Posts by Steve

Engineers are troublesome 'expert loners', says prof

Following instructions

If you're looking for someone to just follow a plan and not think about it, don't get an engineer, get a robot.

The engineer is there to *build* the robot.

New York cops seek tech solution to plod-v-plod shootings

Solve it with a vat of Dulux

No-one except a cop who's been issued the equipment is going to run around the streets with a bright pink gun.

Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology

@ Religious prejudice

And after they've been to Scientology.org maybe they should check out Operation Clambake at www.xenu.net

Tory who claimed brother's tech gear on expenses quits

Re: How's it fraud

"It's not fraud in the slightest if the expenses are signed off, which they were."

The Green Book states that the ACA is for "those additional costs wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred to enable you to stay overnight away from your only or main UK residence, either in London or in the constituency" so I'd love to hear how spending £1,600 on a house for your ducks meets this test.

I'd also like to hear why my MP needs a second house so large that his claims for mortgage interest came to £5,000 more than I earned last year. In what way can that be considered "necessary"?

Dutch cat skinner publishes critics' personal details

Re: Re: @what's the problem?

'if you eat one animal then you shouldn't complain about any others being killed under any circumstances ever cos otherwise you're the worst kind of hypocrite'

That's not what he said and you know it - in fact we all know it as we can see what he wrote on this very page.

He's saying that if you are prepared to kill one type of animal for food/clothing, it's hypocritical to complain when someone does the exact same thing to another animal just because you consider one to be a pet and the other to be food. You're making that out to be "if you wear leather shoes, you might as well stamp on a spaniel". Can you see the difference?

Unless you just don't like the way she killed it - what's your preferred method for dispatching a cat?

'Chief whip' tweet suggests early general election

Gullibility?

Given some of the technical incompetence displayed by this government, this could easily have been true.

MP expenses leaker may never be found

Let's hope they never find him

He can become an urban legend that we use to scare MPs.

Wacky Jacqui defends Michael Savage ban

@ TIm J

"You might not like what she's doing - you might not like what any of the MPs are doing - but fuck right off with your arsehole analysis about the number of hours they work!"

It's not unreasonable to assume she only works 20 hours - if she worked as long and as hard as you claim, then she'd have done something right by now even if it was only accidental.

As for busting a gut to deal with our queries, the last time I wrote to my (Conservative) MP and specifically asked for HIS stance on an issue, he forwarded my letter to Ruth fucking Kelly!

It's very easy to say "most MPs aren't that bad" but just try and find one of these hard working MP.

Banned US shock-jock demands Clinton intervention

@ Dave Ross

I think we should extradite her, but make him pay the legal fees - and then live with her.

Could Sadville break the internet with nakedness?

Re: Re: Wankers

"I would just like to see the debate mature a smidge here."

And I'd like to claim lap-dances on expenses, but it ain't gonna happen. Immaturity is the only redeeming feature of Second Life - I honestly can't think of a better way to bring down the pompous and self-righteous than a swarm of flying penises.

@ Mike

"most residents are retards of the 120-160 IQ variety"

Educated idiots are always the worst.

Pirate-pursuing lawyers get DDo$ money transfer slap

Re: Childish

"When I became a man, I put away childish things...

...such as the the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up"

C. S. Lewis

Site schools world+dog in browsing history pilfering

Can't even find my current pages, nevermind history

It only found three sites and I had four tabs open in Firefox.

The site it didn't find was hsx.com and I know for a fact that I've got a cookie for that site.

UK gov squeezes 'best pricing' pledge from MS

@ Mike

"so, if i were to take a copy of windows and move it from one computer to another - that's what they mean when they are talking about open source?"

It's more like you take a copy of Windows, try to move it from one computer to another and suddenly find out that MS are going to screw for another license. So you say rather loudly, "You know, that open source stuff I was reading about sounds interesting," and the price mysteriously drops.

Vatican damns Angels and Demons as 'quite harmless'

Re: Re: I know

Before you get carried away with yourself I really think we need to clarify what type of bear this is.

We should probably standardize it to a brown straw bear with a polar straw bear and black straw bear being slightly more or less of an exaggeration respectively.

Mozilla mauls Microsoft on IE, Windows 7 bundle

There are two types of people

1. Those who buy a computer and will use the software that's bundled and...

2. People who install the system themselves.

For group 1, bundling is irrelevant as they'll use whatever Dell etc installs and those companies are free to put in whatever browser they like while they're adding the rest of their proprietary software and AV packages. For the rest of us, installing an alternative to IE is part of the windows installation process. I installed the Windows 7 RC the other night and I didn't consider the process complete until I'd added Kapersky, Firefox and a graphics card driver.

English vocab poised to hit 1m words

Reg hacks slacking off

Surely we now need a new term to describe the phenomena of increasing neologisms.

Home Office to keep innocent DNA samples

@ anonymous ex-plod

"Oh and the 12 year olds on the database are there for a reason - muggings, theft, assault, violent crime, criminal damage - you name it. Most of them end up as career criminals - I don't see the interest in destroying their records? If they never commit another crime they shouldn't have anything to worry about..."

I was 12 the first time I was involved with the police. A kid blamed me for damaging his school bag (to avoid trouble from his parents) and plod came round to my house and tried to bully me into confessing on the basis that it "would be easier for everyone". Nowadays, I'd be kept on the database solely because of the accusation of a schoolchild.

Given that I spent my teenage years being stopped and searched by the police on an almost weekly basis I would inevitably have run up against the "no smoke without fire" attitude and the fact that I was on the database would work against me.

As for "most of them end up as career criminals", care to back that up with some figures? No? Thought not.

Kebabs pose 'no danger whatsoever', Russians claim

@ Paranoia?

"but all the evidence is that a vegetarian diet is actually FAR healthier than a carnivorous one."

Utter bullshit - what the evidence actually shows is that most vegetarians tend to do more exercise and pay more attention to their general health. Once you factor them out, you're left with a bunch of lard-arses shoveling there faces full of chips and cake. However, there does seem to be significant evidence that a vegetarian diet leads to an inability to distinguish between causation and correlation.

Maybe the reason you find normal eaters get "defensive" about your herbivorous diet is the fact that, after feigning shock at this attitude, you went straight on to tell us all why herbivores and better than everyone else.

Ron Howard accuses Pope of scuppering Dan Brown movie

Il Papa / Le Pape

I believe his proper title is actually Darth Ratzinger.

Meet Phorm's PR genius

@ HamsterWheel

"Happy that Phorm are creating British jobs (some of you may need to look this word up)."

Given that you describe yourself as a "shareholder" and your posting on here in the middle of the day, I'm not sure you're in any position to be playing the "get a job" card.

MEPs get the fear over nanotechnology

Grey goo

"MEPs declared that nanomaterials "potentially present significant new risks due to their minute size, such as increased reactivity and mobility, possibly leading to increased toxicity in combination with unrestricted access to the human body, and possibly involving quite different mechanisms of interference with the physiology of human and environmental species.""

That is actually a perfectly reasonable position. Smaller particles are absorbed more easily through the lungs so the safe level can vary with size.

It shouldn't be too surprising since, if nano-materials didn't have unusual properties, we wouldn't be bothering to mess around with them.

IP minister rules out 'three strikes' disconnection law

@kevin

"can anyone confirm whether downloading cleanly encoded tracks from an album i possess (on vinyl, for instance) is legal or not?"

Yes: you have paid for a license to access that content.

No: you do not have a license to copy that content.

1st, 3rd & 5th day of the week it's the first answer. 2nd, 4th & 6th it's the second. On the 7th day, flip a coin to decide and write a large cheque to a lawyer.

Pirate Bay judge and pro-copyright lobbyist accused of bias

@ Ian

"The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that was that the judge was either incompetent, or corrupt. Apparently it's the latter."

Given how easily he was found out, I'd say it's both.

€25k for an old Nokia handset?

What are the odds...

...that this rumour can be tracked backed to a German guy with a warehouse full of 1100s that he can't get shot of?

Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines

@ David Ashe

"I see the lull in quality of art, music, movies etc. all attributed to in-your-face mass distribution of anything and everything for free, we have become the "i want it ALL for free" culture, you only get what you pay for!!!"

If the drop in quality is due to downloading, how the fuck do you explain the 1980s?

The quality of music is not reduced because the poor record companies are running out of money to "invest", it's reduced because the major labels have a stranglehold over what music gets heard. There's still the same amount of talent in each generation, but the vast majority of air-time is given over to a small group of similar artists who are treated as consumables by the industry and replaced every 12-24 months.

$3.58m

Isn't that pretty much a life sentence?

I can't see the justification in handing down a fine that can't possibly be paid.

Pirate Bay fans: Lay off our neo-Nazi Sugar Daddy

@ Graham Marsden

"I note that you didn't quote the bit where I pointed out that your "So Nazi [sic] are cool?" comment was a Straw Man."

I read through what he quoted three times trying to figure out how he got from what you wrote to "Nazis are cool". It's traditional to exaggerate your opponent's position rather than just make it up completely.

I think he's getting as deluded as the freetards he likes to rant about.

Carphone Warehouse blocks union website

El Reg blocked by PC World

I had some friends who used to work in the PCW call centre in Sheffield who told me that the Register was blocked because management were worried about what staff might read on here.

A Twitter PR agency: Just what the world needs now

Is it just me...

Or is Twitter basically an RSS feed for people who don't have any actual news?

British film board rejects 'disturbing' sexual torture film

Bee Movie

It wasn't seeing it on TV that first gave me the idea of putting an aerosol and a lighter together - it was the words "Keep away from naked flames" written on the side.

Animal rights group protests seal clubbing in World of Warcraft

I see one small problem

More people are likely to try and join the seal hunt than try to stop it.

Report: Legalising drugs would save UK plc huge packet

Gang violence

There's also the eradication of the violence associated with the supply chain.

The drug trade is almost entirely run on credit and the violence arises because there's no legal way to enforce debts.

MPs battle to save great British pub

Re: Smoking

There's always a few who'll pop up to claim they go to the pub more often now, but they are in a small minority. We used to have two non-smoking pubs before the ban and they had the lowest trade. After the ban, the level of trade in the rest of the city's pubs has dropped to that of the previous non-smoking pubs.

Sure, there are other factors, but claiming the ban is irrelevant is just nonsense.

Most undergraduates 'show fear when asked to do maths'

@ Liam

"maybe they just find maths BORING and uninteresting. after all maths has no room for interpretation - its always a right/wrong answer."

Let me guess - you got bored of getting the wrong answer.

"to me maths is taught to an unnecessarily high standard anyway. how many people have actually used simultaneous equations by elminination since leaving school?"

So you're conflating what you learn with the standard to which you learn it and then stirring it a good helping of missing the point. It's a pity that they didn't teach you English to the same high standard that you were taught maths. You don't learn simultaneous equations so that you can then go around doing simultaneous equations everyday. It teaches abstract logical skills which are clearly in short supply in the general population. You learn it to a high degree of accuracy because a) in maths, if it's not accurate, it's wrong & b) no-one wants their kids being taught by a maths teacher who says "you'll never need it at McDonalds so don't worry about putting too much effort in".

However, I do think that describing this as "mathematical anxiety" is a bit of a cop out - it's innumeracy.

@ Destroy All Monsters

"An economist would say that they actually chose degress that they preferred as having some math in the curriculum actually lowered the preference ranking of the other degrees. So be it. Enjoy your toothless sociology."

Mr Kettle, meet Mr Pot. Economics is simply the branch of sociology that deals with people trading items and the fact that they use more numbers does not make it anymore of a science.

Playmobil Bible faces wrath of lawyers

What law is he breaking?

As far as I can tell, he hasn't tried to pass these of as actual Playmobil products and there's no claim that he's making money from it.

It's just a piece of art.

Texas senator wants to ban Vista purchases

So what if he "read a lot about it"?

Politicians rarely have first hand experience of the things they are legislating about or running. At least this guy seems to have understood what he read which is more than you can say about most politicians when they talk about technology. Compare and contrast:

"We have a lot of problems with the Vista program. It had a lot of bugs. It takes up a lot of memory. It's not compatible with other equipment, and it's supposed to be an upgrade from the XP program that is being used by state agencies, and it's not."

"The National Identity Register will be unhackable because it won't be connected to teh intawebs!"

The Pirate Bay punts BitTorrent cloaking device

Re: Ohh, honestly...

Did you get lost on the way to the Daily Mail?

@ Dave Barrett

You had me up to this point,

"That said I dont have a problem with people downloading copywritten material, just dont leach all of my bandwidth at the weekends!"

The only bandwidth anyone uses is that for which they have paid their ISP. Much as I have tried, it has been impossible for me to use more bandwidth than this.

Jacqui Smith pulls in another TV psych in violence probe

Re: take it up with Jaqui

"Anyway, if you do have a grievance, could you take it up with Jacqui so I don't have to moderate quite so much of the jumping up and down around here?"

Maybe you should change the link from "Post a comment" to read "Post something Sarah likes because, even though she's the moderator, she seems to get annoyed at having to actually do some moderation".

If it was about ending domestic violence against women and *children* you'd have a point about it not being sexist, but this is not just about domestic violence, it's about violence against "women and girls" in general committed by males. There's no mention of violence by females against males or by females against females or by males against males.

"Also, try and get away from the bloody *title* of the thing and try taking apart the content of the proposal which is not going to help anyone, male or female."

Yes, let's do that.

"As part of this, the Home Office will tackle "attitudes that may uphold it (violence against women) in order to help women and girls feel safe,"

"We also need to understand whether there is a link between exposure to these images and boys’ expectations about acceptable sexual behaviour, and to violence."

It's about helping females "feel" safe about males and looking at the way images of females might turn boys into wife-beaters. No pre-judgment there then.

"Ending violence towards women"

And they're planning to acheive this through a campaign fronted by Jacqui & Linda - two people who make me wish there was a way to stab someone through the television?

Maybe they'd do better without using two people who actually deserve a bit of violence

Profs design AK47-locating 'smart dust' helmets

Counter-sniping

"A helmet fitted with Ledeczi's system already knows exactly where it is and how it is oriented with respect to the gun muzzles, so it should be able to mark the positions of enemy shooters on a see-through visor or monocle without difficulty."

That is just begging to be built into a rifle scope.

In fact, why not build it into that SWORDS system that they've got.

Police union leader calls for 'killer games' sales ban

I hate to Godwin the argument....

...but it's Germany, so what the hell.

Hitler didn't have an Xbox.

Or was he playing Jew Blaster IV on a Hollerith punch card machine and things got out of hand?

Police ad urges: 'Trust no one'

@ @ Cameron Colley

"If you report a true crime to the police more often than not nothing will be done about it as in the past year me and a few people i know have had to report crime to the police but nothing was ever done after the report was filed,"

I can beat that - two weeks ago a friend of mine reported two people breaking into a house. He could see them climbing over the fence with a hefty bag and working on the windows and he knew for a fact that neither of them was the 80yr old lady who lived their.

The police response - it "wasn't a priority". An on-fucking-going burglary at a premise who's owner could well keel over with a heart attack should she discover them in the act was not deemed enough of a priority to get them off their arses. When he offered to go outside with a bat and chase them off the police told him that he would be arrested for assault if he caused any injuries.

Bush Obama sides with RIAA in P2P fight

Re: Get over it

"The fine should be the legal $10,000 per copy. The perps circle jerk means the punishment IS a deterrent, as intended."

How do his actions prove that it is a deterrent? It hasn't retroactively stopped him committing the crime and the fact that people are continuing to break that law shows that it clearly hasn't worked as a deterrent to other people.

Emotional arguments do not make Street View illegal

Court of Appeal, talking shite

"If the photographs had been taken ... to show the scene in a street by a passer-by and later published as street scenes, that would be one thing, but they were not taken as street scenes but were taken deliberately, in secret and with a view to their subsequent publication."

Of course they were taken as street scenes you twats - the clues in the name "Street View".

I'd also like to know how taking a picture "deliberately" and with a view to "subsequent publication" means it's not a "street scene". Are all "street scenes" photographed by accident or is this some lawyer bullshit around the definition of "street scene"?

Cops wanted compulsory DNA cards

No surprise to see plod's opinion

And they wouldn't want cards to be carried compulsorily if they didn't also want to have the power to see them on demand.

Online game given real-life bank permit

How long before the first crash?

Are they going to be able to lend as well? What happens when you join the game, take out a loan and then get bored and stop playing? Are you going to be forced to log on and carry out menial tasks until you've paid it back?

Google Street View hits UK streets

Just looked in Parliament Square...

You can see Brian Haw and some bloke next to him but Bush's face has been blurred on a placard.

Obesity witchhunt is a 'moral panic' - sense out of Texas

@ Fat Facts

"Fact - my biggest ever weight loss was over 8 months, when i lost eleven stone (2004)"

I work late so often buy takeaways rather than cook dinner, I drink coke all day long, take in far too many calories in beer form and never get any exercise. My ENTIRE BODY doesn't even weigh eleven stone.

Unless your "fitness regime" includes paying a personal assistant to come round and hide all your food, I don't see how you can blame your 40 stone weight on a lack of money.

Basic geometry?

If BMI is "calculated by dividing weight by the square of height", then surely an increase in height will lead to a reduction in the BMI, not an increase.

If the numerator stays constant and the denominator rises, you get a smaller value.