Posts by Phil

Google slips Reg reader £500k!!!!!

Exchange Rates

I think the current exchange rate is about 98 Sense per GB Poun... So about one Dollhair to the Poun.

At the pub I think 500000 GB Poun wil get you 784 carats worth of Kilkenny if you buy by wieght

Home Office to keep innocent DNA samples

@fredly

In Ontario, radar controlled cameras for speeding tickets are banned for exactly that reason. "Innocent unless proven guilty": no proof of who was actually driving = no conviction. Only when the police actually have contact with the driver can a ticket be given.

I live in France now, where not only do you get a fine from an automatic radar, but also points taken off for even one or two km/h over the limit. Apparently there are tens of thousands of drivers with suspended licences that don't even know, having never spoken to a police officer. The standard practice is, upon receiving the notification, to claim that is was Grandma driving, so that she loses the points(being blind and shut up in a home, she doesn't care)!

*looking for my papers, monsieur le poulet!

French lead world in eating and sleeping

French Food

I live in France and I have to say that the quality of food is very high, and relatively affordable too. French food, that is. I love french food as much as the next guy, but having grown up in Toronot(one of, if not the most, multicultural cities in the world) I like to eat a variety of different cuisines. After almost three years here, and having travelled extensively in France, I have yet to find a decent chinese restaurant, or vietnamese, or indian, or ... you get the idea.

Minnesota calls for 200-site net gambling blockage

@Chris C

Actually it is legal, except perhaps under NAFTA. Unless the gambling sites being blocked are in Canada or Mexico, than it's perfectly legal to block access in order to benefit the local casinos(unless there are other free trade agreements in play).

The thing is, their reasons for doing it may be legal, but the law they used is probably unenforceable. The first ISP to challenge it will most likely win;

T-Mobile lays ground for embedded SIMs

many countries

I travel a fair bit... I have one phone and a SIM for each country that I visit regularly. All of them are pay-as-you-go. My British and French SIMs are easy to handle; I just have to put a little money in once a year; the Canadian and Spanish ones are slightly more complicated because the credit on them has a use-by limit.

I would never, ever buy a phone that couldn't be unlocked(ie embedded SIM); it would essentially force me to buy a phone for each country, or pay massive roaming charges.

Boffins sniff keystrokes with lasers, oscilloscopes

Perfect screen

Haha! i use a revolutionary technique: no passwords, firewall or anti-virus. All of my sensitive info is lost in the terabytes of spam and virus activity coming from my infected bot-net computer!

Gotcha, you bastards!

Signed,

A governement employee with access to your data

Spooks told to get used to encrypted VoIP

Code

Just use encrypted code... Even if they can brack the encryption, they'd need aggressive interrogation techniques to understand the code.

49-1 84-45 14-89

Mine's the one with an copy of today's newspaper (just like my friend has)

Brits and Yanks struck with embarasment embarrassment

Well put

why is I have to study English? I speaks da bitch

UK gov unleashes biometric IDs

Leave the card at home!

The thing is, all of those foreign nationals will have passports or ID cards from their home country, which are both still legal ID in the UK. There's no obligation to use the UK ID card if you have another form of ID. Why have the government possibly tracking your whereabouts through the card when you can use your French, Spanish or Costa Rican passport (none of which can be traced) in the bottle shop.

US mulls clicks for cameraphones

K750i

I've had 2 K750i s... Both bought on ebay, the first was canadian and it had no way to turn off the shutter sound, the second was french and you just select the SILENT profile to make it completely, well, silent.

WTO backs US in Chinese piracy dispute

re; So What!!

Hear hear, Son, hear hear!

Except that China probably has the political balls to do something.

Stop'n'search gets touchy-feely

@RE: @ PR excercise and Luther Blissett

Matt, your commentary would be much more impressive if you knew how to spell.

Most Americans without broadband don't want it

Neither ignorant nor apathetic

In pretty much all big Canadian cities, dial-up is free. North Americans don't pay per minute for local calls and there are lots of local numbers for dial-up. Some of them serve you with an ad-based frame, some don't.

I thinks it's funny that some people seem to get all upset that not everybody wants the internet... Some Guy: "Americans are ignorant and apathetic. Well, I don't know about that and I don't really care."

I don't want an arabic/russian dictionary at the moment but I'm neither ignorant nor apathetic.

Oprah slow to Kindle - fans left out in cold

@Thomas

I'm not so sure about that.... It hasn't come up yet but I'll bet that if Oprah told her sheeple who to vote for, a lot of them would take her advice...

Child porn in the age of teenage 'sexting'

Witchhunt?

I can't believe that nobody noticed the name of the school. Greensburg-SALEM? Now who can name another example of mass hysteria leading to ridiculous convictions.... Anyone?

I'll give you a hint... Burnt at the stake!

Take a hammer to your hard drive, shrieks Which?

Serious question!!! Again!!!!

Nobody's answered yet...

I'm totally serious! An induction stove works by creating a powerful electromagnetic field; is that field strong enough to wipe a hard drive?

Does anybody know? Anybody???

Serious question!!!

What would happen if you stuck it on an induction stovetop?

Seriously, does anyone know?

Fire, 'cause induction don't have none!!

Vogue model sues Google over 'defamatory' blog

US

remember, in the USA you can sue for anything and rarely have to pay anyhting but your own lawyer, who will often work for a percentage of the settlement, if any....

that's why there is a CRIMINAL CHARGE for malicious lawsuiting in the US, the suER doesn't have to pay the court costs of the suEE

Paris 'cause suEE sounds like "squeal like a pig"

Terry Pratchett knighted for services to literature

Hurrah!

nuff said

Junk science and booze tax - a study in spin

Woohoo!!

Excellent! I'm going to immediately double my alcohol intake... or is that halve... or...

to hell with it, let's grab a pint.

Mine's the one with two bottles

Teen-bothering sonic device now does grownups too

Infrasonic warfare?

couldn't the chavs hook up a tone generator to a suitably tricked out car stereo and blast the offending shop with low frequency sound, guaranteed to cretae feelings of fear, nausea and unease in all the customers and employees? No more illegal than the mosquito and the shop would go out of business pretty quickly.

Black helicopter 'cause the rotors are at 18hz

Employees sue for unpaid Windows Vista overtime

@ winkypop

I don't know where you are, but many of the jobs I've had in the UK had clocking-in systems that were certainly NOT "totally voluntary". Nothing more irritating than having 1/10th of an hour taken off your pay.

French record labels sue, um, SourceForge

Satellite Dish

I currently live in France, and have found the perfect solution. I have simply purchased a disused radio telescope, hooked it up to my wifi card with a couple of alligator clips, and connected to my parent's wifi network in Victoria, British Columbia. Ahhhh Canada, my home and native land, where downloading is legal, but "making available" is not.

I'm currently selling bootleg cds of music for 1 euro less than the price in the shops, and predict retiring to Aruba by mid-2009.

Aliens, because, well, I pick up their wireless networks too...

America's second largest ethanol producer goes titsup

Definitely worth it!!!

Funny... I make my own ethanol and I find it profitable and tasty.

Mine's the one with the clay bottle marked XXXX

Music royalties group pooh-poohs Belgian P2P appeal reports

@ Anonymous Coward

I agree!!!

Also, schools should be banned, because they ignore their obligations by teaching people to read and therefore possibly use the internet via an ISP to download said copyrighted material.

Swiss boffins sniff passwords from (wired) keyboards 65 feet away

Two words

Faraday Cage

RFID remotes have line-of-sight in their sights

@clockwork remote

Just like my grand-dad's automatic watch, 68 years old and I still haven't changed the battery, uhh, wound it, uhh...

I say a clockwork/rechargeable remote powered by the bass notes from the overpowered stereo in the neighbor's council flat/car.

Employee has no privacy on company computers, US court rules

Privacy?

@ Mike: I seem to remember that in many cases(depending on the country) it is illegal to "forget" passwords or to refuse to give them if the encrypted data is on a computer that has been seized or belongs to someone else.

I suppose it's a toss up between a week or two in prison for contempt of court, or several years for the fraud that your strong encryption has been hiding!!!!

Personally, I feel that anyone who expects any privacy whatsoever on a work computer is an idiot, unless it is specifically spelled out on paper(although I wouldn't trust that either!!!).

Fraud should be hidden by circumlocution.... ie: "If a hypothetical withdrawal of X had taken place, it could have been credited to my theoretical Cayman Islands account etc etc"

Cops cuff anti-drug ninja vigilantes

Secretgeek: Ford Products

In North America the Mondeo is either the Ford Contour or the Mercury Mystique...

I don't know why I'm writing this, no one cares, least of all me.