussing specific security issues, and I note that Cluley's article (hotlinked from this story) is very careful to avoid stating that Mac viruses do or do not exist - he refers to Mac "malware" and Mac "threats", but keeps referring to "anti-virus software" to address these. No. It's bad enough that the uninformed seize upon the existence of ClamAV and the like to bleat that "there must be Linux viruses because anti-virus software exists for Linux" (we can't stop people from demonstrating the extent of their ignorance), but it's shameful that he is attempting to promote Sophos anti-virus and anti-malware products by leveraging that ignorance.

By all means he can promote his company's security products for the Mac, and there's no objection to them calling it "anti-malware" and/or "anti-spyware" software. But it's not "anti-virus" software unless, like ClamAV, it's software for dealing with Windows viruses that happen to reside for whatever reason on a Mac platform, in the same way that my Linux servers deal with Windows viruses being sent through my Exim MTA, destined for Windows-using end users.

Quite frankly, it's about time that Trading Standards officers or the Advertising Standards Authority prosecuted Sophos for misleading anyone who buys "Sophos anti-virus for Linux" in consequence of the belief that Linux can be infected by a virus. Or have they successfully claimed the cash prize offered by Eddie Bleasedale's NetProject Limited to anyone who can successfully infect one of their properly-configured Linux boxes with a virus - i.e. malware that is self-replicating, the key criterion for software to be classified as a virus?

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 planned for 2009

William Old
Flame

order(cart, horse) -> reality

"We want them to test their sites and services with IE 8, make any changes they feel are necessary for the best possible customer experience using IE8, and report any critical issues (e.g., issues impacting robustness, security, backwards compatibility, or completeness with respect to planned standards work)."

No.

Change to...

"We want them to test their sites and services against open standards, make any changes they feel are necessary for the best possible customer experience, and report any critical issues (e.g., issues impacting robustness, security, backwards compatibility, or completeness with respect to planned standards work) so that IE8 can be made standards-compliant."

There. Much better.

Scots vote out ID cards

William Old
Happy

@Lee

> The real point, which annoys many of us in England, is that when it comes to things that affect only Scotland generally only Scottish MPs (MPs represent Scottish Constituencies) get to vote on it, whereas when it comes to things that affect only England Scottish MPs also get to vote on it.

That's because you have the UK Parliament in London, not the English Parliament, but the Scottish Government has already been established. I see no problem. Scotland is (well, for the time being) part of the UK, and its MPs participate and vote in the UK Parliament. If you don't have an English Parliament, and have to use the UK Parliament as a proxy to determine your home affairs, whose fault is that?

Remember that the Scottish Act of Union (1707) was signed some distance from the Scottish Parliament of the day, because an angry mob was trying to burn it down to stop it being enacted. Daniel Defoe, at the time the Chancellor of the English Exchequer, made records of the payments made (in gold) to each Scottish landowner to buy their vote - you had to be a landowner to vote in those days. So now that Scotland has nearly righted that wrong, why not take the opportunity to regain control of your country's affairs in the same way...? :-)

BNP leaked list claims first victims

William Old
Flame

@Mark and @Martin

@Mark:

> Actually, police officers are not able to be members of any political party, be they Labour, Tory, BNP, UKIP, MRLP.

Oh yes, they are... Schedule 1 (relating to Regulation 6) of the Police Regulations 2003 states:

"1. A member of a police force shall at all times abstain from any activity which is likely to interfere with the impartial discharge of his duties or which is likely to give rise to the impression amongst members of the public that it may so interfere; and in particular a member of a police force shall not take any active part in politics."

That doesn't stop them joining a political party. However, the Police (Amendment) Regulations 2004 replaced this in its entirety with:

"1. — (1) A member of a police force shall at all times abstain from any activity which is likely to interfere with the impartial discharge of his duties or which is likely to give rise to the impression amongst members of the public that it may so interfere.

(2) A member of a police force shall in particular–

(a) not take any active part in politics;

(b) not belong to any organisation specified or described in a determination of the Secretary of State."

So, at the Home Secretary's whim, any political party can become proscribed for police officers, and yes, the Conservative Party is next on the list... :-)

@Martin

> It seems clear to me, as Martin Burns points out, that the member of the police should not keep their job as a simple matter of breach of his or her contract of employment. If the employee wants to claim that the term is not lawful then the correct venue is an employment tribunal. In the meantime the correct behaviour by the police is to terminate the employment.

Martin, police officers are Crown servants, they have no contract of employment. That's why they're fed up being sh*t on by the Home Office and are looking for increased industrial rights.

Astronaut space dump pong-bomb frag shower today

William Old
Stop

@Nick

> Even in orbit the gravitational force is still significant, it's just balanced by the centripetal force.

No.

In this particular case, the gravitational pull of the Earth *is* the centripetal force that acts on said orbiting object. Imagine that gravity suddenly failed... no centripetal force, so said object carries on in a straight line, i.e. at a tangent to the previous circular orbit.

What you mean is that the gravitational acceleration of the object for that particular orbit is equal to the value for centripetal acceleration (the rate of change of tangential velocity) that keeps the object's distance from the Earth constant: the radial rate of descent is zero.

Police collar kid for Wi-Fi pinching

William Old
Flame

@Steve Roper

Steve, either you have a bad memory, or you are making it up.

Tespass is a civil tort, not a criminal offence, and there's simply no way that it would ever get within a mile of a Magistrates' Court, unless the County Court happened to be built that near, because if you did decide to sue someone for damages for trespass, that's where the claim would be dealt with - and in a Small Claims arbitration by a District Judge, if the claim was under £5,000.

The only other possibility is that you are posting from the United States, but I've never heard of an American magistrate before...?

Hi-tech cops lose their website

William Old
Thumb Up

Re: but remember

This AC has got it spot on... there's no way that a .org is appropriate now, it ranks with (for example) http://www.surreypolice.co.uk, which used to belong to someone who had bought up all the www.[nameofforce]police.co.uk domains for reasons that were associated with a personal crusade.

Let it lapse, and replace it with something more meaningful. SOCA is not a police force, so it would need to be a .gov.uk domain anyway.

Dell Inspiron 910 mini-laptop to be a hardware hacker's dream?

William Old
Thumb Up

@Simon

Fewer...

Q - Is the quantity measured or counted?

Measured = Less

Counted = Fewer

MSI intros cut-price Linux mini-laptop

William Old
Gates Horns

Can someone remind me please...

... how much do you get back from Microsoft UK if you click the "I do not agree" box on the Windows XP licence screen and ask MS for the licence fee back because the Ts&Cs are unacceptable? IIRC, it requires a form to be filled in (sent by MSUK) promising that no copies have been kept, yada, yada, yada, on pain of being forced to instal Vista Ultimate on your electric toothbrush if you've lied (or something like that anyway...).

Obviously, if that rebate is greater than the model price difference, then it will be cheaper to buy the XP version (and boost the Vista sales figures!!) and apply for the rebate. This was covered in detail on El Reg some while ago (>1 year) but I can't find the article.

45th Mersenne prime discovered (possibly)

William Old
IT Angle

I love these arguments...

... so I'm going to start a new one! :-)

> A Mersenne number is a number that is one less than a power of two, or Mn = 2n – 1. So, the first few are 1, 3, 7, 15, 31, 63, and so on.

No... the first few are 0, 1, 3, 7, 15, 31, 63, and so on. 2 to the power 0 is 1, so (2 to the power 0 minus 1) is 0. I'll leave it to the next poster to start arguing about the negative powers of 2... ;-)

UK.gov child data-sharing scheme delayed (again)

William Old
Flame

Protests outside Parliament...

... could be banned long before the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act was enacted. It's sad that so many people are prepared to make such misleading comments without even a cursory examination of the facts. Sessional Orders have been used for nearly three centuries to keep the streets clear for MPs on days when the House was sitting, by a Sessional Order that read as follows:

“Ordered, That the Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis do take care that during the Session of Parliament the passages through the streets leading to this House be kept free and open and that no obstruction be permitted to hinder the passage of Members to and from this House, and that no disorder be allowed in Westminster Hall, or in the passages leading to this House, during the Sitting of Parliament, and that there be no annoyance therein or thereabouts; and that the Serjeant at Arms attending this House do communicate this Order to the Commissioner aforesaid.“

Sony Ericsson delays Windows phone to Jan 09

William Old
Gates Horns

@AC "Cool phone"

> however WM offers best flexibility of what u can do with your "phone"

It also offers the maximum flexibility of what everyone else in the world can do with your phone... imagine, an embedded OS that is designed to offer the security vulnerabilities of ActiveX in particular, and the Windows OS in general... nightmare!

Clearly, the phone can't launch until it works at least 95% properly, and based on Windows, that might well still be a long way off...

Windows for mobiles is like carthorses for the Grand National...

McAfee SiteAdvisor sued over 'spyware' tag

William Old
Flame

@ I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

> The term: "may contain", is not tense specific. Perhaps the line aught to have had a lawyer copy-edit it...

Before getting a lawyer to copy-edit it, they should have checked it from the perspective of literacy... I know that it was written by an American, but in English "may" is permissive, and clearly they actually meant "might", which is probabilistic.

"You may borrow my computer" = permissive

"It might rain tomorrow" = probabilistic

"May" might be used wrongly instead of "might", but no-one may corrupt English meaning in this way... :-)

McKinnon loses extradition fight

William Old
Paris Hilton

@Britt Johnston

> the world is so small that national boundaries aren't relevant. Yet there is disagreement on what an extraditable (i.e. serious) crime is.

I have a degree of sympathy for the issue to which you refer in the first part of your comment, but when you consider the number of uninformed people on this thread who refer to "UK Courts" when there is no such thing (Scotland having its own legal system and Courts, and England & Wales having theirs) that you are going to have an uphill struggle even to generate an intelligent debate on the subject.

Add to this the impossibility of harmonising key differences between the two jurisdictions (e.g. the age of criminal responsibility in England & Wales is 10, but in Scotland it is 8), and that further complicates things. Even Road Traffic legislation has to cater for this - the offence of "Taking and driving away", S.178 Road Traffic Act 1988, applies only to Scotland because it was needed there - E&W has "Unlawful taking of a motor vehicle" but all Scottish theft and kindred offences are common law offences, not derived from statute.

I wish you well!

Paris, because her boundaries are important - I want to find out where she would draw the line...

Microsoft, Nikon release shutter on patents

William Old
Gates Horns

@AC (First post)...

YES!

Copyright lawyers accuse 25,000 UK videogame filesharers

William Old
Unhappy

Not UK... England and Wales only...

The High Court of England & Wales has no jurisdiction over subscribers in Scotland... we await the application to the Court of Session, which - on the basis that an IP address can't do any wrong, only humans - will toss this action on the scrap heap, with a bit of luck...

The idea that the subscriber is liable in (Scots) law to a litigious third party, with not a shred of evidence that the individual concerned is responsible, should get short shrift....

Watchdog hits 070 swindlers with big fine

William Old

@AC

> On the whole, the scam calls I get are either from the U.S. ("you've won a vacation in Florida!")

Be especially careful with these... this particular scam is *not* designed to get you to ring a premium rate number, it's to get you to pay for some "extras" with a credit card... astonishingly, anyone mad enough to give the "company" (Grand Tropical Vacations, or something similar) their credit card details gets seriously fleeced by fraudulent transactions from an interesting variety of foreign countries in various parts of the known universe... YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Wireless browsers shut out of the Olympics

William Old
Paris Hilton

Makes no difference...

... as all of the CBS content isn't available to Linux users anyway... what a pile of steaming crap...

What are these Olympics anyway? Are they important? I think we should be told...

Paris, because she was awarded gold in the horizontal jogging event...

Microsoft starts stoking hype for Windows 7

William Old
Flame

@M

>>"after a BSOD caused by VS2008 hanging"

> Hang on, Windows Vista didn't cause this error, VS2008 did. Your blaming the wrong product there!

No, he's not... what sort of crappy operating system (I'm not expecting answers, by the way...) falls over and dies because it doesn't properly manage the applications running under it?

> Why not run VS2008 on Linux?....oh wait you can't, because Linux doesn't support it. Maybe because Linux doesn't support as many products, it doesn't crash as much. Hmm.

No, it doesn't crash as much because it has a well-designed, modular structure, is truly multi-tasking (not a beefed-up toy consumer OS), and uses a dependency database for code libraries to maintain compatibility of installed applications, or "avoids DLL Hell" for short. Some of my servers have been running happily for over a year without re-booting, so add decent memory management to that list. Oh, and add the "No Linux viruses, ever" to the analysis (NetProject still offers a huge sum of money to anyone who can actually infect one of their properly-configured Linux boxes with a "Linux virus").

Another braincell-challenged numpty who probably has no idea of how long computer science existed without Ctrl-Alt-Del and blue screens of death...

Road Pricing 2.0 is two years away

William Old
Flame

The future of Roads Policing

In "Roads – Delivering Choice and Reliability", Ruth Kelly (Secretary of State for Transport) states:

"We will therefore work with the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers to identify the most appropriate way to enable additional police resource to be provided for motorway traffic enforcement purposes where that proves necessary, possibly through developing a new standard ‘framework’ agreement."

She's been badly briefed on this - almost all forces are removing police officers from motorways and arterial roads, commensurate with the development and deployment (by her own Department!) of the new roads police, also known as "Highways Agency Traffic Officers" (HATOs). They don't have enforement powers (yet... see the debate in Parliament by the late Gwyneth Dunwoody, who spotted this wheeze from her own party even before the concept got rolling - see http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debate/?id=2004-01-05.57.0).

But you will see it soon, given the crisis in police leadership (that phrase is being used openly in Home Office) and the huge numbers of officers retiring from the service over the next few years (over half of the entire service). HATOs will be enforcing speed and other traffic offences within 5 years. With PCSOs replacing police officers across England & Wales (Scotland is far too sensible to take this nonsense on board) - in some forces, with unsocial hours payments, PCSOs are paid MORE than probationary police officers! - there just simply won't be any police officers available for roads policing. Soon, "policing" will simply be a uniformed response to spontaneous public disorder, nothing more.

Society gets the policing that it deserves...

ISO rejects Office Open XML appeal (redux)

William Old
Flame

Consent obtained by fraud...

... isn't true consent in law.

I take my hat off to ISO, the exchange of grubby brown paper bags full of cash has been pretty well carried off successfully here, and as other commentators have said, all this has done is to irretrievably damage ISO as a standards body.

An ISO standard that has no implementations and probably never will have... how the mighty have fallen.

In their latest business venture, Microsoft has announced a computer-aided tool for forcing Imperial pipes into metric fittings, and vice versa, in line with their new ISO standard for engineering infrastructure. Concerns over mechanical strength and safety issues from leakage of pipe contents were dismissed as being the ravings of "those who just don't like Microsoft"...

Jeez....

Filesharing teen gets damages reduced in ignorance claim

William Old
Boffin

@Sean Gray

> And just to set the record straight, Pete - it's not illegal to drink underage- it's illegal to sell alcohol to somebody underage, since the person underage is deemed to not be responsible for their actions

Errmmm... no, not quite! it's nothing to do with whether or not they are responsible for their actions, it's simply the case that Parliament hasn't made it an offence to drink alcohol whilst being under any specific age, although it is an offence in England & Wales to give alcohol to a child aged under 5. If there was an issue about under-18s not being responsible for their actions, then the following wouldn't have been enacted:

"An individual aged under 18 commits an offence if he knowingly consumes alcohol on relevant premises." [Section 150(1), Licensing Act 2003]

I'm assuming that you aren't referring to Scotland, which has its own legal system... I couldn't be arsed to look up the Licensing (Scotland) Act 1976.. oh, alright then...

"A person under 18 shall not in licensed premises buy or attempt to buy alcoholic liquor nor consume alcoholic liquor in a bar." [Section 68(2) Licensing (Scotland) Act 1976]

But in Scotland, the age of criminal responsibility is 8 years of age, whereas under English law it's 10. Not particularly relevant, I just like pointing out how much more sensible Scots Law is, whenever I get the chance... :-)

Suprise at spelling snafu sanctions

William Old
Flame

Aaaaargh!

Step forward to accept an award: JohnG, Pete, Bob Boswell, and GrahamT...

Mike Crawshaw, to you goes the supreme accolade: my sincere thanks...

These esteemed correspondents to El Reg have, thankfully, crafted appropriate responses to the maladjusted Brainiac from Thames Valley Polytechnic (or whatever it used to be), responses that enabled me to retain my sanity after reading the mindless vomit-babble that has passed, in some quarters, for an academic opinion... may his worthless mutterings be hereafter consigned to the /dev/null bitbucket of nothingness...

Tasing of unarmed opposition peaks among firearms cops

William Old
Happy

@JonB

> But if I am simply handed a fixed penalty no matter how innocent I may be. I would be mad to go to court - the costs, even of a successful defence, would massively outweigh the fixed penalty. Except in the rare circumstance where the defence is very simple and even then I have to take time off work for the court case, which again will cost me more than a fixed penalty.

So... your argument is that fixed penalties should be done away with, so that instead of being given a fixed penalty, you get prosecuted instead, so that THEN you can plead "not guilty"? Errmmm... and how does that represent any financial saving (or even a different option at all to a request for a hearing in lieu of the fixed penalty) over what you describe above?

Logically, your argument is therefore "I don't like fixed penalties, because they remove my opportunity to plead not guilty and incur exactly the same expenses and time off work as if I requested a Court hearing for a fixed penalty"... ?????

> But if I am simply handed a fixed penalty no matter how innocent I may be. I would be mad to go to court

What's your estimate of the proportion of innocent people given a fixed penalty notice, compared to "all people given a fixed penalty notice"? 100%? 99.9%? Really, I'm interested in your estimate! And if you don't pay the fixed penalty, you don't get tasered, either... (relevance to the thread!)

It would be a useful exercise for you to identify the hordes of predatory public officials who issue fixed penalties to completely innocent people, with neither the evidence to support the allegation, nor any heed for the fact that said innocent party can apply for a Court hearing - where it is open to the magistrates to make a costs order against the prosecuting authority if applied for by an acquitted defendant (I note that you don't mention this in your response). Don't you think that these hundreds of thousands of miscarriages of justice might eventually attract some judicial comment, or be the subject of concern from elected representatives?

The whole point of the process is to allow anyone who agrees that they've committed an offence to pay the fixed penalty instead of being prosecuted, and thereby to avoid exactly the expense and time off work to attend Court that you yourself list in your original comment. The fact that a very small proportion of the general population has a problem with the fixed penalty system, notwithstanding that it's a legitimate enforcement tactic, approved by Parliament and avoided by all those who don't offend in the first place, is rather sad - and, I should add, tough titty. Anyone who thinks they are innocent, can go to Court. Jeez, it couldn't be any simpler or fairer!

Your beef sounds like sour grapes or an extremist rant, to me. The rest of us are just grateful that our hard-earned pay, from which we are regularly parted by excessive taxation, isn't wasted on pointless Court administration for numpties who are angry at themselves for getting caught (speeding, or whatever) in the first place (and can't afford First Class justice = acquittal, a la Nick Freeman, but that's another story...). Yes, I'm a police officer, and I'm not clairvoyant, but I will bet that you're NOT a police officer, and that you've been the recipient of a fixed penalty... don't ask me how I do it, though! :-)

> How stupid do you think people are?

Well, as you've asked, *most* people aren't, but there are high-profile exceptions every now and then... :-)

William Old
Flame

@Edward

> It's about time we learned that and realized that we're about to give away the last vestiges of our most basic freedoms.

Ah, yes, that beloved centuries-old and golden freedom to kick the shit out of the poor old police officer that tries to lock you up when you're pissed and fighting-mad with a bottle in your hand...

Knights Templar to Vatican: Give us back our assets

William Old
Flame

@NickyTheFish

> Despite the fact that many members of the Knights Templar did escape to Spain, England and other parts of Europe...

NickyTheFish, pay attention at the back there... if they'd gone to England, they wouldn't have been "escaping", because England was sympathetic to the Papal See and supported the persecution (and execution) of the Templars. They actually went to Scotland, where many of their graves are still visible (very numerous around Argyll and Loch Awe).

Just as well, as Templar cavalry helped to rout the English at Bannockburn - without them, Scotland might well have lost this decisive battle.

Firefox 3.1 vs IE8: 'Alpha, beta testers step forward, please'

William Old
Gates Horns

@Kevin Eastman

> "as my work website and email only works with IE."

HA-HA!

(With apologies to Nelson Muntz...)

Microsoft predicts 'some' ROI for online millions by 2010

William Old
Linux

"Trust me on this..."

Yeah, right... this has got to be concrete evidence that the ordure is arriving at the rotary air-redistribution device as far as Vista is concerned...

> Microsoft claimed more than 180m Windows Vista licenses have now been sold, up 40m from the last official figure.

Yes, but on how many actual systems is it still installed? I'm happy to conclude that the installed user base is increasing rapidly, but measured in thousands, not millions...

BSA: Software piracy's 'tragic' impact on US society

William Old
Thumb Down

BSA letters to small/medium businesses...

... demanding that "software audits" be undertaken and the results returned to them, effectively to prove your innocence, just go in the bin (actually, shredder).

Who are these guys? The cream of the licensing compliance droids from Microsoft, with whatever brain cells they had left surgically removed, and wound up and pointed at honest business people trying to make a (legal) living?

With a bit of luck, they will assume that we are using pirated software, but God help them if they turn up here with an Anton Piller order (civil search warrant), which is what it will take if they want to look at all of our (Linux!) boxes... :-)

Microsoft's Live Mesh doesn't want you

William Old
Flame

Can there be any better evidence...

... of the fact that, despite Microsoft's worn-out cliches and downright lies, their software is simply...

WAKE UP AT THE BACK THERE, FOLKS!!!!

... *not fit for purpose*, and you will not, under any circumstances, get the 99.999% uptime that their slick marketting droids would have you believe is on offer to "enrich your corporate software experience".

The only "experience" you will (errmmm..) experience from trusting your business to their sloppily-written bloatware and "bent-over-with-its-arse-in-the-air" defences to malware is the "bankruptcy and ruin" experience.

Got it?

It's not Unix, it's not Oracle, it's not a platform for 24x7 critical operations, it's a toy single-user consumer operating system with many sparkly but dodgy bolt-ons that - for some reason - people think is the only choice in computing platforms. It ain't. Run something reliable instead.

God, I'm almost tired of sending screenshots of error messages from fallen-over .asp servers to corporate Webmasters to show why I didn't/couldn't buy anything from their crappy broken MS-driven sites... almost...

Consume .NET services without Silverlight

William Old
Gates Horns

I might be missing something here...

... but would the end result of the .NET version be truly browser-independent?

I'm sure that someone who knows the answer will post it, but I'm tired of having the "Windows experience" of finding that a Web site bombs out to a page filled with "I'm .ASP/SQL Server and I'm broken because it's all too hard to cater for anything other than IE" when I'm trying to buy/book/query something on an MS-driven site.

Don't these online vendors get it in relation to just how much trade they lose because their buggy IE-only sites fall over when faced with anything different?

UK gov announces Road Pricing 2.0 - Managed Motorway

William Old
Flame

Ruth Kelly and "Spot the police officer"

From 5.25 in the paper:

"Traffic policing is a clearly recognised strand of policing activity... We will therefore work with the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers to identify the most appropriate way to enable additional police resource to be provided for motorway traffic enforcement purposes where that proves necessary, possibly through developing a new standard ‘framework’ agreement."

They can develop whatever new agreement they want, it's already too late to try to return more police officers to motorways. The creation of regional motorway policing groups (such as in the North-West - see http://www.wigantoday.net/latest-north-west-news/Police-reveal-plans-for-joint.4262008.jp) is in part due to the fact that individual force motorway units have been repeatedly downsized until they were no longer individually viable - the development of the Highways Agency Traffic Officer (HATO) Service was part of the Government's strategic plan to reduce the bill for policing (their own official figures show 647 fewer police officers at the last count - see http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/hosb0208.pdf).

Put together with the deskilling of officers through civilianisation, the loss of over 40% of the current Police Service through retirement before the 2012 Olympics, and the admission that there won't be enough firearms officers, qualified search team officers, or protection officers for 2012 even if every single one of these across the entire UK was so deployed (which in itself isn't practical), and you will realise why Ruth Kelly has been badly advised over this - "managed motorways" will have to "manage" without more police officers.

HATOs will be undertaking "policing" and speed enforcement on motorways and arterial roads within 3 or 4 years, because there won't be any alternative.

Police seek two for C&W network robbery

William Old
Flame

Not a robbery...

... because, ermmm, it wasn't. S.8(1) Theft Act 1968...

Robbery.— (1) A person is guilty of robbery if he steals, and immediately before or at the time of doing so, and in order to do so, he uses force on any person or puts or seeks to put any person in fear of being then and there subjected to force.

There was no-one in the building when they *burgled* it. S.9 Theft Act 1968...

Burglary.— (1) A person is guilty of burglary if —

(a) he enters any building or part of a building as a trespasser and with intent to commit any such offence as is mentioned in subsection (2) below; or

(b) having entered any building or part of a building as a trespasser he steals or attempts to steal anything in the building or that part of it or inflicts or attempts to inflict on any person therein any grievous bodily harm.

(2) The offences referred to in subsection (1)(a) above are offences of stealing anything in the building or part of a building in question, of inflicting on any person therein any grievous bodily harm therein, and of doing unlawful damage to the building or anything therein.

Intel Classmate PC lands in UK for £239

William Old
Paris Hilton

An extremely useful feature not mentioned in the review...

If you carefully open up the casing and scoop out all the nasty electronic thingies, wash away all the Microsoft XP Home buggy goop, and dry it off in a warm dry place (an airing cupboard is ideal), it makes a superb and very elegant executive sandwich carry-case for socially-upwardly-mobile children.

Be sure to remove the ubiquitous add-on "WinXP Home" metallised sticker before use, as this is incompatible with every known food hygiene statute in this quadrant of the Galaxy.

Paris, because she is referred to by other types of hygiene statute in pretty well most of the known Galaxy...

Vodafone presents punter with £500k phone bill

William Old
Joke

@Jacob Lipman

Ahhhhh...

You mean a *118* number !!!!!!!!!!! Why didn't the original poster say so??!!

:-)

Oyster system failure causes travel misery

William Old
Joke

@Andy Livingstone

It's a contactless electronic stored-value payment card for the London transport system (underground, bus, Croydon Tram), so-called because it generates the pearls that go to senior LT staff to keep them in the luxury to which they have become accustomed...*

* Please note that a key part of this explanation could be regarded as slightly controversial and/or "economical with the truth"... :-)

Government waves cutlass at IT budget

William Old
Gates Horns

@David Cornes

But at least if it was all moved to Linux, there'd be half a chance of public sector IT systems complying with open standards.

At present, neither the HMRC Self Assessment system, nor the (Microsoft) Government Gateway complies with one of the most basic Internet open standards that there is... e-mail addresses!

Despite RFC822 (partly replaced with RFC2822), neither of those two systems will accept a perfectly valid, RFC822-compliant e-mail address with an ampersand character (&) in the local part, which gets rejected as an "illegal e-mail address". The excuse is that "it's not allowed by GovTalk", which is MS-speak for "Our security model is so fundamentally broken that we cannot allow any input containing an ampersand in case the server gets compromised".

The irony is that all of this arose out of an ongoing e-mail correspondence with HMRC and the Cabinet Office using... yes, you guessed it!... the "illegal" e-mail address with the ampersand in it!!