Posts by Jimbo 6

Women face 'glass cliff' after breaking glass ceiling

If I...

...had to date my boss, I'd probably prefer a woman too.

China jails porn-monger

@ Shane

That's the best sounding job since I saw - in the small print of some competition rules on a can of beer (one where the 'winning code' was under the ringpull) - "No purchase necessary: just send us your name and address and we'll open a can on your behalf."

Either that, or the 'Manual Penetration Tester - £45k p.a.' on El Reg's 'Latest Jobs' recently.

Head of Stats warns politicians: 'Hands off our numbers!'

Mark Twain said it best...(allegedly...)

"“People commonly use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post ; for support rather than illumination.”

Vote, vote, vote for Barbie the computer engineer

For proper realism...

...surely we need "Human-Resources Barbie" ? Or would that be totally indistinguishable from the real thing ?

Not actually a joke I suppose, more of a cynical observation.

Rickets rise linked to excessive gaming

It's not the games...

...it's the fact that when the brats do actually go out into the fresh air, they insist on wearing long sleeved hoodies, with their hoods up, in the middle of summer. I remember seeing a gang of them one *blazing* July day a couple of years back, wearing not just hoodies but massive 'puffa' jackets all fully done up, and thinking that it wouldn't be long before there was a rickets epidemic. I'm surprised (and schadenfreudially overjoyed) that my cynical musing has now come to pass !

The only body part that teenage boys seem to expose these days is their scrawny spotty arses, thinking they're dead hip and up-to-date... for their info, it was already a joke when it was shown in 'Clueless' (1995)... I suppose that these days any teenager with sufficient intelligence to operate a trouser belt gets bogwashed for being a swot...

Hang on, this isn't the Daily Mail website, how did I get here ??!!!

RockYou hack reveals easy-to-crack passwords

That's my policy...

.... but with the added protection of using a *Welsh* dictionary. (It may as well be a random selection of letters, as far as most people in the world are concerned.)

Flames, cos we likes to keep the (holiday) home fires burning...

Cardiff tops UK plastic fraud list

"Cardiff tops UK plastic fraud list"

... I thought you were talking about Bulgarian airbags.

Avatards rush to name sprogs Pandora

Point of information, your honour :

In the original story, Pandora's box (actually, probably an amphora jar) contained all the GOOD things that the gods gave to humans - health, happiness, wisdom etc. When it was opened they all escaped - except for Hope, the only gift that humanity still has.

See, I knew that degree in Classical Civilisation & Latin would be handy at some point in my life !

On a lighter note, the silliest name I know of someone giving their sprog was 'Brew', as in 'Special'.

Knuckle rap for riot shield sledging coppers

I'm amazed

All those coppers, and not a single one of them used the anti-terror legislation to stop him filming ?

New Labour bring old Nuremberg Laws to Britain

You are correct

It's actually the Nuremberg _Principles_ which are being swept aside

Mini-asteroid sneaks up on Earth

Phew

NASA publishes a list of what's (known to be) coming our way (or at least, the ones they don't mind us knowing about) at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/close.html. Only yesterday a 1.6km lump (which would make quite a mess of this planet) came pretty damn close, in astronomical terms. How we've managed to survive this long, god alone knows.

El Reg sparks international incident with Olympics committee

"squat and receive an HD Olympics video enema"

Reg articles frequently make me laugh, but rarely do they bring actual tears to my eyes. Quality.

(Paris, cos she also likes things that bring tears to her eyes)

Today is not New Year's Eve - or the end of the decade

Do we have to go through this argument AGAIN ?

I remember some people arguing 10 years ago that the new millennium didn't start until 2001, however they were all French people, so the rest of the world sensibly ignored them.

As others have noted above, this would mean that 1980 was part of the Seventies, which is obviously cobblers.

One li'l factoid that no-one else has mentioned here though, is that March 25th was the end of the *Saxon* calendar year. By the time Pope Greg did his thing, the discrepancy in the Julian calendar had shifted it to April 5th, which is why the UK tax year still ends on that day.

Fancy a lottery win? Smoke dried vulture brains

What's the IT angle ?

Oh yeah... El Reg... vulture....sorry.

Software fraudster 'fooled CIA' into terror alert

What the web really needs...

...is a <sarcastic> </sarcastic> typeface option. When the article was described as 'entertaining' I think our Reg hack probably meant it in the same way that Dad's Army was entertaining - dealing with a grim historical subject through cynical, world-weary laughter. I think kudos goes to El Reg for bringing yet another example of the innate stupidity of "our leaders" to our attention.

(BB isn't really watching *me* - I'm feeding a looped cctv tape of me, sitting quietly at my pc, into the central monitoring system to give me a good alibi whilst I go and do something nefarious. I don't think anyone's noticed yet.)

US mum calls 911 over Grand Theft Auto

If I were her...

...I'd have just told the 911 phone operator that he had beaten somebody half to death, stolen their car, and evaded police capture by driving through a shopping mall. *Then* they'd have got Arkansas on his ass before he had time to hit 'save'.

Google 'open' memo betrays deep corporate delusion

"choose to use"

...only because most animals will (naturally) look at what everyone else is doing, and do the same, it's number one in the survival rulebook. Thus, because Google has become a shorthand for "internet search engine", so people new to the web only hear about Google, they find it works ok, so they stick with it. I myself had never thought of changing until about 3 weeks ago, now it's "Alta Vista, baby" (said in a Terminator voice). Why have I changed ? Because I've become more aware of Google's nasty alter-ego ("how can I ever thank you, El Reg !!!").

Saying "you can't draw attention to a Google's faults, because you *have a choice* to go elsewhere" is like saying that no-one should have complained about the Ford Pinto, because they *had a choice* to buy a car that didn't explode due to a known design fault.

ID card minister forgets ID card

Shome mishtake shurely

'Good thing' ? I think you mean 'what a shame'...

China executes securities trader over $9.52m fraud

If the number of citizens somehow excuses state murder...

Good job we don't have a One World Government then, with 6 billion people to deal with they'll no doubt be executing people for having badly manicured nails.

BTW us 'barbaric' Welshies abolished capital punishment 1,064 years ago (you may have noticed the Bible says 'Thou shalt not kill', there's no subsequent clause that says 'unless...'). Try, I know it's difficult but please, try to get with the program, people.

Swindon twins with Walt Disney World

Or...

A statue of David Brent. Dancing, possibly.

NHS IT spree faces cutbacks

You can’t make an omelette...

As an employee of the NPfIT (full disclosure : I work for BT), I find myself in the strange position of actually defending one of the government’s projects (remarkable, but true). £12bn sounds like a lot – but employ a calculator and you can see that that is about £20 per UK-citizen per year (which, compared to the £14000 that HMG has given to ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks on my behalf, is peanuts). True, there has been money wasted along the way, and there have been failings in the way that it has been implemented, but the need for an NHS-wide information system is imperative.

Example : I was hospitalised with a severe injury a few years back and, when discharged, advised to see my GP a week later. Imagine my utter lack of surprise that my GP had no knowledge of what had happened, so he had to rely on my (hazy) recollection of what medical treatment I had received (which took up most of a 15-minute appointment), rather than having my medical record passed to him down the intertubes. How much NHS time (and therefore money) is wasted in circumstances such as that ? How many people get second-rate treatment because one clinician has no way of knowing what another one has done ? As Dr Ingrams from the British Medical Association said (quoted on the BBC), "The NHS pays out a third of a billion pounds a year on mistakes; a lot of that could be put right if the IT was in place."

Another example : two years ago the PACS – picture archiving – system was deployed: until then, in most hospitals, x-rays were *still* stored in cardboard folders on shelves in corridors. How many private businesses still keep everything in filing cabinets (with no way of searching for anything that is mis-filed) ? NHS trusts (there’s 127 of them) reported an average saving of £250,000 in their first year of using PACS (so a total saving of c.£32 million). Can anyone who reads El Reg say that their workplace has thrown money down the drain by getting some computer systems, and should just go back to doing all their work by hand and snailmail ?

Also quoted by BBC : Tony Collins, executive editor of Computer Weekly magazine, said the government should scrap central contracts..."They could save money by cancelling those central contracts and giving trusts the ability to choose what systems they want."

IMHO, as an industry insider, this is part of the problem, not a solution: before there was any central authority, a lot of Trusts invested in ‘what systems they want’, which (surprise surprise) were in no way compatible because they were developed by scores of different IT firms. What good is it if your doctor’s in Liverpool but you get hospitalised in Manchester, who have a different system ? How are the Manc hospital going to get hold of your GP’s records, or feed back the hospital notes to your GP ? What if you move house – are your PCT just going to print out a paper copy of your notes, send them to your new PCT, who have to type them up onto a different system ?

There’s plenty of things to deride this government for, but dragging the NHS into the 20th Century isn’t one of them.

MPs to go clubbing in cocaine inquiry

re: Hey, here's an idea...

No, the NHS is the country's biggest employer - third in the world, after the Chinese army and the Indian railways - though as a proportion of the national population, it is the biggest anywhere (unless the Pope is the only resident of Vatican City, in which case he wins). Also, a lot of NHS staff already have hands-on experience with pharmaceuticals...

I for one welcome our coked up House-of-Overlords

Downfall writer praises Hitler rant net meme

>title goes here<

Surprised you didn't mention "The Wrong Bike"... my fave by far

Regulator warns on school CCTV schemes

I'm just amazed...

...that the Police actually listened to a group of protesting people and managed to make a decision based on common-sense, rather than just nicking them all and adding them to their database of 'domestic extremists'.

El Reg receives message from planet 'Female Pigeon'

@How about the Christian mythology?

Au contraire, Mr Blackshaw - there might be only one Big G, but the Book is stuffed with mythical beings that NEVER ACTUALLY EXISTED* - Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Ham, Sham, Spam (my memory gets a little fuzzy after that...)

* No they DIDN'T. DIDN'T. DIDN'T. DIDN'T. DIDN'T. DIDN'T. DID. DIDN'T with bells on.

Guardian in hot water over activist face flash

@ RegisterFail 10:32 GMT

"they don't actually know why they're protesting, they're mostly just a bunch of students or bums with nothing better to do"

You, sir, are either a grade A muppet, a member of The Filth, or a member of the Bonehead & Numbskull Party. Get back to reading the Daily Express and don't bother the rest of us with your horseshit opinions.

Pregnant monkeys on crack - boffins investigate

What I want to know is...

...what tax form do you have to fill in to get "Cocaine that we gave to some monkeys" written off as a legitimate business expense ?

Prof: Extremists tend to dominate debates

"pro-alcohol extremists"

Sounds like my sort of terror campaign !

Let's wipe those soft-drink canning facilities off the face of the earth !!!!

Swedish parents win right to name sprog 'Q'

He could have a worse name...

... like that policeman who's being charged with assaulting a protester at the London G20 - Sergeant Smellie. In fact, his first name being Delroy, he probably spent his whole school days being called 'Smellie Dellie'. No wonder HE has unresolved issues that he can only deal with through using a metal bar to beat women.

Hand grenade, cos El Reg doesn't have an 'Officer Dibble' icon yet.

UK government ignoring own rules on open source

Where's a policeman when you need one?

Well they're obviously out catching REAL criminals - amateur photographers...people wearing coats in Tube stations...newspaper vendors on their way home, etc

Euro project to arrest us for what they think we will do

Factual correction...

When they re-branded the RUC, they changed it to "Police Service of Northern Ireland", not "Northern Ireland Police Service".

The originally-proposed name was quietly shelved when someone in power finally realised that people might take the mick (no joke intended) if they were called N.I.P.S.

And after all, it's the UK police that wear tits on their heads.

Society bible lectures students on etiquette

Advice ?

Here's my advice to young people these days :

PULL YOUR DAMN PANTS UP !!!!

And get your bloody hair cut.

Illinois bright spark sparks car inferno

"What's the IT angle" ?

Simple -

IT = Inflammation Technology, in this case

(the technology being a lighter - at least she knew how to work one of those)

Oppressed snappers focus on police in London and Chatham

Re: The Law (AC, 09:04 GMT)

"Only time I see it could cause that much concern is if you were taking pictures of locations of camera etc, because theres not going to really be many reasons to do that."

In case you'd not noticed, just about every central street in every town in Britain is bristling with both official & private (i.e. business) surveillance cameras, meaning that we-the-public can't take a photo in an urban environment *without* snapping a CCTV camera.

What makes the whole thing even more ridiculous is that if I actually wanted to know where all the CCTV was, in order to commit some heinous crime, I'd just look on Google Street View.

(Perhaps we could talk the cops into arresting Google - then everyone would be happy !)

BB cos I LOVE HIM.

Tourist magnet blows off Speedo-wearing men

I didn't want to go to Alton Towers anyway.

In France & Italy, it's the other way round - they recently decided you have to wear 'proper' skimpy swimming trunks, rather diving in in the boxer shorts which you may have been wearing for a week. (This caused some trouble amongst French Muslim youth, on the not-unreasonable grounds that flashing your marital wares to the world whilst wearing skimpies is immodest and hence definitely not Islamic....IIRC, one municipal pool ended up with a car dumped in it as a protest against its insistence on this rule).

I'm with the Islamic yoof on that one.

Paris cos... she wouldn't care what a man was wearing, when deciding whether to blow him off

Cameron condemns Tweeters as tw*ts

I believe...

... the MIBs must be messing with my mind, requiring me to don some tin-foil cranial protection. There's no other possible explanation for finding myself in total agreement with the leader of the Conservative party.

Greenpeace unleashes Captain Kirk on HP

Now THAT'S what I call psychological warfare

If I got a personalised phone message from The Shat telling me to give up smoking, drinking and letching after young ladies, I'd probably quit all three. That's marketing-and-a-half.

Bank fined £3m for data loss

From Reuters' coverage :

"While this is a serious matter, no customer reported any loss from these failures and we are doing everything possible to prevent a recurrence," HSBC Insurance Managing Director Clive Bannister said.

- So *how exactly* would someone who had had their identity cloned know that it was all down to some twunts at HSBC throwing confidential documents around like confetti ? Do those swan-roasting card scammers now send the victim a full breakdown of how they got the personal details ?

Hopefully 'doing everything possible' will involve taking off and nuking the City from orbit. It's the only etc etc

Too thick to boil an egg? Buy 'em preboiled

Fools and their money...

Reminds me of the 'Microwave-in-the-bag carrot batons' (nb 'batons', not 'sticks' !*) I spotted in Marks & Sparks some years back - a snip at only £1 for about half a pound (227g to you, young 'un) of Bugs' favourite nibbles - about 10 times the price of actually buying some whole ones and doing a minute's scrubbing and chopping.

*Bart: Wow! Can I see your club?

Lou: It's called a baton, son.

Bart: Oh. What's it for?

Lou: We club people with it.

Russians demand flying cars and telepathy

Perpetuum Mobile

They want a copy of the Einsturzende Neubauten album ? Have these people never heard of Amazon ?

Home Office ditches compulsory ID card trial

Typical yoof

"young people...less immediately opposed to carrying such a card"

Only too true, as yoof have little experience of the way anything used to be, against which they can judge the accelerating erosion of civil liberties that's happened over the last ten years.

Also, they generally want to get pissed as fast as possible, and a 30-second delay whilst the barman checks their passport/driving licence/etc is obviously going to be too traumatic for them (it also risks their attention span running out, so they forget why they were in a pub on Friday night in the first place)

I didn't fight in two World Wars you know.

Girls Aloud net obscenity case falls at first hurdle

@ AC (13:36 GMT)

"Have any of you ever watched a gory slasher film? 18+ cert?

Did you want to lynch the director for making it, or did you enjoy it for what it was. A bit of fun."

Yes, I once sat through about half of 'Hostel'. I certainly wanted to lynch the director for that one. He wasted an hour of my life.

But seriously folks...

Horror is, by definition, meant to be horrific. It's not meant to be 'fun'. If you get a boner out of murder/rape/mutilation, you need to seek professional help.

NASA takes stick over feet and inches

Imperial

...refers to the Roman Empire, not the British Empire *actually* . The weights system is based on there being eight men in a Roman army unit (hence 1 pound of meat/grain = 2 oz per legionnaire) and seven days in a week (hence fourteen pounds in a stone). Try dividing 10 kilos of meat equally, by seven days and eight men, and see how far you get.

In another vein - who else remembers Nigel Planer in 'Brazil' - "Bloody typical, they've gone back to metric without telling us !"