Posts by Matt Bryant

Assange takes extradition fight to Supreme Court

Shum mishtake?

"....case as a matter of general public importance...." Shirley, that should be a case of unbelievable self-importance generating an erroneous belief that it is a matter of general public importance?

Hopefully, A$$ange's latest attempt to avoid justice will fail at the first hurdle, and he will stop wasting taxpayers' money and the courts' time with his nonsensical blathering that it's all Unlce Sam trying to "get him". Yeah, Uncle Sam was in bedrooms in Sweden, hiding all his condoms - not! What's the betting that if he loses he'll try doing a runner?

Naked vegans target Prince Harry over meaty 12-incher

RE: Richard Wharram

They do look a bit undernourished, probably their diet making them look so tired. Maybe they sent two vegans in order to match the "work-rate" of one omniverous lady! Me, I'd steer clear - experience has led me to notice that veggie girls are much more likley to break wind during times of exercise.....

Standard put-down to PETA/nanny types - Hitler was a veggie and a teetotaler.

Electric car crash leads to battery blaze

RE: Eco warrior's to shame...

Ah, but I have the answer (to shutting up the Greenpeckers)! I have a solution that is not only truly "Green", it has zero emmissions (apart from plenty of swearing when going up hills), and also has secondary health benefits! The next time a Greenpecker is dissing your choice of motor, simply ask him why he doesn't use the following as his family transport? (It also has the added side benefit that a few of these being hit by articulated lorries should thin out the annoying Greenpecker population quite nicely....)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quadricycle_Intl_Q-cycle-6_06.JPG

Oracle coughs up $35m owed in unpaid overtime pay

RE: Captain Underpants

".....we're still getting letters and emails asking us whether we want to renew our support contract for some kit that we don't own...." Yes, but how many other companies have such bills going to their purchasing departments, which don't have a clue as to which servers are where or whether they're alive or decom'd, and simply pay up? How else do you think Hurd gets to his "hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Solaris installs"?

Latest Call of Duty day-one sales hit $400m

$400m!!!

Dammit, don't these people know there's a RECESSION on!!!

/Sun mode off

iOS upgrade swells iPhone battery-suckage grief

RE: Optional you say?

LOL! I can guess what the answer is:

APPLE: "Hello, this is Apple Support, how can I help you?"

SHEEPLE: "Hey, my iPhone4S has awful battery life, what are you going to do about it?"

APPLE: "We're very sorry to hear you are not completely happy with your Apple product, but we insist it must be the way you're using it."

SHEEPLE: "What!?!"

APPLE: "Don't worry, we have a fix for all the user-generated issues in the coming iPhone5, would you like to pre-order one today at full price?"

SHEEPLE: "Baaaaaa! Of course!"

World's only twin jet-engine bike drives onto eBay

RE: James Hughes 1

"You are going to need some pretty impressive ear defenders for that baby." Probably just new eardrums! The original Argus pulsejets used on the V1s were not just incredibly noisy, but also had a very destructive blast wave due to the relatively low frequency of the pulses. The Nazis were desperate to make cheap aircraft using the Argus pulsejets to give an even cheaper option to the Heinkel HE 162 Slamander, but the continual blasting of the pulsejets actually had a destructive effect on wooden-framed and -skinned aircraft like the Messerschmitt 328! Something that can literally blast wood apart just by being run in close proximity is not going to be good for your health!

Oracle dubs Solaris 11 world's 'first cloud OS'

RE: HP Shill

Note how the Sunshiner can't supply any reasoning as to why the Slowaris virtualisation could be "zero overhead", and steers firmly clear of the fact that the majority of the Slowaris implentations mentioned generate no revenue for Snoreacle.

RE: TPM - Solaris 11: Crossbow, Network Virtualization, LDoms, Xen, KVM

Thanks for the marketing splurge, Novatose (by the way, where ARE those SPARC V systems you used to pump so noisily?), but I predict the average company's response will be "Meh, it runs on that expensive dog SPARC, we'll just keep on buying VMware instead."

Zero-overhead virtualisation

Top-notch comedy from Oracle! Only real case I can think of is hardware partitioning on hp Integrity, and that's hardly granular. Maybe what Hurd meant was "zero interest virtualisation", as in no-one is interested in it. And exactly how many of those "hundreds and hundreds of thousands" of installed instances is Larry getting a support payment for?

US doctors demand right to advise on gun ownership

RE: No

"......to make sure the dumbasses aren't putting their children or other people at risk...." Wow, did it take long to develop that overbearing belief that you are so much smarter than everyone else and that you have the right to tell them what to do? I see many more kids being killed each year when driving their parents' cars because their parents didn't think to teach them some real driving skills.

I'm not exactly thick (I would qualify for MENSA with plenty of points to spare if I could be bothered), and I see no problem with sensible gun ownership. I actually know a rocket scientist (well, missile one) that shoots regularly. I even know a surgeon (sorry, not a brain surgeon, but a peadeatric one) that looks forward each year to the 12th of August.

RE: I'm sorry

The advice should be coming from someone qualified. Personally, I think any member of the public that wants a firearm should have to do a safety course before gaining their licence, but that course should be delivered by an authorised body with the actual knowledge of gun use and safety.

RE: Idiotic article

Wow, it's like playing "spot the bandwagon humper"! Note the revealling trend - disbelief of simple statistics; preference for emotional decision-making rather than factual analysis; prediliction for supporting "I know what's best for you" ideas. I'm making a pretty safe bet when I guess you also want Gitmo closed, Assange knighted, and blame out current economic mess on "the bankers" rather than our politicians?

Doctors should be practicing medicine, not politics.

Lemmings

RE: TakeTheSkyRoad

I always thought they could have had a really successful sequel if they'd called it "Anti-Lemmings", with the object of the game being to stop any lemmings escaping by using their "skills" to guide them to their doom in the quickest time possible! After wasting many an hour trying to save the ungrateful and unco-operative little b*ggers, I would quite happilly have spent a few deliberately leading them to their death.

'Angry Bird' netflinger projectile brings down drug ultralights

"Yeah, good smuggler, just fly straight and level for me...."

I assume neither option was tested against unco-operative and manouvering targets? I'd love to see how they get close enough to ram a prop against a dodging target, especially if it's Reaper-like remote-by-video piloting, AKA like looking through a straw. And the net-launcher would require the target to also be relatively co-operative as it would be easy to watch the launching vehicle approach, then manouvere the minute they got in range.

A more realistic deterent would be the chopper with a radio, loudspeaker and a chain-gun: "This is US Border Patrol helicopter Welcome One to unidentified ultralight, land your aircraft and surrender immediately, you have one minute to comply!"....... BRRRRAAAP! "Welcome One to Control, splash one! Best send out a meatwagon to sort out the dope from what's left of the dope."

New plastic telescope ammo machine gun is light as a rifle

RE: Stability of Plastic

I'm also curious as to whether there is any plastic residue in the chamber after sustained firing with plastic-cased rounds. Caseless ammo is potentially even worse - to make it waterproof, solid and stable, other chemicals are added to the powder mix to bond it together, and they were reputedly a problem with fouling for the G11.

I'm also wondering where does this leave the 6.8mm SPC round which is supposedly so close to US Special Forces' hearts. I presume a rifle/LMG made to chamber the new 5.56mm plastic-cased rounds could be rebarelled to fire one with plastic-cased, telescoped 6.8mm SPC....?

Feds back down from legalizing government lies

RE: Dahak

"....Nixon's Southern Strategy....." Very old history. Do please try again.

"....the ultra rightist bias in the American Media...." Really? Where? We talking about the same "listening to Obama I got a shiver down my leg" media? Get real!

RE: Same reason

"....maybe they judge the current players on their policies and invidual merits...." Yeah, because The Obumbler's main selling points where his extensive experience and policies - NOT! The guy was barely out of the kindergarten of US politics.

RE: A Republican pro "free speech"?

Why is it that people making fun of Republicans always conveniently forget that the Dummicrats are not exactly coated in glory when it comes to human rights, lying, etc? After all, Lyndon Johnson, accused as fabricating the Tonkin incident as part of some plan to escalate the Viet Nam war, was a Dummicrat. Or the fact the Republican party was formed bu anti-slavery activists to fight the pro-slavery Dummicrats, the same Dummicrats that formed the KKK. Yeah, that's right, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. Even simple marks of respect, such as when Reagan signed up Martin Luther King Jr Day as a national holiday, all conveniently forgotten in the rush to swallow the latest hype. Looks like the "pliant press" aren't the real problem, it's the appallingly low level of historical knowledge amongst far too many of the US electorate.

The Great Smartphone OS Shoot-out

RE: Ian Ferguson

".....If one platform has a killer feature for you, then you don't need a comparison."

OK, here's my alternate review from the viewpoint of a business user.

Apple - potentially insecure, with restricted business app availability and no way as an admin to tailor the phone build - I get what Apple gives me and that's it. The end user has more control than the admin. If I want to try using business apps via a web interface I have the problem of no Flash support. And the phone is guaranteed to be a major distraction for any user, with iTunes chewing up bandwidth and allowing movies and music to be introduced onto the corporate storage when the users insist on backing up their iTunes on work desktops. Major fail, nil points.

Android - more secure, can be tailored, but I have to build the new phone stack by hand. Work apps, how do I view or edit MS Office attachments? I suppose I can at least relie on web interfaces, Android does have better web support than Apple iOS. But how do I get it to work with Exchange/Outlook (yeah, get your head out of the sand, Exchange/Outlook is still the dominant email combo in business)? A lot of fiddling will be required to get there. I also don't have a centralised management server, so if I have a clever user they can reverse any controls I put on the handset, and even install their own stack. Not quite a fail, but not the best option.

MS Win Phone 7 - questions over security simply due to heritage. No problems linking to other MS products like Exchange/Outlook, MS Office Phone 2010 looks good, when it gets here. So, a work in progress, but not quite there yet.

BB - only proven, secure email system. Recent BIS issues were the first for years, ublike the many issues with Apple phones (are you holding it right?). Office docs not an issue, I have real centralised control through BES, and I can even remotely brick a stolen phone at my leisure. BB is still the clear winner.

Welsh gov splashes its cash on 10 lucky resellers

RE: No Dell?!?!

This is the margin-thin desktop bid, so Dell probably won't be too upset. The one to watch is the list for the servers and storage as that is where the real moeny will be.

Palestine fingers Israel for blasting Gaza off the net

RE: Meaner Philips in disguise

"Matt, i'd never have thought you'd be an apologist for Israel too...." So, being aware of a few historical facts (which I note you don't bother to try rebutting) makes me an "apologist"? I suppose it's just people that have fews that show up your ignorance that get labelled as "apologists", right?

"......but almost laughable that it's the Palestinians that won't negotiate...." Netanyahu has offered talks to Abbas many times, it is Fatah that has refused, that is a simple fact. Try doing some background reading before jumping on whatever is the fashionable political bandwagon of the moment. Indeed, Netanyahu actually ordered a six month halt on settlement building in a previous attempt to get Abbas to the table, and Fatah refused. Netanyahu has made the same offer again this week, and again it has been refused. The Obumbler has been beating his head against the Fatah wall for two years now in an attempt to get them to the table, all without success. Please do explain how that is "laughable" as it seem quite tragic to me.

"....The jewish settlers are nutters just like Hamas...." And I suppose you made an in-depth study of the issues, there, right? Yeah, right! The big difference is that when there is an attack on the Fakeistinians it is investigated by the Israelis and, if it proves to have been committed by settlers, they are arrested and tried. Here is just one example http://www.israel-palestinenews.org/2010/11/israeli-settler-convicted-of-kidnapping.html. On the other hand, when Fakeistinians of any political group attack Israelis it is lauded as an heroic act. As just one example, the PA recently named a square after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, whose "heroic act" was being part of a 1978 Fatah attack that killed 38 civillians (including 13 kids) and an unarmed American nature photographer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_Road_massacre). Hilariously, the naming of the square coincided with the 2010 visit of Joe Biden, when the media got in a frenzy over the announcement that the Jerusalem authority was processing a permission to build some houses in East Jerusalem, which was somehow much more of a horrific incitement than naming a square after a childmurderer. But I'm betting your skimreading of history missed out on the whole Mughrabi episode too.

"....They have a god given right to live in occupied land cos some dusty old book promised it...." Sorry, do you mean the Muslims?

"....don't see them negotiating any time soon...." There will be negotiations when Fatah accepts the offer of talks already made many times by the Israelis. Indeed, waaay back when Bill Clinton was prez, the Israelis (Ehud Barak) made an offer that was 95% of the West Bank plus bits of current Israel and safe passage routes to link to Gaza, plus limited right of return, yet Arafat prefered to walk away from the table and start the Intifada. Political commentators were astounded that Arafat turned down such a genearous offer, indeed he didn't even attempt to negotiate, he just returned to violence.

"....Stick to trolling about HP...." I suggest you stick to reading IndyMedia, as facts seem to just upset you.

RE: James Micallef

Membership of UNESCO should be reserved for full states. Like Israel, the Fakestinians had the chance to become a full and proper state in 1948, which would have granted them full UN membership and inclusion on such bodies as UNESCO, but instead the Arabs decided they'd rather try and wipe out the Jews. They threw away their chance, and they've thrown away every chance since. Why should they be rewarded when they have avoided talks and refused to negotiate with Israel?

RE: Flamers at the ready

The Fakeistinians have failed to meet their obligations under the Oslo Accord, failed to stop violence (the barrier stopped the bombers, not Fatah), have failed to punish terrorists that have launched attacks from the West Bank, and still do not recognise Israels right to exist (one of the preconditions of Oslo). The demand for a stop on settlement expansion is just Fatah's way of avoiding talks. No-one has asked Arabs in Israel to stop building anything as a precondition to talks. When Netanyahu and his predecessors offered talks, Fatah have refused them at every opportunity.

Meanwhile, the Obumbler administration and the EU throw more and more money at Fatah in an attempt to create a viable economy, in the hope that work will give the average West Banker a reason not to go suicide bombing. It's not surprising the Palis kept their banking system secure, but that's probably only so no-one finds out how much of those US dollars are being piped off into Fatah goons' accounts.

RE: How is it

The UN partition plan was accepted by the Jews, it was the Arabs that then tried to steal the bit given to the Jews. The problem for the Arabs was the Jews fought better despite being outnumbered, because they wanted a home, whereas the Arabs already had homes and just wanted the Jews NOT to have a home.

RE: James Micallef

Yeah, but three-quarters of the original pizza was given to the Arabs by us Brits without consulting the Jews. It's called Jordan. The Jews then agreed to accept a small and irregular piece of the remaining slice as decided by the UN, only the Arabs said no pizza for the Jews was their prefered option. Do you understand that? UN makes decision, Jews agree (despite it being much less pizza than they were promised), but Arabs with already more than 85% of the pizza in the bag said "no". I know it's not fashionable to remind the fashionably irate of the historical facts, but then you sound so uneducated it really needs doing.

Yeah, right!

If the Israeli authorities wanted to kill the Fakeistinian Internet, they wouldn't need to go to all the trouble of a massive DDoS, seeing as all the Paltel outgoing lines go out via Israel. I'm sure the Israelis have it rigged so, if needed, they just press one button and the West Bank and Gaza all get disconnected. The truth is Israel has more than enough PFYs with nothing better to do than to make a LOIC clone (maybe called LOI-oiyoiyoi-C?).

Nude lady recreates Star Wars tauntaun scene in dead horse

RE: Too late

Years ago I read the Star Wars idea of using the dead mount as an igloo was inspired by a Red Indian legend of a warrior that hid from his enemies on the battlefield by gutting and crawling inside his dead pony.

Applied Micro leaps ahead in ARM server race

RE: OS porting

".....HP will port VMS to ARM...." Yeah, did you actually even try thinking about what that would involve? First off, Itanium was designed to be a porting-friendly platform, it is equal-endian and has more than enough registers to cope with even highly-demanding languages like NonStop or OpenVMS. The job of squeezing that type of CPU load into the ARM cores would be beyond a quart-into-a-pint-pot job, we're talking more of a gallon into a thimble! We already have plenty of ARM cores on the market but the biggest impact is with smartphones from Apple and HTC, running cut-down BSD/Linux OSs, not even proper desktop OSs. ARm cores may appear soon in low-end PCs, but they will be budget home jobs for consumers, and probably won't be in corporate desktops for a few years yet.

If hp should ever see the need to port off Itanium for any of their enterprise OSs, it is much more likely to be to another enterprise design such as x64. The 64-bit ARM cores are interesting for low-power (as in "low CPU performance") replacements for bottom-end x64 servers and desktops/notebooks, but they have a long way to go until they can challenge Xeon/Opteron, let alone Itanium.

Please try and keep at least one foot in reality for your next post.

RE: X86 vs ARM RISC

Whilst 128-bit cores would be fun, they would need a big push to get OSs and applications re-written to take advantage of the extra addressing, otherwise there would be zero advantage (and probably a cost disadvantage) to running 64-bit code on them compared to a 64-bit core. The UNIX vendors needed to go to 64-bit to maitain a scaling advantage over M$ Windows, and to address larger memory spaces. When M$ (and Linux) moved to 64-bit it was to chase after the UNIX OSs and to improve their own scaling. It would take a massive investment from software vendors to move up to 128-bit, and 64-bit is fulfilling their current needs, so unless there is a real need (such as to stay ahead of Android maybe?), I can't see it happening soon.

HP Project Moonshot hurls ARM servers into the heavens

Hmmmmm.....

OK, a thumbs up to hp for being the tier-one vendor first-out-the-gate with a product, but there are some points which make me go "meh":

1. Big issue - not 64-bit. I just don't have much 32-bit requirement outside virtual desktops, and seeing as that's going VDI it won't go ARM. I assume hp were worried about a 64-bit ARM version cannibalising some low-end Proliants, but other vendors without a Xeon range won't be so bothered by going straight to 64-bit versions.

2. Why the SL chassis, why not a real blade chassis like the C7000?

3. If I lose a CPU I assume I have to replace a whole 4-CPU card, so I also assume I lose four running images (if I'm running one image per CPU, it could be more) to fix a problem with one.

Sorry, I'll wait for the Atom variant or the 64-bit ARM one, thanks.

Coming to a webfarm near you soon!

"......"There are a lot of customers that I have talked to who think 32-bit is just fine," says Santeler. The chips will probably be good at web serving, web caching, and big data chewing workloads where processing data in smaller bits is the norm, not the exception......"

In other words, as long as the product sits in the same group as the x64 Proliant servers, it will always be held back just enough to make sure it doesn't impinge on Xeon/Opteron Proliant sales.

RE: I remember....

"Bit of string? You were lucky! We had to make our own string out of our own hair! And we didn't have cans, no, cans were for fancy companies. We had to staple our left hands into cup shapes and attach the human hair string to a toothpick shoved under the fingernail of your index finger. We had to get up for work three hours before we went to bed, work twenty-five hours a day on the helpline, and come payday our boss would chop us up into little pieces!"

"Aye, those were the days!"

/apologies to Palin, Chapman, Jones and Idle.

It's time to end the Windows Wait

RE: ZZZZZZzzzzzzz

I have one "media server" PC still running a five-year-old Gigabyte i-RAM, loaded with junk PC133 modules that would have been on eBay otherwise. It has served as the boot disk for those six years without a fault (apart from the time wifey disconnected the mains plug so should could plug in the vaccum cleaner, and the built-in backup battery drained over the weekend, clearing the i-RAM's boot image!). True, the capacity is not 1TB, it's actually only running 4GB, but that's more than enough for a boot image. I've seen clearance stock of i-RAMs on places like eBay going for $50..... If the battery dies on the current i-RAM I'll probably go look for an i-RAM Box (instead of a PCI slot it uses standard 5.25in disk slots) and use up some of the junk DDR400 modules I have spare. They seem a lot more reliable than the current crop of cheaper SSDs.

HP hooks up with Calxeda to form server ARMy

RE: An ominous cow heard

"Maybe you should get some experience in reading and logic, Matt....." Maybe you should actually stop for a second and get an adult to help you think about why we're using expensive platforms like 64-bit UNIX on Power and Itanium rather than just all Wintel/Lintel? That's because x64 doesn't (yet) meet our business requirements, so there is no way an even less-capable ARM CPU, 32-bit or 64-bit, is going to do the job. And seeing as I really don't think IBM and hp are making kit just for us, it would seem there is a large market out there that also won't be able to do what they need to do on x64, and definately not on ARM.

"....you can have >2GB of physical memory without a >2GB logical address space, just like Xeons used to...." Yes, and that was a software trick, which gave us all types of fun with memory holes! I remember working with hp Netservers many years ago that were prone to the issue - your memory useage would go above 2GB and suddenly the server crashed! We switched to Compaq Proliants because they had a clever trick for pushing the memory hole higher up the memory, so you only hit it if you went over 3.6GB, but it was still there. Thanks, but I think I'll avoid that again, especially as Atom doesn't have that issue.

Yes, a low-powered option to x64 will do well in such low-performance tasks as webserving, fileserving, NAS and printserving, which are pretty much OS-agnostic, but it won't even hold a candle to current low-end Nehalems in terms of performance, let alone Itanium, and performance becomes more and more of a factor as you get into departmental servers and higher up the enterprise. Low CPU current draw alone is not the only factor in making server buying decisions, especially for generic business servers, and especially if it means you have to recompile and re-test all your applications. Atom won't require a recompile or waiting for my app vendors to re-accredit and support a new core, as ARM will. Webserving has a low barrier of entry for a new CPU design - costs are usually a prime concern, so low current draw is a big advantage; massive memory footprints are not required; lots of small threads can be handled in parallel, each on a separate core; and webservers will probably perform just as well on ARM as x64 when the limitting factor is usually the bandwidth available to the remote user accessing the website. Now, you try and string together a coherent post about why you disagree and we can call it a discussion, otherwise you're just sprouting laughable wishful thinking.

RE: Wake up Matt

"....de rigeur amongst Wintel-dependent IT departments...." Actually, as well as Windows, we have RHEL, AIX and hp-ux all virtualised on different platforms. Apart from some VDI test instances, it's all 64-bit, and about 95% of the images are using much more than 2GB of RAM. Maybe you should get some experience in an enterprise environment. Good luck trying to run an enterprise instance of Oracle RAC or DB2 with less than 2GB of RAM for your hot tables, even with SSDs!

RE: @Matt

"....hardware vendor led campaign...." What have you been smoking? Virtualisation allows much more efficient use of servers, the vendors were much happier back in the days of 20% average server useage before virtualisation came along and upset the applecart. And the majority of virtualised environments (even the UNIX ones) I hear of are going in as consolidation exercises on blades or 2- or 4-socket rack servers, not big servers.

As for ARM-based thin-clients, the article specifically says these are datacenter servers, not desktop VDU boxes. And please don't mention SUN's thin client farce, not unless you're doing so with a suitibly sarcastic tone. You'll find tech like VMware's VDI offers much more flexible options.

Maybe hp are aiming for the telecoms market or maybe they see the opportunity for some form of high-speed, massively-parallel switching device. Or just a webserver consolidation platform.

Webserving?

After all, for real enterprise apps like databases or virtualisation you need the extra memory addressability of x64. If it was 64-bit ARM that HP was working on, then Chipzilla might be worried, otherwise this is more of threat to webserver CLUe like Niagara.

Google won't face Oracle in court until next year

Damn!

And me with all this popcorn ready to go!

McKinnon's mum up for human rights gong

RE: Naughtyhorse

Wow, why not assume the worst? For all you know the judge and jury could accept the idea that McCrim had no evil intent and was/is just a schmuck. Surely it would have been better to get him in front of a jury before he got painted as just trying any excuse to get out of facing the music for an act he already admitted to?

And please do detail exactly what it is that you think makes him unlikely to get a fair trial, or can we just assume that's more blow-hard venting?

WikiLeaks on verge of financial collapse, founder says

How much?

So, how does 20 employees equate to $3.5m? Assuming a million for the costs of running their website would still be generous, leaving an average wage of $125k. Oh, I suppose I should take into account A$$nut's salary plus his travel costs, legal costs, hair-dresser costs.... At least donators can rest assured none of their money gets wasted on condoms!

HP boasts of 3PAR benchmark boost

RE: craignunes

Must be an imposter! That was a technicaly coherent and reasonably short statement from a supposed hp veep!

Nipples and teen lesbians sexy even when ironic, ASA rules

RE: AC

".....but quite often you don't get a choice about what ads get shown to you until too late...." Wrong on two levels.

Firstly, ad campaigns are targeted - they do a deal with Sky/Virgin/ITV/C4 to get certain timeslots on certain channels, aiming for certain demographics. For example, they won't put an ad for Duke Nukem on the buy-crap-jewellery-shopping channels as the audience are largely dim-witted women with zero interest in gaming. But, they will want to target times and channels where programs popular with the demographic are shown (Scyfy, Sky1, etc), so if you happen to like that same type of program then you're right in that demographic.

Secondly, you could watch ad-free TV such as the BBC. Well, if you have a low threshold for entertainment, that is. Or simply close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears the minute the ads come on. No-one is forcing you to watch pixellated gyrating lesbians with or without their nipples on display.

RE: What's the point.....

Ah, but that is the source of the (tiny number of) complaints. What happens is the missus insists on some "quality time" together (i.e., not staring at the back of the gamer's head), so you end up pretending to enjoy one of her fatuous soaps in order to placate her. Imagine how angry she gets when her "quality time" is interrupted by said Duke Nukem ad. The numbers say it all - a grand total of 34 gamers were being forced to suffer "quality time" during the run of this ad campaign!

Why so shy on pay-by-wave, Nokia?

RE: Lost count...

"....A criminal can't use a scanner to read people's cards....you have to have a merchant account....." Really? So what happens during a purchase then? There is no need to scan the card, just make it think it's taking part in a real purchase. All the crim has to do is set up a front company, create a bank account using some other individual's details (go look up ID theft, then read how money launderers use fake businesses with real bank and VISA accounts to "wash" cash), get a merchant account, then they can have a legit means to charge RFID-enabled cards or phones. You could even clone a real merchants setup, create a bank account in the real businesses name but under your control (with fake ID), then the police and VISA will end up chasing after an innocent party whilst the crim goes happilly on their way.

".....the criminal would need to be 10-20cm away from the card - this is the greatest distance an NFC card can be pushed to in the lab...." Sorry, but that lab must have been set up by the NFC lobby. The typical RFID device in credit cards and phones does not have a power-source of its own, they work by taking the power from the scanner's signal and then using that to send a reply. If you boost the scanner signal high enough you will boost the reply, and if your scanner has a highly sensitive receiver then it will pick up the reply from further away. That's simple radio wave physics, your only worry is the signal-to-noise ratio. I remember a DEFCON article where they managed to read one at fifty-plus feet several years ago, so pedestrian chokepoints like underground exits (usually about ten to twelve feet wide) would be perfect.

Blow for McKinnon as extradition treaty ruled 'not biased'

RE: France has it right: No deportation but a trial in France

"....why else would the UK allow the US NSA to have a base in this country?...." It's called intelligence sharing, rather useful in fighting international criminals, spying and terrorism.

"....No one, but no one has any base in the USA....." Not quite. For example, the British forces make much use of US bases inside the US for such fun as desert training. The US presence in the UK is because we asked them to stay in view of the post-War threat of the Soviets. They didn't really need us to do likewise in the US.

"....France has always stood up for it's rights, ever since DeGaulle was around...." De Gaulle was very anti-US and anti-UK because both Chruchill and Roosevelt didn't want him as the leader of the Free French during WW2. Instead, they wanted a rather more malleable French admiral to head up the Free French as part of the British forces rather than a separate entity. De Gaulle never forgave the Allies, even after the Yanks manufactured the Free French entry of Paris to appease him. Meanwhile, the OSS and MI6 decided to betray the French communists in the Underground, who were thought to be planning a post-War coup to take France into the Soviet sphere. So, having thoroughly upset both the Left and Right of French politics, it's no surprise that the French have remained anti-US to this day.

"....Time the wimp Cameron put some meaning in the phrase 'Great Britain'...." Surely standing by our treaty commitments and following legal process is a good thing, or do we only qualify as "great" if we go by your obviously biased views?

Missing the big picture.

All the posters whining on and on and ON about "poor ickle Gary", take a second and think what the real aim of the Septics is here - they want to make an example of him to deter other hackers, simple as that. They cannot allow someone to hack their systems and then get off scot free. They will use all legal avenues to get a conviction, and should they pass scrutiny here in the UK then they will get Mr McKinnon on a plane to the States. They will then proceed with a big show trial to ensure the message gets slammed home in ten-foot neon - don't fsck with the US military's networks. Regardless of how they may sympathise with his plight, the UK's politicians will also be mindful of the fact that they also want to discourage hackers, so they will not put up too much of a fight. McKinnon is stuffed by his own stupidity, and the longer he and his family and their supporters (many of the latter having their own agenda which doesn't really give two figs about McKinnon) draw it out the worse the eventual trial will be.

RE: WTF! Its equal, not biased?! ... Bullshit! ... Absolute Bullshit!

Oh, how that made me laugh! I do so hope that post was sarcasm, you would have a stellar career in comedy ahead of you. If not, then I suggest upping your meds and getting a good dose of reality.

HP fortifies VirtualSystem arsenal

RE: Once Upon A Time

Oh dear. Your fixation with clock speed completely misses the fact that the Itanium core does a lot more with each clock than x64 cores. Were applications take advantage of that, the Itanium is still much "faster" than the x64.

RE: Problem with the enterprise HP PR

Shush! Some of us make a tidy living from doing the "translation" that actually lets the board think they know what they're buying. If hp talked sense I'd have to make much more use of the cattleprod!