Posts by Dan

If they can break the law, why can't we?

'Cos they did

I may copy the MPs and put all sorts of wacky expenses on my tax return this year. If the catch me I'll just plead ignorance and say "well I thought it was legal to do that since it's legal for MPs to claim those things as expenses".

Hulu recognizes Blighty existence

@pctechxp

No, BBC Worldwide/BBC America are separate commercial wings that don't receive any licence fee cash.

Apple brands UK tabloid 'obscene'

'obscene'

If a Apple considers a topless woman 'obscene', they must be one hell of puritanical organisation.

Next-gen Mac mini 'photo' surfaces

firewire?

I thought Apple were dropping Firewire support from lower end machine?

Joker must retire, insist Heath Ledger fans

when then...

...you might as well also retire the character of Mr. Freeze since Arnold Schwarzenegger was pinnacle of character interpretation in that role.

Apple banishes Macs to old folks home

Fugly

That is one seriously ugly case. It reminds me of an 80s new romantic haircut.

UK.gov backs ISPs on charging content providers, throttling P2P

I would have thought.....

,,,, forcing net neutrality, thus creating a starting point of an even field of a higher (ie not throttled back) service would create even more innovation 'cos companies would really have to go above and beyond to differentiate themselves. If biased traffic patterns become standard due to greedy companies, a company offer a neutral traffic model will become unusual and "innovative". It's almost creating the potential for fake innovation spin.

Third-gen Apple iPhone in development?

there'll wait until...

... their software patents to come through for these secret innovative new feature that are going to revolutionise the way the world and god use their phone. Rumor has it their going to be called iCopy and iPaste. Each will carry a separate $15 upgrade fee.

Spammers target Twitter

Hypocrisy of a spammer

I love how they guy is threatening the blog with legal action for using copyrighted screenshots of his software when he himself has ripped of the Twitter logo and himself uses screenshots of Twitter that clearly state "©2009 Twitter".

Aussie convicted over Simpsons sex pics

Evil me

I've bought, taken home and locked in a wardrobe a Simpsons book. I guess I must be guilty of child trafficking, kidnapping and false imprisonment.

Palin demands $15m to search her own emails

@ Ask a question get smeared....

And lest not forget McCain at those "Sin Feinn" dinner fundraisers in the 80s. You all loved them back then.

Noel Edmonds defies BBC's jackbooted enforcers

they may both be right if

he was paying the license fee by yearly direct debit, just paid for the next year then cancelled the direct debit. He has in effect cancelled his license fee payment but the license currently issued may not run out for another 51 weeks.

Phone phishers hop on filesharing legal threats bandwagon

@Amazed

REAL unlimited ADSL is very expensive to do. Capped is much more competitive without being fakey.

McKinnon a 'scapegoat for Pentagon insecurity'

100% dangerous

I guess he must be more dangerous and more wanted than Abu Hamza, since his extradition to the US was blocked.

they have to

The US government has to make him out to be some ultra dangerous super-hacker otherwise they have to admit that he hacked into their network using techniques a 10 year old child could have learned from the 25 year old Wargames movie.

The Google-isation of all the net's access points

Phormgle

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the way Google scan your interent use is very similar to what Phorm were proposing just a little bit more hidden. I've had techies shouting at me when I dare suggest Phorm is only small step from what's happens already but they're more than happy to Gmail away. This will probably be another arm to their core business, which is basically selling Adword adverts.

Now Hollywood is chasing UK downloaders

@Tim

http://bitsandpieces.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/imagespiracy-20not-20theft.jpg

British boffins perfect process to make any item '100% waterproof'

Hi-Tec?

"being adopted by the UK military services for clothing and shoes as Hi-Tec manufactures these"

What? The 80's cheap trainer manufucturer?

Russell Crowe to play Bill Hicks?

the leaves thing

isn't as daft as it sounds, more of a big scheduling cock up, they realised that by halfway throught filming there wouldn't BE ANY leaves left on the trees.

Pirated movie downloads offered as Zango sweetener

They'll still be disaapointed 'cos

there aren't any decent of the new Batman film out there yet.

Surfing Google may be harmful to your security

Phorgle

This is what I've been saying for a while, what Google already do isn't far off what Phorm are proposing.

Up to 80,000 AOLers face the boot from Carphone network

as said above

You can get USB ethernet adapters for £5 retail, so to buy 80,000 you'd get them for a couple of quid each at the very most. Stick them on a new 12 month contract and CPW would be quids in.

UK ISPs agree to menace their filesharing users

proof

They're gonna need to start supplying proper proof. From what I've seen of these things so far the proof consists of a filename, ip numbers and time stamps. Simply stating a filename is no good, they're gonna have to prove the content of that file, it's not illegal to give someone a tape with "Lily Allen" written on it if it actually contains a recording of your grandmother singing "Knees up mother brown".

Criminal record checks could hit over 14 million people

somewhat flawed

One major problem with CRB checks is that they only check against UK convictions, you could have a foreign conviction for rape and tourture but still get cleared to work with children in the UK. Obviously checking all foreign crime records is next to impossible but it is a big flaw in the system.

UK game-development degrees not up to snuff, claims industry

shouldn't that be...

...all sectors are “facing a serious decline in the quality of graduates”, which is compounded by the problem that “95 per cent of all degrees are simply not fit any purpose”

Do you know how much of your porn is extreme?

The Sun

"This change in the law meant that people had to consider and, if necessary, delete or destroy material which until then had been legal to possess.”

When the law came into effect a few years ago I always wondered what libraries that keep old newspapers would do with their back issues of The Sun, which used to regularly feature 16 and 17 year olds on page 3. Not to mention the newspaper themselves archive, which will now contain lots of "child porn". Maybe The Mirror could do an expose on them.

Police probe pirate-DVD detecting dog's demise

Eh?... Doh!

How did the MPAA train a dog to detect copyright infringement?

Harvard rivals claim smoking gun in Facebook 'code theft' case

More muppets

Oh right, the ConnectU guys are twins, that explains a lot.

Dell rapped for £60 delivery charge on £200 laptop

years

Dell's being doing this for years.

I ordered 3 laptops at the same time from them and they charged me £150 for delivery!

Including the delivery they were still about the same price as from elsewhere, but they use the high delivery charge to hide the real price of their products until the final stages of ordering.

Carphone Warehouse cleared out of 8GB iPhones

of course

Of course they're gonna run out of the old ones as the new one comes out. Carphone Warehouse has probably stopped buying stock and the manufacturers have probably stopped making them. The fact that the iPhone is now effectively a discontinued model has somehow been spun into a massive sales triumph.

Netgear gets a crush on SMBs at Interop

ProSafe

The must be getting pretty confident in the stability and near finalisation of the draft-n spec to release a ProSafe business class version. I may be wrong but this might be the first 802.11n router aimed specifically at the business market.

Biofuel backlash prompts Brussels back-pedal

also

Second generation biofuels are starting to be made out of waste products rather than specifically grown crops. If the processing plants are run off something like hydro power (like all mills used to be) also I suspect the carbon footprint will be lower again.

Also one reason America is pushing so strongly towards biofuels has nothing to do with environmental reasons, it's too lessen their reliance on places like Iraq and Saudi Arabia for oil.

Why I downgraded from Vista to XP

for me

I've been using Vista business on a £500 Dell laptop for over 8 months now, after an upgrade to 2gb of ram (£26), and diabling that damn annoying UAC, it ran great and SP1 has smoothed a few things out with network drive performance and such. I have a desktop running XP also but have actually come to prefer Vista after I got used to the difference in how things were set up. A LOT of the way you do things in Vista is so much more stream lined than XP, at first it seemed weird and odd but after a while I find the XP working methods are actually a lot more long winded and seem like bodges you've just got used to over the years. I don't really see why people are that down on it, apart from the initial knee-jerk reaction against change.

Apple's Time Capsule: is its HDD really 'server grade'?

not even

But according to the reviews I've read of this device, it's hasn't even got NAS capabilities, it's purely a backup drive. So the unit doesn't even act as a real server and won't be under a heavy workload.

Apple's iPhone numbers do not add up

counting

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has their own proprietary way of counting that differs from the base 10 system everyone else uses.

Remembering the Commodore SX-64

price

I really can't understand where they got the price from for this. I wanted one at the time but hell, it's just a C64 circuit board inside a new case with a disk drive and a tiny TV. How's that add up to almost $1000?

Evesham Technology goes into liquidation

re: Iain Black

Yeah, that's the Evesham Micros I remember. Selling backup devices and peripherals for the 8bits then 16bits.

Ofcom urged to clamp down on broadband speed deceit

how come?

Why is Ofcom moving on this issue when the whole "unlimited" & FUP advertising scam is a far bigger problem. The "up to" is a reasonably fair description and the connection speed is down to the UK's telecoms infrastructure not the individual ISPs. The "unlimited" meaning "unspecified limits" is a far more dodgy area of advertising and practice. What Ofcom need to do is come up with a code of practice for FUPs, specifying certain things that must be clearly defined in them. I wish someone with enough dosh would take a large ISP to court over their definition of the word "unlimited".

Police give up on lost CDs

I...

I have them.

I ordered an acre of the moon and somehow these cd's were delivered instead.

I was going to return them but decided instead to use them as the geekiest kitcshest mug coasters ever.

Megan's Law snafu fingered in rapist's murder

charles bronson

This is a big step further than that case in the UK several years back of a paediatrician being attacked by an illiterate mob who thought her job was "paedophile".

Top US engineer in piss-off-everybody car fuel solution

bioenergy

Juan Enriquez makes some good points about bioenergy in this Ted talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/193

Poll confirms Brits believe Jesus Phone salvation too costly

As he said...

I've thought this from the start, as Richard says, if they sold it for £200-£300 as an iPod that you could also stick ANY sim card into and make phone calls, the things would be flying off the shelves.

Drink rats' milk, suggests battling Heather Mills

Outdone

She's just trying to outdo Paul's ex-wife Linda, she was vegetarian, so Heather's gotta be vegan.

I'm surprised charities and campaigns are still using her, whenever she opens her mouth these days people instantly assume she's talking twaddle whatever she might saying.

Facebook faces UK data probe

YouTube

I believe the same situation is true with YouTube, deleted videos and even video taken down due to a copyright violation aren't actually deleted but merely excluded from the site. There are/were a few sites that have work arounds that enable you to still view "deleted" YouTube content.

Gene Simmons blames college kids for ruining music biz

radio

Nah man, radio ruined the music industry. All I need to do is turn on the radio and there's dozens and dozens of channels of free music playing all day long. They even divide them into genres of stations and then again into categorised programmes. If I wanna hear some free Kiss music I just go to the DJ Rockula show on URock FM. I'm never gonna need to buy any music again, it's all there, free, 24 hours a day.

iPhone to solve UK unemployment

spin that bell

Sounds to like O2/Apple spinning up the fact that they, just like most stores & customer support places hire extra staff for the extended festive season to cope with the increase in custom over Christmas.

Leopard data loss glitch uncovered

Surely....

Surely this is a very simply yet major oversight in the code. Don't delete the original until it's confirmed the new version has be written correctly to the other drive.

UK minister pledges policing for Second Life

CSI

Maybe he's been watching a P2P download of this weeks US episode of CSI New York, that's what they were doing, catching a murderer in Second Life.

Jobs hits London to announce O2 iPhone deal

£35 a month?

But 200 minutes and 200 texts usually cost £25 a month on O2.........

Seems like the end user is paying the 40% revenue that goes to Apple.

AT&T turns screws on iPhone unlocker

hmmm

This strikes me as ironic since didn't Apple start out by selling Blue Boxes anyways?