Posts by It wasnt me

Thanks for the happy memories, Micron – now beat it, says China: Court bans chip sales

Re: People’s Court

Not sure if you're being ironic but so does your statement. Possessive 'its' does not have an apostrophe. It's is always an abbreviation of 'it is'.

Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

Re: Violation of national sovereignty

Exactly. Can we pass a law in Westminster saying that our citizens can help themselves in US shops? Or that a speed limit of 70 mph applies on US motorways to English people? I don't get the difference with what the merkins are doing.

By the way, I like the way you ended your post with 'period'. Very USA'ish. Full stop.

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Re: Because It's Not Google

By your own argument surely your last sentence should by now be "Guess Micro$oft will be ready to dyson up the honours."

'Mafia' of ageing scientists, academics and politicos suck at picking tech 'winners'

Really?

"First, space has often been described as a sector with huge potential – totalling £19bn in turnover by 2020 and 70,000 jobs. In fact, space revenue is rather modest – a few hundred million – which goes into satellites and instrumentation development, with a few lucky firms taking the lion's share."

--Sorry, that just patently isn't true. One has to assume the rest of the article is unsubstantiated crap as well. Have a look around at what money really comes from space. Tens of thousands of jobs and £12billion in 2015 for a start. Growth rates ahead of most industries.

What is your problem with space? At least back your assertions up with some data.

Really not worthy of the register.

UK cops spot webcam 'sextortion' plots: How vics can hit stop

Re: Nice, let's blame the victim

What on earth are you talking about? No-one have ever threatened to tell my mum what soap I use unless I give them £500.

There is a very clearly clear line that needs crossing and as the OP observed, it takes a certain (immense?) amount of stupidity to get there.

Google: There are three certainties in life – death, taxes and IPv6

Re: does Google offer IPv6 yet?

Does Google pay Tax yet? Is hasn't died yet so its not looking promising for 3 alleged certainties ........

EU verdict: Apple received €13bn in illegal tax benefits from Ireland

Re: What I don't get...

No. I still don't get it. Time and materials £3. Fair enough. Purchasing £1. Fair enough. £950 licensing the company name from some shell company in a shitty tax haven that charges 0.005%. That's fine, let Ireland have their 50 cents. But lets say there's an extra cost of doing business in the UK. Its 30% of sales. That's brings up your product cost from £1000 to £1300. Its entirely your business decision as a company. Option 1. Surrender your market share to someone else. Option 2. Pay the tax. Re-arrange your cost model accordingly to remain competitive. As a UK taxpayer I don't really care which option works. The investment in jobs argument from Apple is a complete nonsense. 30% of their sales will be far better for the economy than the handful of head office staff that they may move elsewhere. The stores will stay, the sales jobs will stay, they don't manufacture here anyway.

I really wish our government would have the balls to say that the tax rate is x% of sales, non-negotiable. If you don't like it piss off. There is no doubt whatsoever that Apple would stay, pay the tax and the world would carry on turning.

The sickening thing is that all of this bloody money they owe the countries they fleece ends up in an account where they can't even spend it for fear of being taxed when repatriating it. Or perhaps repatriate is the wrong word as it implies bringing it home rather than stealing and exporting.

Re: What I don't get...

"The sale of products of services within a country should be taxed in that country."

That's what I don't understand. Please, please could someone explain it to me? The only explanation I can get is that it needs to be done globally rather than unilaterally. I genuinely don't understand this.

Starbucks effectively pay no tax. I am told that if you raise their tax bill to 40% or 25% of takings they'll just bugger off somewhere else.

So what. Let them. People still need coffee. Someone else will fill the gap. Ditto Apple. If they don't want to pay tax on their phones don't let them sell them here. Tell them the tax rate as of tomorrow morning is 30%. They will either (A) completely leave the UK and surrender the market to someone who is prepared to pay tax or (B) pay the tax. People in the in UK will still get shiny phones. The UK will get their tax. I admit this is more complicated with services but apple make their money on hardware. I don't care for the argument that the money from a phone goes to patent licensing or snake oil fees. Tough.

Seriously, what have I missed? Pay tax in the UK or piss of and surrender your market share to someone who is prepared to pay tax.

Ditto Amazon. You sell me something physical in the UK then pay tax on it here. Its utter crap to say that Amazon will move their staff (jobs) out of the UK. All they'll have to do is massively increase postage costs and effectively surrender the market to someone who will operate (and pay tax) in the UK. Post Brexit you can then slap an import duty on anything from Amazon and really ensure that the market is surrendered to companies who are prepared to play by the rules.

Seriously, whats so difficult?

English Uber alles in London taxis? No way, TfL – taxi app titan

Re: Shut the door on the way out

I agree with all of your points. And I think Uber is the right choice for you. They use Satnav, which will help them get you to Heathrow, which is of course, north of the river. :-)

Judge gives Zuck a US$6 million Brazilian

@ find users who cut cat tail

Your analogy is not quite right. You hand plain text to WhatsApp S/W. It does the encryption, transportation and decryption. But because of the way it designed its S/W it (supposedly) can't be decrypted by a man in the middle.

Brazil are saying that doesn't comply with local law.

If that's the case then its really not a privacy issue. Comply with the law or don't sell your product.

(I'm glad our law's don't mandate this. Yet.)

Lester Haines: RIP

Really rubbish

So sorry for everyone at the Reg and particularly his family.

I'm utterly surprised at how sad this had made me feel. Ive been reading the Reg for as long as I can remember and genuinely always loved Lester's articles. The world is a worse place today.

:-(

Brexit threatens Cornish pasty's racial purity

Re: Good terms?

I completely agree. We should build on what we have. We should shape the EU from within. Here's a thing though. We tried that. Cameron came to the EU with a begging bowl and got told in no uncertain terms to go home. He barely got scraps. Nothing at all meaningful. You see unless an individual nation states goals are exactly in line with the political integration master plan, the EU is not interested.

Which is why I will be voting to leave. Personally I sincerely hope that this leads to some meaningful negotiations followed by a second referendum.

But if it doesn't then I am prepared to take a hit on the economy and prosperity and all the other apocalyptic goings on that the remainers foresee just so that I can retain the right to elect my leaders, and to send them packing when they fail.

If we get a second vote and it includes some basic safeguards then I'm in. Otherwise, I want to leave.

Hey look - nothing at all racist about that argument.

France POPs €800k fine on 'illegal taxi service' Uber's windshield

Re: Good

Correction:

Uber certainly have their share of shady practises, but taxis in general are well overdue for a shakeup. Every over-blown cliché about work habits - strikes, laziness, arrogance, extortion, unreliability, etc. - actually do apply to them.

You're welcome.

Marauding monkey blacks out Kenya

Re: Huh?

" I think I saw a stat somewhere"

Really? Where? Cos it sounds like complete and utter cr@p.

You really need to cite references round here or it sounds like you're just making stuff up.

Power cut into the dark ages? Wtf?

Bloke flogs $40 B&W printer on Craigslist, gets $12,000 legal bill

Wow.

America. You truly are a great nation. The greatest.

Shhhh! Facebook is listening

Sadly .....

..... It doesn't really matter. You also need to refuse to have friends. You can nail down your account as much as you like. But your clueless friends allow FB to upload their entire phonebook which includes your name, address, phone numbers, DOB etc. etc. It doesn't really matter what you do unless you have 100% control over your contacts. And non of us do.

Really you're looking after your friends data, but they're not looking after yours.

India's tech manufacturing push to ride on the Ganges

According to a documentary...

....I saw last week, the entire capacity of India's waterways is already taken up floating the bowel movements of the best part of a billion people down to the sea. They need to do some serious cleaning up if the want to use the waterways for anything else.

IBM invents printer that checks for copyrights

Re: Won't sell may of these

This is why if you're not making anything and profiting from a patent you hold, is should be torn up and thrown in the bin. Preventing someone else from doing something you don't want to / can't be arsed to is monumentally pointless.

Patent applications should be accompanied by a working prototype. They should then be reviewed periodically to asses their ongoing utility.

McDonald's Sweden adds fries to VR

Re: Better use for greasy used cardboard ...

Brilliant. Next time i'm rushing through Heathrow late for my flight i'll stop and dig out my BBQ. Get a nice little fire going on the concourse. Pop into M&S for some nice fillet steak. Maybe if I get one of the more fancy BBQs I can whip up a little pepper sauce. And then i'll tuck into a nice juicy steak on he middle of T5 whilst my plane disappears off to wherever I didn't really want to go anyway. And there i'll be, thanking Lord Jake for his endless wisdom on the Register. Are you from Utah?

Ten years in the clink, file-sharing monsters! (If UK govt gets its way)

Re: You COULD NOT...

If you really wanted to harmonise the sentencing guidelines then you could lower the penalty for the physical crime.

Comparing maximum sentences with different crimes is perfectly legitimate.

Your "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is a dangerous one.

It is perfectly reasonable to use stronger laws (fraud etc) to prosecute the more serious cases.

Sorry. I fundamentally disagree that you could be locked up for 10 years for sharing an ISO. And I disagree just as strongly with the way that policy was created.

Elon Musk takes wraps off planet-saving Model 3 vapourmobile

The amount of slack they are all being cut is amazing. Where does the electricity come from for these amazing super green electric vehicles? Because until the answer is definitively NOT "from burning fossil fuels" then they have no right whatsoever to be claiming green credentials. They're cheaper to run at the moment as there's no fuel duty, but if the whole world changed to electric cars tomorrow then 1>. We'd burn more oil to generate the leccy and 2>. the government would find a way of taxing it.

I just wish someone would start being honest about electric cars.

Caveat: My whole argument falls down if and when we make a massive planet-wide switch to nuclear power. But we won't cause its got a scary logo and you can't see its fumes. And I wont win any friends around here for suggesting that we should, will I Mr Page?

How to solve a Rubik's Cube in five seconds

Re: Or you could

I tried. Its pretty hard to find one who can beat the rubiks cube in under a minute....

Yes, GCHQ is hiring 1,900 staffers. It's not a snap decision

Re: Genuine Question

Ive never understood the needle / haystack analogy. Its fecking easy to find a needle in a haystack, just so long as you have a match and a magnet.

Europe's Asteroid prang probe plan calls for cubesats

Re: ... 10cm^3 modules ...

"1 dm^3 or 1 litre would also be acceptable answers."

Not round here it wouldn't. IT would need to be 1.7362 Bulgarian airbags.

Ford's parallel PARCing: Motor giant tries to craft new tech just like Xerox

And ..........

You point out that "we have concepts but even cars new today take decades to cycle through the market". So ? To make it happen someone needs to be working on it now. That someone might as well be Ford since they make cars. And the media might as well report on it. Im not sure that I see your point?

Ex-Microsoft Bug Bounty dev forced to decrypt laptop for Paris airport official

Wow.....

Is the news / surprise / story that this happened at the French end of her no enemy rather than the American end?

Forget Hillary, HP's ex CARLY FIORINA 'wants to be next US Prez'

Re: She doesn't understand the scope of the job...

Buy her for what she's worth? You might get more if you rendered her down into more useful materials.

SPB's mountaintop HQ menaced by wolves

Wow, lucky Spanish cattle.

If you survive the wolves, the matadors will kill you.

Re: Wolves may be preferable to the hunt...

They polish off cats you say? Do I need an import license?

Stats-crunchers toss ebooks into Blighty's 2013 inflation basket

Re: Wow - that's a bit of luck

Makes you effing livid doesn't it? And the new products that are added are all currently at the beginning of their price curve. Expensive now - new to market. Becoming more popular, new players in market. Prices getting driven down. What a fantastic way of calculating inflation. Bastards. Who the hell does this sort of manipulation help anyway?

Look out! Peak wind is coming, warns top Harvard physicist

Re: One question I have always asked myself

Indeed.

Which is why you don't build wind turbines behind: trees, tall buildings, hills. The whole premise of the article was that current calculations for wind farms assume they don't take any energy out of the wind. Why would a tree take energy out, but not a white thing shaped a bit like a tree?

Capita bosses defend £30m migrant-poking IT deal with Border Agency

WTF?

"Vaz claimed that the Border Agency asks migrants to consent to sharing their data with other government departments".

..... WTF...... Has anyone ever said 'yes'?

Why the crap would would you give that option to someone who by definition will be doing their very best to avoid government detection?

#Forwhy: American Express lets you pay by tweet

Great !

"Credit card company American Express has launched a service that lets customers buy things using Twitter."

Thats novel. After years of trying i've still to find anywhere that accepts their cards.

Wind now cheaper than coal in Oz: Bloomberg

Re: Other impacts !?

You are also right. There are other ways to deal with the base load issue. Every single one of which involves having enough conventional plant to ciover the entire load when the wind isn't blowing. Thus rendering wind power a massively expensive vanity project.

I personally agree with the other commenters. If wind is really a solution then put it on the market and let the market decide. Dont bloody subsidise it with a levy on my energy bill. Ive go nothing against wind turbines, I think they look pretty and often enhance a landscape or least add interest. But thats all theyre good for. Fucking expensive sculptures, which apparently arent to everyones taste.

Greenland ice did not melt in baking +8°C era 120k years ago

Re: I don't expect this to change anything

Perhaps the webbed fingers actually evolved last time this all happened.

Just what the world needs: Android in the rice cooker

Re: You laugh

"What I want most of my modern science and appliances is that whether I am there or not, they obey me. I bought them. I own them."

No no no no no no no no........ That was then. Now your $600 just gets you a license to cook rice. Dont try and cook any for someone else or the MPAA / RIAA will ........... :-)

Nuisance calls DOUBLE, Ofcom vows to hunt down offenders

Re: A good stiff letter

Yes, all correct. But Ofcom, set up as a regulator, operates primarily as a lobby group for the industry. They are completely toothless, and judging them by their actions completely uninterested in acting for the consumer.

Nothing at all will happen, ever. Successive governements have no interest in reforming Ofcom. You cant even get rid of your landline, since the state supported monopoly that is BT insists you pay for one to receive the internet.

Getting rid of your landline wouldn't evn help, as they move to mobile.

Unfortunately, the reality is that absolutely no-one anywhere has any interest in stopping this, as everyone in the chain apart from the poor suckers getting harassed is making money from it.

Sir James Dyson slams gov's 'obsession' with Silicon Roundabout

I appreciate some os his arguments, but hes also full of shit....

... He didnt invent the bladeless fan. He just hid a smaller fan with blades in the bottom of something about the same size and shape as a fan.

And as for the bagless vacuum cleaner, its still just a vacuum cleaner. It has filters instead of bags. And the filters cost a shitload more than the bags did. So what he really did was apply the razor blade business model to the humble hoover, add some bright coloured plastic and charge us all a fuckload more. How is that better for me? Dyson should be held up as a marketing guru, not an engineer.

Curiosity gives Martian rock its first scrub down

Bets on them......

....... drilling in 5 cm and hitting oil ?

:-)

Microsoft burgled, only the APPLE iPADS stolen - cops confirm

Re: Sad sack

I used to shop at that store in Southampton. Until one of the Apple employees suggested I go buy the kit a couple of shops down in John Lewis where they are happy to give you a two year warranty, and will not not need threatening with the law should you need to use it. A jolly helpful apple drone - I was surprised.

China seeks ‘Oceanauts’ for deep sea exploration

Hmmmmm.....

I like exploration. I like the oceans. I even like nuclear energy. But mixing the 3, overseen by a closed authoritarian state just doesn't sit quite right.

Google maps app is BACK on iPhones, fanbois spared death

Re: Maps worth more to Google than Apple?

"Don't use a clubcard".

Wow.... So Tesco know I buy fish. Big deal. I do. And for the privilige of sharing that information with them they gave me enough vouchers for a new iPhone5 this year, and a 4gs last year.

I get free phones, they get to know what I eat. I consider myself the winner in that exchange.

Seriously, theres privacy and theres privacy. Life more pleasant if you live somewhere in the middle of the paranoia spectrum.

On an unrelated note, have Apple pulled a blinder here ? 18 months ago they were paying Google billions for the maps. Now they're paying them nothing for an improved version. Some might think thats a bit of business genius. Google obviously get our data, but they got that before. Google maps is so much better than the iOS abomination that I would have happily paid good money for it.

Apple's iOS 6 maps STILL muddle Mildura

Re: How many RPM

Indeed. But I do pass judgement. I like my apple products (which normally lines you up for a kicking in this esteemed rag). However the maps f**k up is a step too far. I knew they were s**t yet apple forced me to upgrade to iOS 6. (It auto downloads, uses up 1.5 GB of space which filled my phone so I had no choice but to click install to get the 1.5 GB back. Impossible to remove the auto-download).

The maps are so absolutely, indescribably shocking. I have told Apple twice using their notify software that my village is not in the middle of the solent and after 6 weeks, nothing.

Unless maps is fixed (and I mean properly fixed - replaced with something that f**king works) then apple have lost a customer. My house alone has Mac Mini, Macbook pro, iphone 4s, iphone 5, iPad and Time Capsule.

I don't pretend to think that Apple could give a shit about losing me as a customer, but i'm pretty sure im not alone. I really think their only option is a massive dose of humble pie and a huge u-turn.

The company is an arse-hole. Until now I put up with that because I liked their products and they worked for me.

Being an arse hole with shit products though just doesn't make a compelling sales pitch. (As their share price seems to be telling them).

</RANT>

E-reader demand slumps, slapped down by slates

Or could it be....

......that perhaps people are notcing that its normally vastly cheaper to buy a paperback than its digital equivalent?

Frenchmen's sperm plunges by a third in quality and quantity since '89

Global warming ?

It gets blamed for everything else....

Duck.

Hero Playmonaut lost at sea as SPEARS ditches in Channel

Re: Cause identified

"It is scientifically know yellow color brings bad luck."

Ahhhhh, so thats why people who wear yellow coats only ever get crappy jobs working in car parks.

Makes sense now.

Re: The wrong (jacket) stuff

I really wanted to downvote your comment for being such a killjoy, but I can't cos you're absolutely bloody right.

My Mrs (HMCG) has recovered one to many bodies from the channel for my liking.

Ready for ANOTHER patent war? Apple 'invents' wireless charging

Re: Healthy?

Holy Wow. I was going to write a rebuttal to the assertions of your post, but its so full of unsubstantiated nonsense that I am compelled to conclude that you are a troll. Or is there a link from the Daily Mail to The Register for some reason today?

Sam Sung found in Apple Store SHOCKER

Re: Except that Samsung isn't properly pronounced Samsung

Eh? Its still spelt exactly the same, and therefore very probably pronounced exactly the same, you pointless little fool.

Apple iPad 4 Wi-Fi only tablet review

Re: Choice

"Oh, and good luck installing the latest OSX on a mac from before 2005."

Do you really think Windows 8 would install and run on lets say a Sony Vaio from 2005? Even if you could cobble the drivers together it wouldn't boot before the heat death of the sun.

"Windows or Linux don't lack that sort of legacy support."

Utter windows fanboy shite. Vista would barely boot on a brand new machine with a "Designed for Vista" sticker on the front when it was released. I'm still waiting for it to copy a 4Gig file I started off in Feb 2009.

Fair enough on your first point, but you should have left it at that. Holding up Windows as a model citizen makes you look like a shill.