Posts by Josh 15

Climate shocker: Carry on as we are until 2050, planet will be fine

We can expect the usual 'common purpose' CAGW alarmist trolls to completely ignore reports such as the one Lewis highlights. This kind of data doesn't compute for them; it doesn't fit their erratic and wholly discredited climate models and certainly doesn't suit their agreed agenda (21) - which is to keep right on hyping up so-called 'man-made climate change' (still no proof, at all, anywhere, from anyone), and predicting the coming cataclysm as fast as their begging bowls can be handed around a self-congratulatory UN circle circle-jerk.

As long as a cowardly, politically aligned msm keep playing the warmists' tune (and, boy, do they) I'm very much afraid we'll remain trapped in this surreal moment - where an absence of any proof at all for the fevered, bullying claims of the warmists made on behalf of CAGW somehow come to mean a 'scientific consensus' I thought everyone knew science is never done by 'consensus'?

UK.gov backs away from ISP level filtering plan to protect kids

This seems like a rare outbreak of common sense from our usually legislation-happy government (although the present bunch don't seem half as trigger-happy as New Labour were on their frankly unfettered law-making spree whilst in office). I agree with others who have said that issue of online porn should be a matter for parents to deal with; parents should be given an 'opt-in' (for 'safe surfing' counter measures) rather than the reverse whereby the entire population gets clobbered with a government censor in the name of 'safeguarding' (whatever that is) the children. In these hysterical times, a welcome move.

How can the BBC be saved from itself without destroying it?

TwentyEightGate is a BBC Scandal

Andrew, a shame that so many here would rather squabble about the status of the BBC as a public service broadcaster than the issues of impartiality and honesty you eloquently write about in your piece. I'd just like to thank you for keeping up your efforts to expose 'the climate bias', whether in the BBC or loose-cannon 'green' NGOs 'sexing up' their news releases with willful misinformation etc.

As a UK TV license payer, I'm disgusted with the BBC's handling of so-called 'man-made' climate change issues. There is quite simply no discussion and very few, if any skeptical voices are ever permitted on these publicly-funded airwaves (a total disgrace and, I'm sure, a breach of Charter obligations) - but even when such voices are rarely permitted they are usually sneered at and demeaned by a bullying Corporation intent on holding to its agreed doctrine on CAGW.

Keep up the good work, Andrew; 'TwentyEightGate' is a scandal. The BBC will do their level best to ignore the whole thing and carry on, business as usual. It's up to voices like yours and all of us climate sceptics to keep this particular thorn worrying away in their side. Long live El Reg!

'Ex climate sceptic' Muller's latest BEST stuff is the worst so far

Re: Simple answer

Utter rubbish. Ocean 'acidification', if it is happening at all, is of so little concern as to be meaningless. Why don't you read some facts for yourself?

http://www.c3headlines.com/are-oceans-becoming-acidic/

Greenpeace calls out cloud names on green claims

Marxists...

Expect to hear much more of this kind of drivel from 'green' NGOs in the run-up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June. Of course, behind it all lies Agenda 21, the UN-sponsored Marxist social/political experiment in 'wealth redistribution' and taking all developed economies to Hell in a hand-cart - but nobody mentions Agenda 21 (especially not the mainstream media). Look it up online. It's real, it's alive and it's coming to tax you for your evil, materialistic ways.

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, WWF, etc. Shameless rent-seekers, all.

Home Sec: Web snoop law will snare PAEDOS, TERRORISTS

Hiding behind child protection is an age-old trick...

Ms May speaks with forked tongue. On the one hand, she trumpets the recent 'smashing' of 'a major international child pornography website', yet on the other she is insisting a huge new data mining infrastructure is required to catch paedophiles. This insistence is also at odds with the latest IWF report, which informs us that not only is there no child porn hosted in the UK whatsoever, but incidents of foreign hosted CP are in major decline, as is the mythical notion of 'commercial' CP, something that if it ever existed anywhere else but in the minds of over-zealous poilcemen, is now more elusive than ever by all accounts.

The Home Secretary cannot have it both ways. Is there a major CP industry here in the UK, or elsewhere, necessitating these draconian, invasive new laws - laws which will affect the rights and privacy everyone in the UK using online services? Has this been demonstrated by CEOP and by the IWF beyond all doubt?

If not, I suspect that what we are looking at here is yet another ACPO job creation scheme funded by taxpayers for the benefit of ex-coppers looking to top up their already generous pensions. After all, if it's good enough for CEOP and IWF why wouldn't they want to expand the wheeze? 'Child protection' is the gift that just keeps giving.

As you were.

Climate-change scepticism must be 'treated', says enviro-sociologist

There is only One Truth and it is non-negotiable.

This is how the New World order will be. There is only One Truth and it is non-negotiable. Those who cannot or will not accept the 'sustainable' CAGW manifesto, those who wilfully refuse the approved ('settled') doctrine of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, are to be described in sneering tones as 'confused', as 'deniers' and suggestions will therefore be made in the press that they should be imprisoned for crimes against humanity.

This is right. This is noble. This is because sacrifices to our freedom, to our expression and to our individuality have to be made if we are truly to move towards a sustainable global future - a future in which the wealth of richer nations will be redistributed to 'less developed nations' by UN mandate (Agenda 21), a future in which UN-appointed 'Climate Courts' will hand out punishments to climate offenders in defence of the rights of Gaia (supreme above all humanity). The up-coming Rio Earth Summit in June will hopefully see much of this ratified into binding law right under the noses of indifferent global media organisations and ignorant, cowardly national governments.

We are hopeful. The future belongs to us. We are almost there.

Toy Story: Mystic Met needs swanky new kit, swoon MPs

Re: What is a correct weather forecaste?

"...Once you understand the variability you can appreciate the accuracy..."

Or the inaccuracy. It does work both ways. Also, it might actually give the lie to anyone professing to be able to predict climate patterns 30, 50, 100 years from now. The Met has not been reluctant to tie it's flag enthusiastically to the AGW mast, so by extension feels it's perfectly okay to confidently predict climate change over such large time spans (an entire generation, for instance).

"...10 of their last 11 winter forecasts wrong..."

I guess that would be the 'settled science' at work, then. I'll get me coat...

Activist supplied illegally obtained docs to DeSmogBlog

What is 'settled science' so afraid of that it must resort to theft to prove its point?

Why won't St AlGore debate the 'settled science' with Christopher Monckton, despite repeated invitations to do so? What is he afraid of?

Why doesn't mainstream media report the fact that pro-AGW science funding dwarfs the money received annually by sceptical (e.g. independent, non-governmental) climate science by some $3000 to $1, according to extensive research by Jo Nova and many others?

Why won't the fiercely pro-AGW BBC report on climate change with at least some pretence of balance and fair mindedness? Aren't they legally required to represent all views?

Why are the world's 'expert' pro-AGW climatologists, allegedly resorting to common theft to prove a point? Surely the science can speak for itself?

And so on.

Climategate ruling: FOIA requests cover backup servers too

"...at best the legislation was a quixotic gesture intended to make some kind of 'we're greener than you - get with the programme!' statement to the world..."

It's much more serious and depressing than that. Governments across the Western world have used the complete fiction of AGW to enact huge swathes of legislation, to divert vast sums of public money and to raise wholly indefensible taxes in the name of being 'green'. Itt's the Big Lie, the ultimate global deception and it will be exposed even as it begins to fall apart. Tyranny always fails, always ends badly, and the AGW scam will be no exception.

Ocean currents emerge as climate change hot-spots

Gotta laugh at the pro-warmists toadying up to the writer of this article, congratulating him for his 'good science' - yes, he follows the dominant, approved narrative around AGW, therefore his is an 'approved' message and is to be publicly congratulated for being so.

We are then subjected to a torrent to tedious explanations as to why this 'approved' piece is correct by a stream of self-important delusionists intent on ramming their ridiculous pro-AGW agenda further down our throats.

I particularly enjoy the way in which CO2 (remember that?) is skirted around, barely mentioned, as the rush to embrace ocean warming (yay!) as a new climate culprit is engaged with considerable enthusiasm. By the end of the year I fully expect 'climate change' to have adopted a new moniker; having gone from 'global cooling' to 'global warming', to 'climate change' and to 'climate chaos' with a huge variety of carefully chosen descriptors along the way ('extreme weather events' is current enjoying considerable currency) this can only get more creative and disingenuous.

Isn't it about time the pro-AGW zealots had, at the very least, the good manners to admit they really don't have a clue what they are talking about and actually stop this charade? In the crumbled ruins of the 'settled science' the intellectual honesty of climate science lost it's reputation and it's credibility a long, long time ago to the so-called 'consensus'.

SpaceShipOne man, Nobel boffins: Don't panic on global warming

"...The people with money (oil companies, car manufacturers, power generation corps, industry in general) have largely lined up with, and funded, the 'denialists'..."

This is one of the biggest myths. 'The people with money' are the denialists? Really? You just haven't done ANY homework at all, have you? Go check out the total sums (totalling in the hundreds of $billions) handed out annually to pro-warmist NGOs and puppet organisations such as the discredited IPCC and it's bottom-feeding leeches. You might be shocked just how much of your taxpayer money is siphoned off into these greedy, self-serving organisations.

In comparison, the anti-AGW movement (if there is such a thing) receives but a pittance from private benefactors (and no taxpayer funding at all), some of which might well include fossil fuel companies. Just do you research and go seek the figures for yourself. I guarantee you the BIG BUCKS are with the pro-AGW brigade. They always have been, right from the very start of this disgraceful charade.

Kiwis collar Megaupload kingpin, Anonymous exacts revenge

"...Is it any wonder that the US is the most reviled nation on Earth?.."

Also happens to have the world's largest prison population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison

Not bad, for a nation styling itself 'the land of the free'. *facepalm.jpg*

"...It doesn't matter that SOPA didn't get through, the Merkins will just do whatever they want anyway...."

Yes, and that's the important bit - it doesn't matter if SOPA and/or PIPA fail; what cannot be done via the front door can always be achieved via the back door, bit-by-bit, until the government/police/corporations have rearranged the internet in exactly the way they would prefer to see it, right in front of our indifferent eyes. We're like bugs, sinking on a peach.

SOPA and all the distracting hot air around it is ultimately meaningless; governments and government agencies will never stop, they will never give up, they will always be seeking new ways to wrestle the web away from ordinary people, using sensational scare tactics, bogus statistics and blatant disinformation.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever."

-G. Orwell, 1984

Pollution-gobbling molecules in global warming SMACKDOWN

Okay, so where does that leave the 'settled science' on AGW?

UK's solar 'leccy cash slash ruled unlawful

"...I'm surprised that all the bleeding heart organisations that want a greener future seem to overlook that the money to pay for these schemes comes from every electricity user in the form of a stealth tax ("levies")..."

I'm not surprised by it at all. NGOs like Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and Greenpeace are heavily politicised organisations, each with a very specific social engineering agenda regarding bogus AGW and massive 'wealth transfer' from 'richer' nations to 'poorer' ones (or, to be PC, 'less developed nations'). This is what Durban COP-17 was all about - luckily for us, an unsuccessful attempt to rob the world's better off by using thoroughly discredited AGW propaganda. Despite Andrew's excellent reporting around here at the time, I'm not sure many Regs fully understood the frightening implications of what these insane zealots were attempting to do at COP-17 - let's just say their VERY SERIOUS attempt to create, with taxpayer money, a 'World Climate Court' was, for now at least, kicked into the long grass. But just the fact that it, along with countless other truly barmy 'edicts', was proposed for binding legislation is enough to set off alarms all over the place. There was even talk of creating a global 'green' UN taskforce... Orwell was late, but he's looking increasingly on the money.

Friends of the Earth supporting relatively affluent middle-class Europeans is a fairly typical ploy of such NGOs today. It is not for nothing they spend top dollar on marketing and PR gurus, like any successful business with high consumer brand recognition. Yes, it's cynical, but mostly (and most importantly) it's political. It suits their bigger agenda. Just like Oxfam openly lobbying for a shipping (carbon) tax at Durban - it has nothing to do with putting clean water in African villages or saving rainforests (both perfectly legitimate aims), and everything to do with green taxes and bogus climate 'science' and the misdirection of $billions of public money into unsustainable, uneconomic, unreliable 'renewables'.

Durban failed: Relax, everyone

Thanks, Andrew

I've been following the sorry tale of COP-17 - two weeks of taxpayer-funded self indulgence beside the equatorial sea for the 15,000 or so so attendees - for the past two weeks, mainly via the 'official' channel of the BBC and then via the blogosphere. The BBC have been, and sadly remain, completely biased in their reporting of this event. There is no suggestion at all, in any of their coverage, of 'wealth transfer' and the entire jamboree (or attempted robbery, as I prefer to call it) has been lauded by The Biased Broadcasting Corporation as a 'triumph' and a 'significant new deal', as well as indulging in meaningless bombast such as 'saving tomorrow for today'...at which point, on the verge of vomiting, I had to stop reading.

Now that the attendees - mainly unelected NGOs and eco alarmists - have all racked up their Air Miles quite nicely, they can get back to lecturing the rest of us on how sinful our way of life is, whilst smarting, no doubt, from the fact their attempted heist went so badly wrong. That's going to put a few annual financial projections out at the WWF, Friends of the Earth, Oxford, et al, lol.

Thanks for this valuable summary of COP-17, Andrew. I knew I could trust El Reg to take a more impartial and critical view of this meaningless party by the sea. The fact that you are practically alone amongst news outlets to refer to the more outrageous proposals seriously being put forward by these unelected NGOs (hoping for them to be enshrined in law) speaks volumes for your integrity as a journalist - sadly, very many of your colleagues and peers in the MSM have failed abysmally to report the facts of Durban. Who here, for instance, has any idea that there was a serious attempt to at the 'Conference of the Parties' to have a World Climate Court created?

If you've been following the coverage on the BBC you will not have heard one mention of it at all.

Climategate: A symptom of driving science off a cliff

Bravo, Andrew!

"“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

- Joseph Goebbels

Well done, Andrew, for once again having the cheek to criticise today's dominant narrative around AGW - the fact that sceptics are also called 'deniers' is no coincidence in the light of just how religious pro-AGW propaganda has become. But it's so much more than that - it's a dangerous political dogma and an expensive waste of public money - money that could have been used for genuine environmental protection. The Church of AGW has permitted bad people to sneak in under the guise of 'green' and steal public money for illegitimate ends.

I refer El Reg once again to the upcoming COP-17 climate jamboree in Durban, S.A.. Two weeks of taxpayer-funded fun in the sun for politicians and NGOs alike, preaching the catechism of the AGW true believers, helped in their mission by the world's uncritical, ignorant media, eager for more sensational headlines regarding the impending 'climate catastrophe', no doubt headed our way. Will this be another 'two weeks to save the world' moment? I wonder. We've been there before, after all, so many times.

Keep it up, El Reg. Don't be afraid of your critics and keep that delicious sense of the absurd alive and well.

Climategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails

Keep it up, El Reg

All the usual craven apologists are out and about busily putting out fires, suggesting there's 'nothing new' in these emails and that we're all taking it 'out of context'. Pathetic. Thank you, Andrew, for reporting these latest revelations on El Reg - you guys are truly one of the few news outlets actually bothering, so cowardly are mainstream journalists on this issue. I know many bloggers are also on the case, including a sizeable scientific community currently trawling through the leaked emails with forensic precision.

We can only hope that the upcoming two-week climate jolly in Durban (taxpayer-funded, of course) will have been (further) damaged by the detail in these emails. I'm not too optimistic, though, since it was clear from the official whitewashes that followed the last tranche that the Establishment AGW zealots will close ranks and refuse to entertain any possible notion of mistake or even room for doubt.

I look forward to El Reg's coverage of COP17. Please be at least one outpost of rational, fair-minded critical analysis. I've abandoned all hope of getting anything like sensible coverage from the likes of the Biased Broadcasting Corporation.

Massive study concludes: 'Global warming is real'

I Beg To Differ...

Look, all the report appears to confirm is that the world's climate is warming. THAT'S ALL.

Did I miss the bit where the scientists behind this data categorically state, with factual proof, that mankind is proven beyond all doubt to be behind such a rise?

'Consensus is not science. Science is not consensus'.

Very Disappointed, El Reg...

This is a pretty shabby story. I doubt you'll find any AGW sceptics prepared to disagree the Earth's climate is on the change. Why would we sceptics disagree with the proven science of our planet's complex and constantly changing climate? It makes no sense for us to do so, in the face of such overwhelming and incontrovertible scientific evidence.

But proving the Earth's climate is changing is one thing. Proving that mankind's piddling activities might have anything - or nothing - to do with any such measured change is quite another thing. As yet, we have no such proof, none at all - not from one climate scientist, ever.

I expect better from El Reg. This was a pretty poor, non-objective and blatantly disingenuous piece of so-called reporting. Please play fair on this issue. Sceptics like me do not have our heads buried in the sand - for us, the scientific proof is everything. But we are as angered by smoke and mirrors as the next person. This story does you at El Reg no favours whatsoever.

Poll: Porn-watching, net-savvy kids are a myth

"...For example, while parents worry more about 'stranger danger', children find cyberbullying the most upsetting risk."

So, can we finally disband CEOP and that other police-led ship of fools, the IWF? After a decade or more of being continually bullied (and censored) about 'stranger danger' online we finally see the lies exposed by an independent third party with no vested interest in promoting the same old tired, sensationalist propaganda (which was always utterly baseless, not that you'd have found many journalists bothering to ask).

Ah well, CEOP have already thankfully been neutered by Theresa May - she just needs to finish the job now. I don't see so many examples of gobshite police officers all over the TV and radio shouting about 'global networks' of 'online predators' these days (not like the good old Jim Gamble days). CEOP was a nice job creation scheme for ex-coppers while it lasted, but it gets real tricky to justify a £12million pa budget when your number one target simply disappears off the radar (if it was ever there in the first place).

'There's too much climate change denial on the BBC'

It's getting quite sinister now...

...To the point when a public broadcasting corporation has clearly taken a side (impartiality be damned) and will relentlessly push it's agenda, whilst doing it's level-best to silence or at the very least disadvantage any critics of the dominant narrative regardless of the lack of scientifically verifiable proof to back up it's stance. Even the IPCC, bless 'em, don't ever claim, to the best of my knowledge, to have proven the case for AGW. The BBC's partisan behaviour in the so-called climate debate is nothing short of scandalous.

The Blatantly Biased Corporation - living up to it's name.

Thanks to El Reg for continuing to highlight this sorry state of affairs in our state broadcaster.

Rebekah Brooks quits - Murdoch accepts this time

Hopefully

...In a prison cell, if justice has even one good eye.

How I learned to stop worrying and love SSDs

32GB SSD + Win7 = You'll Run Out Of Space Very Quickly

I did this. It was a horrible experience. I had a new PC built (Win7, 64-bit, i7 quadcore, 12GB RAM, 2TB HDD) with a 32GB SSD for the OS.

A huge mistake I was soon regretting. Within a couple of weeks, despite not installing any applications to the SSD but to my 2TB storage drive, I was seeing the red bar of doom appear beneath my SSD icon in Win7, alerting me to dwindling disk space as Windows Updates continued to fill the SSD. In the end, over a long weekend, I replaced the SSD with a 1TB SATA HDD, which now houses the OS (Win7) and I can install my applications to it quite happily.

I consider anything less than 256GB simply inadequate as a 'main' HDD for Win7. Most people don't realise just how fast their system files will balloon as Updates keeps adding and backing stuff up in the background. I will eventually buy back into SSD tech when the price of a 500GB SSD is cheap enough to make it viable - until then, I'll stick with my trusty SATA drives.

Operation Ore was based on flawed evidence from the start

As long as you include

...all the racketeers from the 'child protection' industry who were so quick to tailgate the Ore sensation and attempt to make capital out of it for their own agendas.

I recall the two very wel-known choldren's charities seemed especially vocal on the issue at the time and both did their bit to stake their claim and mark out out their territory - which must have paid off nicely as Ore rolled out and the £multimillion CEOP, as a direct result of the subsequent hysteria, was created - which then handily 'partnered' with such organisations.

Every moral panic needs it's useful idiots. Ore seemed to have no shortage of them.

Duke Nukem Forever DELAYED

The Real Story...

...and the one really worth telling will the be the complete history of the troubled making of Duke Nukem Forever. Some lucky writer (hopefully a games journalist) will bag that assignment and it really will be a tale worth telling, something to rival 'Masters of Doom' (the story of Doom's creation and the subsequent self-implosion of one of it's creators).

I'd buy that book!

Bulletstorm

Game is fantastic on PC

Admittedly, I'm playing on an i7 quad core with a GTX460 and 8MB of RAM, but what the hell? Bulletstorm is probably the best-looking Unreal3 game to date. God alone knows what Epic has been putting in People Can Fly's tea, but it seemes to have worked: it's a corker. Game play is totally bonkers and much of the dialogue is very chucklesome in a very infantile way. In other words, this is a bundle of fun - and a very good-looking one, at that.

Got my game via Steam. Absolutely no issues - plus the game is linked to Windows Live (with Achievements) and playing on the PC with the 360 controller is to be highly recommended. No, seriously: try it for yourself and see.

'ALIEN' LIFE FOUND in California

No.

"...If so, should I re-open my hardened bunker, dust off my baseball bat and prepare for the Zombie horde?"

You'd be better off with a semi-automatic rifle, lots of ammunition and a hideaway in the roofspace of your local high school*, according to The Zombie Survival Guide.

*Once the zombie outbreak is official, of course. Otherwise you risk arrest for being a bit of a local menace.

Interpol issues arrest notice for Wikileaks' Julian Assange

Agreed

As an Englishman, I find ordinary Americans generous to a fault and generally very friendly, intellectually curious and welcoming. Their government, police and secret services do SUCH a disservice to the general US population, internationally. They misrepresent the people on the global stage and with every opportunity they simply compound their oafish behaviour.

America IS and remains a great country - if you can just take the bullying politics, nationalistic militarism and evangelical religion out of the picture. Shame, really. As things stand, the US really does seem, most of the time, like some kind of global menace to the rest of us. For all the self-important cavorting and posturing before the world's media by it's moronic politicians, it's worth remembering, in the words of a certain Mr Bowie, that 'this is not America'. Not the real one, anyway.

MP wants age verification for net smut

F/ None of the above

I think most Reg readers are intelligent enough to detect another shamelessly opportunistic MP spouting utter bullsh*t at fifty paces. Frankly, most adults are completely fed up with successive governments fiddling about with their sex lives.

How to make boots on Mars affordable - One way trips

Where do I sign up for this?

I can be packed and ready to go in less than an hour. Sound's like a great solution to the financial problems of making this whole Mars mission thing work. Consider my application in the post.

LimeWire (finally) dies under judge's gavel

Creating Value

I think perhaps the music industry are most worried about the steady creation of new generations who have no previous point of reference for how music is bought and sold. It's easy enough for me: I come from a time, long ago, when music used to be sold exclusively through high street shops, on vinyl, cassette and later on CD. It all seemed so straightforward. Sure, we could record copies for friends, but it was all a bit of a faff and the quality was never quite there on cassette, at least.

These days, issues of quality are practically non-existent for a generation reared on mp3. For them, music is no longer perceived as a tangible 'object' (remember those elaborate gatefold double, triple, albums..?), but rather as an anonymous digital file of little or no perceived actual real-world 'value'.

In this age of wannabe 'Pop Idols' on every commercial TV channel ('Anyone can be a Star!'), the music industry needs to find a way to engender a sense of 'value' in the product it offers. And in the absence of 12" album sleeves, colour vinyl, gatefolds with expensive booklets, boxsets and limited numbered editions and insets, I can't really see how that can be done.

Perhaps the genie really is out of the bottle for good.

XP? Thanks for the memories

I Made The Switch Already

...From an XP-based machine straight to a Win7 Professional 64-bit machine. have to say I'm loving it. I did spend a lot of money on a very powerful PC (graphics and DAW), admittedly (this thing has frankly ridiculous 12GB of RAM as well as one of these: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 930 @ 2.80GHz, 2801 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) according to my system information. It is amazingly fast and powerful compared to my old XP machine.

I haven't stumbled across very many compatibility issues at all. All my Adobe software works just fine (and now Photoshop runs in spiffing 64-bit mode - yay!) and my MIDI software, indluding VSTi plugins for 32-bit, have just about all been absolutely fine.

All in all, for me, migrating to a hugely more powerful beast has been very painless and - so far - most enjoyable. For me, Win7 feels like a very much more faster, more powerful XP. BTW, I'm running Win7 off of a dedicated 32GB SSD. I know. Even that's too small (just 7GB free). Still, I have 2TB of internal storage. Nice!

Hefty physicist: Global warming is 'pseudoscientific fraud'

@ It's All A Conspiracy

"...Over eight out of ten climate scientists believe that human activity contributes to global warming: http://stats.org/stories..."

And since when did turkeys ever vote for Christmas? Pfft!

As far as I'm aware the El Reg has a healthy, often ironic scepticism regarding AGW. I consider that a laudable journalistic trait, but I'm old-fashioned like that.

Government delays ContactPoint closure

We'll see more of this kind of thing...

I'm afraid this is probably going to happen rather a lot. Grand government announcements are fed to a willing media, outlining the abolition of such-and-such a costly project/scheme/partnership, etc only to be found still in quiet existence some months down the line. It's most regrettable, not to mention plain dishonest of government ministers.

Wikifounder reports Wikiparent to FBI over 'child porn'

Fanning The Flames Of A Moral Panic

It's also worth noting that while child salvationists in the 'charidee' sector and the public sector (step forward, CEOP) continue to gleefully fan the flames of a very profitable paedogeddon, the NSPCC themselves have admitted, in the wake of the Baby P scandal, that 80+ children are murdered every year in England & Wales by parents or carers. Just think about that. 'Trusted adults', not CEOP's beloved 'online predators' or 'stranger danger', but parents and guardians.

While western societies tie themselves in moral knots over the heinous crime - the utter filth - of child nudity (which must now surely rank as one of the gravest threats to modern civilization if the levels of funding directed at fighting this 'global scourge' are anything to go by), children are busy being murdered not by paedomonsters, but by parents and guardians.

Not that anyone seems to care about that.

CEOP renews attack on Facebook

The Bandwagon Rolls On And On...

I think it's true that Reverend Jim's vitriolic outbursts get funnier every time he steps up to the mic. He's been rehashing his trite, tabloid soundbites for so long he's probably unaware he's now slipped into self-parody. I suppose that's one of the luxuries of running one of the UK's most feared, powerful and untouchable arms of the Police Service: self-delusion becomes just another way of life for these unfortunates, so used to having their egos stroked, their every demands met, that they just lose touch with any last semblance of common sense.

CEOP is a hopelessly out of control monstrosity, wreaking havoc on the UK's legal system and civil rights at every opportunity, urged on by self-interested child salvationists and ineffectual politicians. I can't see anyone prepared to hold them to account, to get them to back up their myriad claims with any sort of proof. Meanwhile, the UK taxpayer coughs up in excess of £5million a year (and rising) to sail Jim's ship, whilst craven corporations, keen to jump onto the 'me tooism' of the child protection bandwagon also pour in the largess to fill Jim's coffers.

Chasing phantoms, that's all. Imagined dangers and fabled monsters. It's a total disgrace to all notions of common sense and decency that such a powerful organisation has been - and continues to be - indulged by politicians in such a cowardly and uncritical way.

Mandybill: All the Commons drama

Thanks, Andrew...

...For reporting on this for as long and as consistently as you have here on El Reg. You and Jon Ozimek in particular are both to be congratulated for your dogged persistence with stories the general media seem content to ignore. I'd have had little idea about this or the dreadful 'Cartoon Porn' laws recently passed, without the two of you quietly - and diligently - reporting on such troubling matters here on the Reg over a considerable period of time.

Keep it up! This place is fast becoming a more trustworthy voice of current affairs reporting than good old Auntie, for me!

Right, having thoroughly brown-nosed my contribution to this thread I'll be getting my coat, then...

Man could face prison over six second 'extreme porn' clip

@ Sir Runcible Spoon

Very well said. Sadly, we are so far down the road of hysteria and political correctness that any chance of a sudden outbreak of common sense amongst our self-serving politicians and law enforcers is all but impossible. The past twenty years have witnessed LEA's around the world building empires based around the policing of sexuality on and offline - whole new edifices of power, finance and political influence have been built up to facilitate these new laws and the continuing erosion of privacy and personal freedoms of expression they represent.

It has ALL been about criminalisation: target-driven LEA's need new laws to keep themselves in profit and to justify annual budgets. Hiding behind the spectre of 'child protection' these scumbags prey on ignorance and mob mentality to get what they want. Policitians grandstand by invoking the 'think of the children!' slogan, while duplicitous police forces (headed by ACPO in the UK) silently go about their business in the corridors of power lobbying for new laws to criminalise a new section of society. And we all know where the worthless mass media stand on these issues.

Peadomonsters have been an absolute godsend to governments and LEAs the world over. In America, their fabled existence has led to some of the most obscene abuses of human rights in so-called courts of law, whilst across Europe and much of the rest of the world, crooked politicians and greedy policemen use the menace they represent for their own avaricious ends.

The world, meanwhile, lies in stupor, unable or unwilling to call a halt to the madness that has now seen every man and woman in Britain wishing to work with children not only branded a potential paedophile until they submit themselves to a Criminal Records Bureau Check, but banned from going near other people's children until they do so. Child salvationists claim this as some sort of victory.

Many others see this as the end of a civilized society.

Ad industry OKs climate porn

I wss one of the Complainants...

And I'm not at all surprised at this cowardly verdict. I really didn't expect the ASA to come out against their paymasters, but - hey - it was worth a try. It's truly pathetic that a huge swathe of public opinion is almost totally ignored, dismissed and/or belittled simply because it doesn't follow the Government line. We are not 'climate change deniers' - we don't deny the existence of naturally occurring climate change - we simply dispute the causes.

The ASA should feel ashamed of themselves - not for not finding in favor of my complaint, but because they willfully seek to continue to propagandize on behalf of their paymasters in Government and business, ignoring the arguments and strongly-held views of thousands of 'deniers'.

Well, now I know that's another puppet organization I shan't have to bother with again. I can just see the smug b*stards on the BBC reporting this one. Still, patience... patience. The truth will out in the end. It always does.

Once impenetrable PS3 cracked wide open

Yep

I have to agree. I have no technical knowledge, no programming skills and absolutely no interest in bricking any of my games consoles, but I'm fascinated that some individuals have the time and the skill to dedicate to these technical challenges. I can appreciate that on a purely personal level managing to gain entry to a closed system must be quite satisfying, whatever the intention.

Kids like these should be snapped up by tech companies - I wish I'd been half as clever.

New music file aims to sink piracy using blogs and Twitter

The benefit of the doubt

Hmmm. Let's not be quite so quick to dimiss this out of hand as yet another evil machination on the part of greedy music moguls still pining for the lost Eden of limitless profits from an out-dated retail mechanism. I'll whisper it, but this could actually represent some of the first progressive thinking in how music is sold and marketed in the digital era.

I know. It's a heresy, but there you go. If the music business spent more time investing in this sort of R&D, rather than staging endless showtrials and employing ambulance-chasing lawyers we might actually see a greater proportion of music fans being prepared to ditch their torrent clients and embrace a value-added, content-rich, continuously updated retail model.

I know it's cool to hate on the fat-cat music biz crooks, but let's just see if they give this idea or something similar a try. For all their lazy, petulant intransigence, I'm still willing to let them state their case make a fresh start of it.

Wall-punching Brit gamer foams (milk) at the mouth

LOL

This is *exactly* what the interwebz was invented for.

Boffins: Give up on CO₂ cuts, only geoengineering can work

Man Made Climate Change Is A Global Lie

I've long been of the opinion that the Man-Made Climate Change argument is a complete nonsense, growing more hysterical and far-fetched by the day, it seems. I'm all for genuine environmental protection (saving habitats, natural resources, endangered species, etc), but it seems 'climate change' is all the rage these days, so who cares about saving wild Rhinos and Indian Tigers..?

Climate change is a wholly natural and expected phenomenon - history (there, in the ice cores and the geology) tells us this old world has endured countless such temperature fluctuations across the millenia - most minor, some truly catastrophic - but the ship eventually rights itself and sails on. Humanity's hubris is breathtaking: to presume our insignificant blip of a time on this complex planet could alter an entire planet's weather system...

How future generations will laugh at us: mugged by crooks in power and business to swallow this utter bullsh*t about climate change just so we can all bend over and be taxed three times over (or more) to meet our carbon emissions (not we'll be making any money out of all that trading, mind). It's an utter scandal and global embarrassment. History will not be kind.