Posts by Gav

Why oh why do rock stars die young?

Average

The Rolling Stones' ages have nothing to do with it, as presumably. they are not dead yet, and so would not form part of the figures.

You also need to keep in mind that one quarter of them is a member of the undead, and will never die.

Warner Bros to remake Enter the Dragon

sentence

"Form these words into a sentence: Lee/Bruce/grave/spinning"

Lee grave spinning Bruce?

Grave Bruce spinning Lee?

Spinning grave Bruce Lee?

Bruce Lee grave spinning?

Am I missing something, or maybe missing words? Ahhhhh, here they are!

is/in/his/nothing/do/IT/has/to/with

'Portable' CD player puts MP3 into a spin

ripping & blinding

Course it'll rip. Your hands, your clothes. Just about anything it comes in contact with.

And think of the fun that'll be possible with that exposed laser.

NZ parents may lose battle to keep baby '4real'

Hopeless

"I'm certainly not a quitter."

No, but you certainly are dumb.

I would feel sorry for the kid, but he's already a lost cause. With parents like this, the boy has no hope of escaping the giant sucking void of stupidity that must surround the family.

US govt password security still dismal

It was not IT staff

"So when a user is asked by IT to give up their password and use one that they have just been told, i would expect them to do it."

I think the point was they **weren't** IT staff. It was just some unknown guy who phoned them out of the blue and **said** he was IT staff. There's very little difference with what they did to phishing emails. They just did it by phone.

Crazed NZ fanboy mows down churchgoer

Windows

The church clearly provoked him with giant stained-glass Windows.

Conservapedia too pinko? Try Metapedia

just another stupid website

There are plenty of websites set up by extremists and nutters that haven't been linked and picked over by The Register, so what makes this site different? It's not that much harder to set up a wiki than it is to set up a website.

Why does the fact that it's a wiki automatically mean it's worth our attention?

The return of the ransom-ware Trojan

Scam The Scammers

Funny how people always think they can pull a fast one on these kind of criminal malware outfits. Hey! Pay by paypal then freeze the account! They'll never see that one coming!!

Part of a good scam is getting the victim to think they are actually smarter than the scammer. That way its easier to take their money off them.

Daily Mail slammed for online bingo hypocrisy

A point missed

You have forgotten to mention something in your article. The fact that bingo is the most mind-numbing, random, kill-me-now-I'm-that-bored waste of time known to mankind.

The idea that people sit at home playing it online simply staggers me. Never mind the risks of people losing their money, do they value their own time that little?? At least in the traditional game there's an element of socialising.

Survey lays bare people's phone habits

Dumb Statistics

How can they say that "British people spend an average of 10 months of their adult lives talking on their mobile phone" when they haven't existed that long?

That makes as much sense as sampling the last 10 minutes of my life and concluding that I spend 40 years of my adult life reading the Register.

Alltunes.com claims win in Russian copyright case

Paying as much as you feel like

I'm afraid the few responders to my post are off on the wrong track. Whether AllOfMP3 paid ROMS or not is irrelevant. They paid ROMS a rate that was intended for broadcasters, relying on a loophole in a law created long before the internet. This is significantly lower than what they'd pay for selling the music on.

Not surprisingly, the music industry declined to accept this payment, as to do so would legitimize the arrangement. Don't forget that Russian law enables AllOfMP3 to sell the music whether the copyright holder likes it or not. So the basis of AllOfMP3s business was to take someone else's work, then unilaterally decide what price they'd pay for it. All the time making inroads in other countries' markets that were controlled by a different set of rules. Meanwhile, the music industry's role was simply to like it or lump it. Is it any surprise that they declined to be part of this "business deal"? Can you think of any other industry that would sign up for such an arrangement? An arrangement where you have absolutely no say in who obtains your product, how much they pay you for it, and then have them sell it to your customers on your doorstep, under-cutting everyone else?

The "no investment in future product" is an off-shoot of this. Part of what other retailers pay for product is used to invest in future output. That's what Amazon contributes. AllOfMP3 didn't. It operated on the back of the industry while investing nothing in it.

Working Model

"I wish the music industry would start to embrace this kind of distribution model."

"The AllofMP3 model works"

I love supporters of AllOfMP3. Always talking about business models as if they're MBA graduates. So let's look at the economics of that 'model' in more detail. It involves;

- paying nothing to your suppliers

- selling at a price that your competitors cannot match

- no investment in future product

- zero marketing and advertising costs

Frankly, if you can't make a profit using this 'model' then you're an idiot. I wonder why it doesn't take off in other industries?

Beeb reveals Kylie as Titanic waitress

Title

"Still, at least the Titanic didn't set sail from Cardiff..."

...but the iceberg did.

Oracle sends bloke cardboard laptop

I want one!

Seriously, think of the fun you could have with it.

- take it to a coffee house and accidentally knock it off the table and right across the room.

- or set light to it and complain their wi-fi firewall is faulty

- accidentally and absent-mindedly pour coffee over it. Then add sugar.

- take it to PC World and ask them to fit more RAM

Then when you're bored, leave it on the train when you get off and see if anyone nicks it.

Catherine Tate to accompany Doctor Who

Well that's the next series ruined

I can only hope that they were looking for someone who would raise a cheer when they killed her off.

'Effete' Europe useless in GWOT, says bin Laden man

Who?

"leading Scheuer to indicate he believes we can win the so-called GWOT all by ourselves."

Who's 'we'?

Malware scammers target iPhone

Wrong Headline

"Malware scammers target iPhone" should read "Malware scammers target stupid & greedy, as usual"

Doctor Who recruits new sidekick

It has to be..

Sally Sparrow. She was the best thing in the last series.

MPAA unleashes legal eagles on YouTV and Peekvid

Seems clear to me

Why the knee-jerk reaction every time the MPAA says anything? Their complaint here seems perfectly valid. Their members are producing something, these sites are gaining advertising revenue through providing it for free to others, all without any payment to the original producers. How is that fair? This is blatant free-loading off others' work.

And it always makes me laugh when people use the "if their stuff wasn't so crap maybe people would buy it" argument. If it's so crap, why are people wasting their time making and watching shoddy copies of it? This is just a transparent attempt at justifying the copyright infringement.

Nor does the "I watched it then I bought the DVD" angle amount to much. The fact is that most viewers do not do this most for most things. A few anecdotal examples don't outweigh the majority of cases.

Paris Hilton says jail term has changed her

Register becomes Heat

When did The Register become one of those worthless rags fixated on 'celeb' stories? Is there an IT angle to this pointless non-entity that non-one else has noticed yet?

Two year old's IQ on a par with Hawking

A Poor Measure

Any measuring device has its applicable range. You don't use a 12 inch ruler to measure miles on a road, or the circuits on a microchip. Well you could, but the margin of error is likely to be pretty big.

The same can be said for measuring a 2 year old's intelligence with an IQ test. Even if you accept IQ tests as being a suitable way of measuring such a complex, multi-dimensional facet (and not just a good way of measuring how good you are at IQ tests), applying it to a child this young is just ridiculous.

I don't doubt she's a smart 'un, but claiming you have a valid, accurate measure of how smart, and saddling her with that at such a young age, seems both unhelpful and bad practice.

DrinkorDie warez leader jailed for 51 months

What's that at the bottom right of this web page?

Why, it's a copyright! Fancy that! Guess it's ok to rip off other people's work and ignore their copyright, but The Register gets to protect theirs.

Defamation lawsuit seeks to unmask anonymous cowards

Do the people responding here actually read the article?

I don't see any mention anywhere of the the principle victim signing up to any agreement with the message board prior to the pile-on starting. The only mistake she made was to attempt to get involve and argue with internet trolls, which is always an exercise in futility.

I can imagine that having lies told about you, plus threats of rape (no matter how much of a joke it's supposed to be), in a public place (if you can google it then it's public) is very distressing. Particularly when it's by anonymous people you could be dealing with every day in real life.

That the administrators refused to do anything about it, even retrospectively, makes them as liable as the anonymous cowards as far as I'm concerned. No doubt that the whole U.S. legal process will go through the usual extremes, but I'd say they're getting what they deserve. If you allow your message board posters to behave like irresponsible jerks without any real life consequences then that's the risk you run.

Microsoft 'tweaks Vista' for Google desktop search goodness

Monopoly

No one can sue Apple over iPhone because Apple is not even a blip on the radar when it comes to market share of mobile phones. The same cannot be said for Microsoft and Windows. When you have a near monopoly special rules can and are applied by legislators.

Strange spoofing technique evades anti-phishing filters

Has The Register Become Slashdot?

Do we really need every discussion about internet security to become a IE/Firefox Windows/Linux fanboy bore-fest?

The significant part of this story, just to spell it out to those who haven't bothered actually digesting what it says, is that it is not the usual phishing technique. People who do follow proper internet security advice will get caught out. In fact, the only reason that it's been rumbled is because it tried to take it too far. If it had only asked for the usual login details it would almost certainly have got them. This is scary and should concern people.

Police raid ends allofmp3.com vouchers

Crime Pays

"How is it, that allofmp3 made a success from selling MP3s"

It's amazing how successful a business can be when you have zero production costs and pay your producers whatever you feel like, not what they ask for. You'd need to be an idiot to fail with that kind of business model.

No-one actually involved with a legal business can match that kind of profit margin, so its ridiculous to hold it up as some kind of example.

Fraudsters feast on credit card scam

Watch out for that padlock!

"Firstly, always look for the padlock symbol that shows the site is secure."

This has to be a dumbest, and yet most common, bit of web security advice.

How hard is it for a website to display a padlock gif?

Schoolboy scammer caught again

Lazy Journalism

"The boy started his fraud career at 13 after watching the film Catch Me If You Can. "

Can I be the first to point out that this is unverified bollocks? Just because the papers decided that the easy angle on this con-artist's life of crime was "just like Catch Me If You Can. " does not mean;

a/ he ever watched it.

b/ it inspired him to start a career in fraud.

Or are you suggesting that movies and TV really do cause people to commit crimes?

This is simply lazy, follow the crowd, journalism

How do you carry your mobile phone?

Left

Right is for keys. Can't keep both in the same pocket without scratching the phone.

Cause of global warming found

Here's your irony

What's ironic is that all those superior intellects explaining the writer's lack of irony, fail to notice that it is clearly not meant to be taken seriously.

This daylight savings joke is as old as time.

Engineers write defence against aliens manual

One

"We know that at least one star system (our own) within the Milky Way Galaxy has developed intelligent life . . . that suggests statistics of at least one civilisation per galaxy . . . So, there should be billions of star systems with intelligent civilisations."

The same logic states that we know at least one star system in the UNIVERSE has developed intelligent life . . . that suggests statistics of at least one civilisation per universe. . . So, there should be one star systems with an intelligent civilisation.

If this is the level of analysis in the book, it's working at the level of the dumbest of dumb science fiction. I expect to see a Hollywood adaptation within 5 years.

Spanish flag flies over Gibraltar

Irony

I doubt the writer notices, but there is something ironic in a news story that fails to recognise a difference between English and British getting sniffy about nationality.