Posts by Peter Page

Police kill mobile phone service to squelch protest

re: "The hidden threat"...

Pull the emergency lever. (Have you ever travelled on public transport?).

Approaching space object 'artificial, not asteroid' says NASA

Good job we haven't slaughtered all the whales yet

...Or it might not have drifted harmlessly off again.

DVLA off-road system seriously off-message

@Sir Runcible Spoon: Wallet what?

"Our VED (Vehicle excise duty) or Road Tax as it is usually known, is another way for our goverment to wallet rape it's citizens for the priveledge of paying £1.23 for a LITRE of fuel. "

Are you the boring tosser who props up the bar at my local? Endlessly whinging about taxes and stuff? The git with a porsche and a mercedes, a nice house (which I look down on from my even nicer one), a second home in france, brags about all the fancy restaurants he's just driven back from, early retirement, generous pension, no worries. Constantly bloody whinging about tax and petrol prices and how hard done by he is because some of the stuff he has to pay for can't be directly stuffed down his cakehole or shown off to the neighbours?

Apple, the iPhone 4G, the cops and the click-tart

"extraordinary effort"? Don't you just take it to the cop shop?

Round these parts you drop it off at the nick and leave your details. Then an eccentric rich lady comes in to claim it and rewards you beyond your wildest dreams. Then you pair up and fight crimes together.

Mark E Smith pens World Cup ditty

Ironic you mention Skinner

Frank Skinner has been a huge fan of The Fall for years. I heard him wax lyrical at some length on his radio show a few months ago. And someone told me he (attempted to) interview Carry Bag Man on BBC2.

You might now think less harshly of him next time he fails to make you chuckle or writes another song. Unless you're MES in which case no, you won't be adjusting your view.

Longhorn. Longhorn breed.

Microsoft slams coffin lid on Vista

@I Like Heckling: Glad my helpful helping helped

You're concerned about how soon microsoft will drop all support for vista. Wasn't in the article or your original post. :-)

@I Like Heckling: I Like Helping.

"now my fine OS will no longer be supported" - Only if your fine OS is Vista without service packs. Read the article again.

Security model, I suppose

Not a vista/7 user myself. Ubuntu at home, XP at office. The security model seems to be the biggy. And I imagine if you put that along with the eye candy and other bits and bobs then microsoft are probably right to expect people to pay to upgrade from xp for it. If i'd paid for Vista I'd feel a bit peeved about paying a large whack to get to 7, though. I'm not entirely sure how much a leap from xp was expected though? What else was expected from a desktop OS?

Scuppered own post?

"7 is simply, and ignoring some of the under-the-hood improvements, XP with eye candy. "

So...If we ignore the improvements, then not much has improved?

What if one takes note of the improvements? Has anything improved then?

Is iFlorist the greatest website in the universe, ever?

I will then also be to tell all friends...

....Google for wen shoping more-or-less correctly filtered down distinct mentions. Google for that smooth filtered mention taste. Best for slightly surprising telepathic keyboard.

(Do I get 40 cents yet?)

Nope - trustpilot are clean on that test.

"Your search - "microsoft telepathic keyboard" review - did not match any documents. "

The other 999 sites you're thinking of didn't get a look in either.

Google must have kicked them all off the internet when they saw your complaint.

I am now to trusting fantastic Google with all. It is moost fantstic place to be going when it is that you want to look things. I will be teling all friends to shop at Google when amazzing results to deliver most quick.

MSI tells 97,000 customers to 'Read The F***ing Manual'

They just got the tone wrong.

Nice idea for a joke, but if you're going to take the mickey out of your paying customers you need to be ever so careful to get the tone right. Might I suggest they ask Jerry Sadowitz to help with their next April 1st mail out. He's an affable chap whose amiable put downs often coax chortles of self recognition out of a paying crowd.

Apple bins iPhone covers

@Michael C. Can you clarify one more time?

I'm sorry, you're not making yourself clear. Can you post the same thing again about five more times so I can understand whether or not you agree with Apple's decision?

Madoff geeks charged for writing book-cooking code

@Neoc: Having trouble making sense

"...not only...also...".

In addition to, I think.

Microsoft's Bing feeds you, tries to keep you captive

Linguistic Inflation

"Bing can get the user's intent spectacularly wrong at times. Bing has a mobile version, m.bing.com, on which I searched for Windows Mobile. At the top of the results were glass companies in the city of Mobile in the US state of Alabama."

How is that spectacularly wrong? Not what you wanted perhaps, but hardly a "spectacularly wrong" guess. Mildly amusing at best? Now if you had let it know you were interested in Operating Systems you might have had a point. Or maybe in your life your example really does count as something spectacularly noteworthy. I, on the other hand, have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. Spectacular, you see.

Pirate Bay guilty verdict: Now what?

"What If" merchants getting tedious now.

I'm tiring of the absolutist analogies. e.g. "(The BBC) too are aiding in infringment", "...can’t wait for when the directors of Colt and Smith n Weston get convicted of murder", "...what about Yahoo and MSN".

The convictions were on the basis that copyright infringement was core to the site's business model. (Colt don't directly locate specific victims for murderers and hand them a loaded gun.)

Same goes for "judge didn't understand the tech". eg "no understanding of the underlying tech", "Once the appeal is heard by a tech-savvy judge, they'll be found innocent" I recall getting equally bored a few years back with people claiming smugly that bmp/jpg format photographs of illegal subjects weren't photographs because "they're just noughts and ones". That little utopia for armchair lawyers didn't last long either.

@Yes Me: "Imagine the ramifications, especially if it's applied recursively" Yes. If. But it's not going to happen. Is it?

I don't mind the fun of discussing how legal frameworks are applied and adapted to rapid technological change etc., but (a) hasn't this been done to death? and (b) these people were running a business that relied on encouraging and directly aiding the mass theft of copyrighted material. No matter how many loopholes you think can be wriggled through, do you seriously think letting this behaviour carry on unhindered is any good for the world in general and artists in particular?

(And, yes, music industry own worst enemy. Boo hiss etc etc. Yes, annoying when some stuff you want is expensive (hey, here's an idea. Instead of just stealing it like a petulant toddler, do something else that you can afford - borrow a book from your local library, for example. And give it back again! It's fun!). Also I'm not an NRA stooge so please don't think I'm bigging up weapons manufacture.)

Sun packs 150 billion web pages into meat locker

Ceasar didn't torch library. Apparantly.

"a digital Alexandria capable of surviving a Caesarean fire"

Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time radio broadcast discussed the library a couple of weeks ago. Historian chappy fairly sure Ceasar didn't burn it down (well, maybe just a little bit). Bit of a myth. But (UK readers) don't take my word for it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20090312.shtml

'Talking' iPod Shuffle spills guts

@Five Hats. But your hobnob could be the size...

...of a Shuffle for all I know.

Phorm CEO clashes with Berners-Lee at Parliament

He called Berners-Lee a Luddite!

Going around inventing hypertext interweb thingamajigs is just so typical of these progress thwarting technology dodgers.

The above is sarcasm, btw. It's the way I tell 'em.

Kanye West blames Gmail hijack for bisexual porn hoax

@J. Old geezers like me listen to opera in...

...33⅓ R.P.M. Older geezers: 78 R.P.M.

But I had at least heard of Kanye West. It must be because I am a hip cat with my ear to the ground, daddio.

NAND flash follow-on technology

@Robert Ramsay

Yeah, think so. Not the most fun way of going about it though....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7725815.stm

They use the obvious-when-you-think-about-it pulsed liquid injection chemical vapor deposition technique. I've been drinking a lot of tequila recently resulting in quite a bit of pulsed liquid injection and plenty of chemical vapour. Doctor says my crystals are uric not diamond, though.