Posts by raving angry loony

Vatican endorses Darwin, slights intelligent design

given an inch, they take a light year.

From my point of view, science attempts to answer the provable, testable HOW of things and belongs in science class. Religions of all stripes (including so-called creationism repackaged as "intelligent design") arrogantly claims to address the unprovable and untestable WHY and belongs far away from science class - philosophy maybe, if one is feeling generous. The two might be able to coexist, but not in a SCIENCE classroom.

Of course, the Catholics rejecting I.D. will simply inflame the Catholic hating hard of thinking I.D. crowd even more, so there's no net gain there I think. People such as tfagan, who wouldn't understand the concepts and interplay of "testable", "proof", "hypothesis" and "theory" if it hit them in the head with a large iguana. Or even a finch beak.

Hackintosh maker leaves web doors unlocked

fault?

ref: "The discovery exposes the dark side to a free and open source software movement"

You're kidding, right?

I hope like fuck the author was being sarcastic or otherwise trying to be humorous, because if not he comes off as quite the shill for the proprietary crowd. I hate to be the one to inform the author of this, but proprietary packages are also prone to being used without the guidance of those most knowledgeable. Usually because the budget was spent on the package, not on the necessary training or support. Perhaps if the author had any real world experience in the field, or perhaps bothered to do his research, he would have discovered this. Or perhaps he does and he did, in which case there's really no excuse for such a statement.

Instead of blaming open source, I suggest the author directing future fault finding statements at the real cause of the problem: management that refuses to allow those implementing solutions the time or funds to get properly trained in the technologies they are using, be they proprietary or open source.

If the statement was, in fact, meant to be humorous, please excuse my critical humour failure. After 6 days spent fixing the fuckups of some untrained scapegoat who was using an expensive proprietary package, all because his management refused to spend 1% of the package cost (and about 10% of my fee) on appropriate training, such inaccurate and outright slanderous statements really get my dander up.

Authors Guild to Amazon Kindle: Shut up

RIAA

I guess the ongoing abuse of copyright laws is having an effect after all. Now everyone wants to stretch and shape copyright law to suit their own private wallet-stealing agendas.

I used to think copyright had a purpose, but no more. Fuck that. Information wants to be free. Freetards of the world unite, because otherwise we'll be paying to fucking breath in certain patterns.

Microsoft takes scissors to Srizbi

trust issues

The MSRT tool is a good idea. Since they can't cure the cause - poor security design - at least they're providing a pill for the symptoms. Now the problem is trusting Microsoft to use the MSRT to remove only what is truly malware, and not use it to (oh so accidentally of course) remove parts of competing software, or leave in malware from vendors who pay them enough.

Brum laid bare on OpenStreetMap

Invaluable

This is an invaluable addition to the public domain (or at least open source). Finally people will have real, unfettered access to geographic data, rather than it being solely the preserve of well funded organizations. Kudos!!

Windows Vista man channels Neil Diamond with debut album

@Kenny

Because it's Microsoft. They infect everything they touch, and Allchin has a bit of a ... reputation. This is I.T., thus there is no love. All we have left is hate. Now piss off.

Norfolk town's schools first to be heated by burning cattle

must know

Does this mean the school cafeteria gets a discount on low-fat beef and pork?

Amazon unveils Kindle 2.0

hmm

Kindle looks (minus that ghod awful keyboard! They could at least have made it fold or slide out of the way!), iRex Illiad capabilities, Sony reader flavour, and a bit less DRM (or at least a DRM that allows transfers from one device to another, for lending), and I'd not be unhappy with it. As it stands, however, ick.

Europe gets first petaflops super

Name?

This is Germany. It'll be called the Forschungszentrum Juelich Petafloppencomputerdamnfastgewerkenarbeitmitoast and it'll bloody like it! Then some Dutch wag will call it Hanz.

Sony demos ultra-expensive, ultra-thin OLED telly

bit twee

11 inch? That's not a TV screen, that's a UMPC screen bolted to an ugly box. Buncha wankers. Where's my 60 inch OLED screen I was promised not 10 years ago? They promised it would take 10 years, and they've never lied. Now excuse me while I go fetch my flying car.

Amazon pulls beta tag from PayPal foe

about time.

About time something came along that had a chance against Paypal. Now to get rid of that fraudulent, unaccountable service completely.

Gates looses mosquitoes on tech conference bloodsuckers

blood suckers

Personally, I hope someone takes him to court for something like reckless endangerment. Especially if someone was sick at the time. It's about time that bloodsucking bastard got what's coming to him.

What's next for Microsoft's Flight Sim partners?

In this lesson...

Yet another lesson for the hard-of-thinking who continue to partner with and become wholly dependent on Microsoft. Depend on Microsoft - get burned. Believe Microsoft - get burned. Trust Microsoft - get burned.

Good luck suckers.

Primary schools hit by smut hack

quick!

Put all the teachers who were anywhere near the computers in jail! Obviously they're responsible! Oh, wait, we're not in the USA. Sanity might prevail. As you were.

Immortal Dr Who jellyfish poised to rule Earth

really?

"transformed for the nonce into a thicket of supplementary genitalia"

Admit it, you're just jealous.

Woman jailed for texting while driving

not nearly enough!

Only 21 months for what is essentially homicide (however involuntary)?

Open season for anyone with a car then. Commit murder, get out in under 2 years. Hell, if you use a new car you're test driving, you don't even get blood and brains on your own.

It really is open season on cyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians out there, isn't it?

Silverlight 3 and 4 to 'open up new areas' - Microsoft

the stink of something rotten

Wouldn't touch Silverlight with a 10' barge pole. Yet another attempt by Microsoft to gain another foothold on peoples desktops while trying to carve up more competitors. We've had that pain before, and I for one am not going there again.

Texas lawyer sues Citibank over fake cheque scam

wrong target

If I call a business, and they claim that something within their area of speciality is true, and I then act on this information - can I sue that business if it turns out they mislead me?

That's exactly what this lawsuit is about. The bank said "yes, the cheque has cleared" when in fact it had not in fact cleared.

Maybe instead of castigating the guy suing for being an idiot, it might be advisable to start having a good hard look at the bank for being unethical lying bastards at having given the guy wrong information about the status of a cheque?

Humyo cloud disappears from afternoon sky

single point of failure.

I design expensive highly available systems (well, I used to before our entire division got laid off a few years ago, now I design really inexpensive highly available systems). The one thing I see in all this is that by using something in the cloud, most SMB are putting EVERYTHING into one basket: their (usually single sourced) internet connection. Then there's the inability to actually audit the practices of the company you're using to store your data - and the therefore inevitable downtime as someone, somewhere, fucks up royally.

Using the cloud as sort of a "hot backup" makes sense to me. Depending on "the cloud" to always be there, and using it to store time sensitive, mission critical data is setting yourself up for failure.

Street View vehicle kills Bambi

The Rule:

You kill it, you eat it...

yum, bruised venison.

American Stereotype™ walks Google's mean Street View

@John J

Until they run out of ammo, at which point they'll be completely unable to deal with what's left of the revolution.

Microsemi CEO slapped for fabricating degrees

Trust?

Nice to work for a company where lying and cheating gets you... no significant reaction. Really makes me want to deal with such a company, yes it does.

CIA's Algeria chief recalled amid rape allegations

laptop?

If a CIA "station chief" hasn't learned how to keep incriminating evidence off a laptop, the guy deserves to hang, or at the very least to get tortured (sorry, "subjected to enhanced interrogation"). Not for what he is alleged to have done, but for sheer bloody incompetence as a so-called "spy".

EU funds Antipodes-in-90-mins rocketliner concept

2075? (is a title damnit, I shouldn't need to add alpha)

So they think they'll have 67 years of scamming people for "more cash" before they finally tell folks that they can't deliver because the moon isn't in the right phase? Sounds like a lot of "flying car" or "floating city" projects I know of.

'Bart Simpson' punts Church of Scientology

bullies

Of course, the CoS being quite rich, they won't be the target of insane lawsuits by Fox or the RIAA/MPAA for illegally using the material. These folks are only interested in chasing 12 year old girls or 90 year old grannies who don't have the money to fight in court.

Of course, if they got off the pot and outlawed robocallers it would go a long way to cleaning things up. But again, profit before people.

EC will force users to pick a Windows browser, says Microsoft

Warming.

So long as they still don't force users into IE when we visit Microsoft sites, that'll be good. However, I can still see all sorts of ways for Microsoft to corrupt this particular solution to their illegal/unethical business practices w.r.t. browsers. Still, it's nice to see at least ONE government putting its people (the consumers) first and taking a hammer to this company. Warms the cockles that does.

Kaspersky Lab denies panic mongering

lies, more lies, and marketing.

Hmm. Being the cynical person that I am, I have to look at which scenario is more profitable to Kaspersky. Is it "mild warning" or is it "fear and panic"? So they couldn't do the fear and panic in their "official" warning system, but I wouldn't put it past a eager marketing exec (ie: lying, cheating, unethical scumbag) to try to generate as much "fear and panic" as possible.

Monster.com suffers database breach deja vu

really?

He says ""We take this very seriously,". He's a bloody liar. If they fucking took it seriously, they would have taken effective measures the FIRST time this shit happened.

Boffin: Lost Stradivarius violin tech reverse-engineered

FM = glory??

Someone said "“When you use science to prove a point, it often demystifies the glory of the legendary masters, ...". Really? Because saying that something is "fucking magic" is supposed to keep that glory? I would have thought that knowing how they did it would allow people to go "oh wow", and glory in the knowledge these ancients had that we have lost and now recovered.

What a bunch of idiots.

Ubuntu's Shuttleworth praises Windows 7, welcomes fight

clean?

he says "looking forward to a good, clean netbook fight with Microsoft ". Since when has Microsoft fought clean? Microsoft is the very epitome of fighting dirty and underhanded. Possibly other companies as well, but Microsofts strategy and tactics are relatively well documented over the 30 years of their existence.

All Shuttleworth can look forward to is Microsoft desperately stacking the deck against their competition using every slimy trick in their rather large playbook of slimy tricks. There is no such thing as a "clean" fight when Microsoft is involved. Never has been. Never will be.

Disabling Windows Autorun - there's a right way and a wrong way

Windows security...

Yes, let's automatically execute whatever random executable happens to be configured on some random media we're connecting to, rather than require user intervention. What a wonderful idea! Nothing could possibly go wrong! Then let's make disabling it as cryptic as possible.

Bloody idiots. To think that people still buy that shit, it's sickening.

Airline ticket receipt scam spreads malware

@Mage

Because idiocy and ignorance knows no bounds.

Goat hangs self in Canadian zoo

obvious

He was the scapegoat for the stingray deaths.

Um, yeah, the cashmere one. ta.

FCC fingers Comcast VoIP favoritism

Either way

Either way, this is the USA. Thus, nothing will happen to Comcast, whether they lied one way or another. Consumer protection in North American is a myth, and the FCC is a toothless beast, much like Ofcom without the gonads. Assuming that latter had any.

Apple in iWork piracy boost

why bother?

I'm quite happy with the MacOSX native version of OpenOffice 3.0 myself. Although Keynote is a tremendously powerful application, most of my presentations need to be prepared with very short deadlines, and I for one don't have the time to learn Keynote well enough to prepare the gorgeous presentations it can be used for. The other iWork applications, although "nice", don't really rock my boat either.

OpenOffice is where it's at. Screw Microsoft (with a rusty chainsaw).

Conficker seizes city's hospital network

Yet again...

Yet again, a deficiency in Microsoft's products results in a workaround that creates even more problems. It should be possible to set things up so that the operating system cannot reboot without user intervention. By all means install the patches - but wait for confirmation before booting. Not so for Microsoft, who knows better and will happily reboot a system in the middle of a critical task, sometimes even when you tell it not to.

Fucking idiots.

For that matter, in a real operating system most patches shouldn't cause a reboot at all.

As for the other arguments about why corporations choose certain OS, the rule I've developed in my 25 years of working in the field is "if a decision makes no sense, follow the money". Probably someone who made the decision was rewarded, one way or another, for making that particular decision. Either the fact that they drained the accounts of other divisions into their own triggered a bonus (because their division is obviously "making a profit", even if it's at the expense of the rest of the enterprise), or they got a kickback from the vendor, or any number of other scenarios that I've seen played out. The OS selection rarely if ever has anything to do with the technical merit, and everything to do with who is married to whom, or who is shagging whom, or who is an boot licking arse bandit with no more ethics than a hungry weasel.

EU says Microsoft violated law with IE on Windows

Safari vs IE

Ah yes, the old "but Apple provides Safari" straw man defence of the indefensible.

Folks, Apple provides Safari, yes. BUT I CAN REMOVE IT if I don't want it. It's just another program. Microsoft provides IE, but it has deliberately and maliciously made it impossible to remove it from the system in favour of something else. That's the illegal bit. They're forcing you to use their product when there are others available. They bankrupted Netscape with that strategy (and weren't punished nearly enough for it).

That's what is called a "tied product", and in countries with decent consumer protection (so, nowhere in North America), you can't do that.

So, to clarify. What Apple is doing is legal. What Microsoft is doing is illegal. Capisce?

Silverlight to follow Obama into US presidency

rules

As per the Microsoft license agreement, I may not (1) work around any technical limitations. Therefore, if the fucking thing isn't working as expected, I'm not allowed to change my settings, because that would be working around a technical limitation. What asshat came up with that clause?

Fuck Microsoft. Fuck Obama for trying to force people to use proprietary Microsoft products.

'Miracle' plane crash was no miracle

miracle?

Miracle invariably implies some sort of divine intervention, attributing good fortune to some figment of someones imagination. Yet if it was divine intervention, what about the sadistic little shithead deity that put the damn birds on the flight path in the first place? Nobody has a good rant at that piece of "divine intervention". If one denies that that some sort of omnipresent or omnipotent being was responsible for trying to kill these people in the first place (and succeeding regularly in other attempts), why attribute the beneficial results to this same deity?

In my opinion, calling it a miracle detracts from the fantastic job done by the engineers who designed the plane, the people who built the plane, the pilots who flew the plane, the crew who got everyone out safely, and the onlookers who acted rather than just watch people drown.

Apple joins campaign for real breasts

difference

The difference being that iBoobs provides its own mammaries, whereas the other applications make you provide your own. So Apple can't be held responsible for distributing porn, only with providing tools that were obviously meant to let kids play with jello, and not what some pervs ended up doing with it.

US nuke boffins: Multicore CPU gains stop at eight

simple!

So in an 8 core chip, use the space for 4 of the cores for communication rather than CPU. There, problem solved! For my next trick, solving NP complete in (n log n)^2 time...

Royal Navy warships lose email in virus infection

@amanfromMars

Get new drugs. You're growing resistant to your current batch and are dangerously close to making sense.

'Interfering' BT Vision attracts campaigner glares

Ofcom?

I thought Ofcom had been purchased by BT Marketing Plc years ago? Aren't they now part of BT's "conformance marketing" division, charged with making sure that anyone who complains about BT quietly disappears?

419ers take Canadian for $150,000

voter?

The real issue is that this person probably votes. Why do people this stupid get to vote?

Nortel begs for bankruptcy protection

Pity

It was a good company, ruined by short-sighted, technically ignorant, and greedy executives who did finally managed to kill it. The fact it took Stern and his followers (Roth, etc.) 15 years to kill of Nortel says a lot about how strong the company really was, once.

Dell settles with 34 US states over consumer financing claims

wonder?

I wonder how much profit Dell made on this scheme. Seems to me that it was a heck of a lot more than $4 million, given the amount of business they did.

US teen clocks up 14,528 text messages

not as bad as that.

Assume the following: (1) that there is AT LEAST one incoming for every outgoing message. (2) that not all incoming are replied to given that they are "annoying forwards". So it's less than 7000 msgs in one month. Given that many of them will also be just "LOL", and other things that can be sent in 3 seconds one-handed, it's not as bad as some people are making out here.

Personally, I find it weird. But I don't own a mobile phone anymore as I found I didn't like being leashed. Lots of people find THAT weird, so who am I to judge?

Experts trumpet '25 most dangerous' programming errors

@AC (low budget)

What the hell are you on? The budget has nothing to do with it. Mostly it's crappy management, followed closely by programmers that don't give a damn (often because of crappy management), that allow these types of errors to get through.

The list sounds familiar. Most if not all of these were covered as serious errors in many of the programming classes I took for my degree. Maybe programs that continue to have these errors can now be returned as being "unsuitable for the purpose".

once per year?

Maybe this list could be refined every couple of years. Now that there is an officially sanctioned list, if software development groups - especially paid groups - are still making these errors in a year or two perhaps those groups, as a whole, should be simply fired for cause. That or allow them to be sued for the damage caused by the inclusion of such errors in the code, regardless of what the weasel-worded EULA might say.

National Safety Council seeks total* cell-phone driving ban

works for me

Driving is a privilege, not a right. Let the assholes hurt themselves, no skin off my nose. However, if said idiots want to make my life more risky, then I say cut them off at the knees before they do so. The case for the dangers of mobile phone use increasing driving risk - especially risk to others - has been made. It's time to take action and reduce that risk. Mobile use in the car should be treated the same as a DUI.

Any driver found to have been on the phone when they've been in a prang should be treated the same as if they were driving drunk and have their license withdrawn. Instead of not even being charged, as was the case with the dozy bint who wrecked my leg because she was too busy waving at her phone to pay attention to the fucking road ahead of her.

A "nanny state" is about the state protecting people from themselves. This is about the state doing its job for once, and protecting me from self-important assholes who put their phone calls ahead of my life. I note that the author is from a state where people regularly shoot each other on the highway, and they seem to find this to be "normal". I guess this tends to skew your perspective somewhat.