Posts by Dave Murray

Foreign objects in orifices a bigger killer than laptops

ahhhh, I'm covered in beeeeees!

</izzard>

Women face 'glass cliff' after breaking glass ceiling

Arrrrgh!

The LAST thing we need to do is increase the number of MPs. We already have far too many of these useless, lying, theiving, fraudulent, philandering scroungers and their equally despicable spouses.

French poised to seize Port of Dover

Sense of History

It's clear Charles Elphicke has no sense of the history of our nation or he'd realise us Scots have no issues with the French and were allied with them against the English. Gordon is just selling them Dover as part of the Auld Alliance!

Stats boss slams Tory use of crime figures

The Usual Lies

My grandpa always used to say "there's lies, damn lies and statistics." He should have added "and then there's the things politicians say."

At the end of the day you can easily twist any statistic to say anything you want, especially when talking to politicians or most of the public who don't understand stats anyway. Factor in an unspecified "change in the way figures are recorded" and all your stats are useless. And, that's the way the government wants it because then they can manufacture any truth they want.

NASA develops spaceship work robot called 'R2'

In other news...

NASA gets sued by Dr. Hans Reinhardt of the USS Cygnus.

Hubble snaps space conker bonk aftermath

The Angel Cartel is coming!

That's clearly a Dramiel checking for miners in the belts.

http://www.eve-wiki.net/index.php?title=Dramiel

Compulsory perv scanners upset everyone

Health Issues

What about the health issues to pregnant women and their unborn babies? They are not supposed to have X rays and other e-m based scanners are also likely to be harmful. Is this government really willing to potentially cause another thalidomide scandal?

Verified by Visa bitchslapped by Cambridge researchers

Well duh

I've been saying this since these schemes first appeared. My gf can never remember her password so every time she buys something online she has to reset it. That's really secure right there.

Entire UK will be on ID database sometime in next 3 millennia

Whose fingers?

"as of 2012 the government will require people applying for a passport or ID card to submit ten fingerprints for recording in the National ID database"

Ok if I submit 10 fingerprints each taken from a different corpse in my local morgue? It doesn't say they have to be MY fingerprints. ;)

Loud sex ASBO breach woman spared jail

Younger sister?

Think I slept with her younger Glaswegian sister a long time ago. She was so loud I got evicted by my landlord!

Boffins birth uber 'net neutrality' dowser

Not 100% accurate imo

Mostly reported no problems as I expected but I disagree with the results for POP3, SMTP and IMAP.

"Direct TCP connections to remote POP3 servers (port 110) succeed, but do not receive the expected content.

The applet received an empty response instead of our normal banner. This suggests that a firewall, proxy, or filter initially allowed the connection and then terminated it, either because it did not understand our server's reply or decided to block the service. "

The results for SMTP were similar but I regularly use several POP3 + SMTP servers that are not part of my ISP's network.

Sponsor?

The list of important sites also includes Bing, yahoo, Windows Live, Windows update, various UK and US banks, Deutsche Bank, eBay, Amazon, Sears, Facebook, Visa, Verizon, Trend Micro, Ticketmaster, etc, etc, etc (its a long list). Still wonder if it's sponsored by Google?

Ofcom opens debate on Freeview HD DRM to punters

Fine by me

Ofcom can allow BBC to use DRM but they must revoke the license fee at the same time. I'd be perfectly happy to see that happen, the only BBC program I want to watch is Top Gear anyway.

More problems for Apple's top desktop

huh?

"Perhaps they also use apps that cannot run on Linux and so can't cobble together a PC for the job? At least when you buy an iMac if you want to go play with your own shit you can dual boot into windows."

What exactly would stop a PC dual booting Linux and Windows? Or running Windows in a VM under Linux? Time to buy yourself an IT for Dummies book, Ubuntu and Win7 live perfectly happily with each other on my quad core box.

Google betas Flash-free YouTube sans open codec

Dear Google

Adding adverts to video (or anything else) does not improve it. Quite the opposite in fact.

Air France offers two-seat deal for fatties

Strange

I'm 6 foot with a 32" inside leg and I fit into airplane seats without too much bother.

Odd that you're 3 inches taller yet your legs are shorter. You must have a freakishly tall torso! ;)

(or maybe I just have long legs)

Fuel

Should make em pay more for the extra fuel used. :D

New avast freebie security scanner aims to keel-haul MS

At long last

At long last the best free A-V has a new version! I've been using and recommending Avast 4 almost since it came out for everything from Windows 2000 - 7 and in all that time I've never had a virus infection and neither have any of the people I recommended it to.

Figures

That's ok because the many PCs I've installed it on in the last 5 years, often using the same downloaded copy easily make up for that.

Except Avast doesn't

Except Avast is much less of a resource hog than AVG. In 5+ years of using it on many PCs running Win 2000, XP, Vista and 7 it has never gone into a CPU sucking death spiral on me.

EMI, Universal ink pacts with free tunes startup

Profit? Really?

Spotify are making a profit? Are you sure about that?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/spotify_exclusive/

"just 14p of advertising revenue per user - not enough to keep the lights on"

If you can't keep the lights on then you aren't making a profit. Their figures may have improved since then but it's a long way from 14p per user to a sustainable profit.

NFC Forum offers video to lure competitors

Bar-code-specialists Masabi and Access IS?

I worked in the barcoding field for almost 10 years and I've never heard of them.

Microsoft, German publishers hit Google with anti-trust suits

Early? lol

Those weren't the early days of the Internet or even the web. In the early days of the web we were using Mosaic and the originally free Netscape betas. In the early days of the Internet there were no web browsers and we used email, newsgroups, ftp and gopher.

One second-hand space shuttle: Yours for $29m

Wonder if the bank will give me a mortage for that?

Would be just the thing for advancing my plans for world domination. Muhahahahahah!

Monty looks to Russia, China to stop Oracle's Sun buyout

Back to your cave

Monty! You made yer money now crawl back in your cave and leave the business to the men in suits.

Discrimination warning over airport body scanners

Medical Pouches

My gf has a similar condition only her bag is internal with a small opening in her side that she catheterises. We will be flying for the first time since she had this op in about 10 days.

Since most doctors haven't heard of her condition or recent operations I'm dreading the reaction of airport security when they see the large quantities of drugs, dressings, catheters wrapped in a plastic bag with a sterilising gel, etc in her hand luggage. She must have some of these items in her hand luggage in case she needs to use them during our time in the airport or on the flight.

Modern Warfare 2 outsold Avatar, claims developer

Avatar

Never seen it, don't intend to. If it came on the box I'd probably turn over.

I used to like Cameron but ever since Titanic I won't touch him.

Women to 'chest drive' Bulgarian airbags

What's the point?

At the end of the day they will always be a poor (and obvious) substitute for the real thing.

Avatar renders this earthly life meaningless

Aye!

Theres a few million blue people up here, plus a load of orange ones too.

IT workers told, 'Put down the biscuits, fat boy'

"Piss off BCS"

says skinny programmer who never gets ill and eats wtf I like without need for excercise or dieting.

Haven't they heard that BMI is a load of bollocks?

Now where did I put those cream cakes and the spare jar of coffee?

Taser offers obsessive parents total mobe intrusion package

Copiously-tattooed and -pierced deviants

Looks like a bunch of my mates actually. I'd be perfectly happy for my kids to text them.

Slovakian police chief quits over Dublin explosives run

Beggars belief

What is unbelievably stupid is that they let the man's luggage in which they had planted explosives onto the flight. In no way does it beggar belief that the man himself was allowed onto the flight since he is not a terrorist, smuggler or whatever and in fact is totally innocent. Not that I'd expect a politician to understand that.

Southampton chap lodges todger in steel pipe

Giggidy!

Giggidy!

Johnson reveals ID register linked to NI numbers

Blunkettcard

More importantly has the supposedly blind facist himself got one yet? He thought they were such a wonderful idea surely he must have been the first person to volunteer for one?

Airbus: We'll cancel crap A400M unless we get more £££

Politicians & listening

Two words that can never go together.

Apple to splurge $275m on mobile ad broker

Dear Apple & Google...

I do not want adverts in the middle of whatever I'm doing on my phone, while reading a book or during any part of my daily life if I can help it. I only put up with them on the TV coz I can change channel and see if there's anything less shite on elsewhere. Sadly there usually isn't.

Radio Society tries to beat back powerline networks

Go RSGB!

Makes me wish I was still a member.

Radio Amateurs are forced to comply with very stringent EMC regulations. Everyone else should too, especially people making money out of selling kit.

Unused phone lines to be taxed for rural broadband

Wtf?

A tax on tax?!?

I bet the civil service fuckwad who came up with that one thought he was really clever.

Top security firm: Default Windows 7 less secure than Vista

Trend Muppets

Genes must be using a different Win7 to me because all the copies I've installed have warned me about lack of a-v immediately and I've used 3 different editions. Personally I think Vista's ton of confirmation dialogs that encourage users to just click ok without reading even more than they do already is less secure than a more focused UAC that might cause them to read before they click. But the icing on the cake is Genes saying having a virtual copy of XP in Win7 Home would make it more secure. When everyone else in the industry says the opposite you've got to think he's talking nonsense before you consider the facts and come to the same conclusion.

Vigilantes R US: Private enterprise takes over

@Greg Preece

And what if someone else with the same name lives in that street? A few years ago I had a next door neighbour with the same name. Carphone Warehouse accused me of identity theft when buying a mobile phone despite the fact that I was using my own card and the house numbers on our addresses were different. They disabled the phone and I ended up returning it and buying another elsewhere.

The situation would be a whole lot worse if you were accused of being a sex offender when innocent.

CrunchPad gets JooJoo eyeballed

Vapourware

Very dodgy photo... not only does the device appear to be green screen mono but the guy demonstrating it seems to have been made by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop!

Brown launches 'Zip it, Block it, Flag it' net code for children

Zip it?

So you want kids to compress their personal details before sending to pedos? Coz that's what 'zip it' will mean to them. Not that politicians would understand that.

Dodgy Avast update classifies multiple legit files as malign

Didn't hit me

Realtek sound drivers - check

Adobe software - check

Avast AV - check

Borked PC due to false positives - err no

Didn't hit me on Win7 or Win2k despite all my boxes running the most up to date Avast virus definitions. Perhaps only effects XP or Vista?

Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy

Only the truely Evil...

tell you their moto is "do no evil".

Comments really need an evil G logo.

Manchester journo gets first ID card - late

Journalist?

Clearly a Stepford Journalist!

LHC knocked out by ANOTHER power failure

Learn to read

"However it doesn't surprise me that a bunch of geeks with their minds on higher things (ahem) might not have considered something so mundane as power supply redundancy"

Except they did consider it. The article clearly states that diesel generators kicked in and kept the refrigeration circuits running. That's power supply redundancy making sure the important parts are kept running.

Should you lose your religion on your CV?

Except it doesn't always work

As you can see to the left my name is David Murray, I also live very near Rangers stadium so you'd expect me to be one o them. But, I was brought up a catholic and most of my family support Celtic. If you ask me "which team do you support?" I'll say Fiat Yamaha with a big grin on my face. Then when you look totally confused I'll explain I don't pay any attention to football coz it's all shite and I watch MotoGP (among other 2 wheeled motorsports).

Plus everyone knows that question is an attempt at subtle discrimination so you're still open to be sued if you ask it in an interview.

So where would your casual question get you?

UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files

facists

"Unless you tell us we're never gonna know... What is anybody gonna think?"

That CTC are a bunch of facists that have forgotten about the presumption of innocence. Which comes as no surprise these days really since the MET and most other UK Police forces seem to follow the same procedures.

IE bug leaks private details from 50m PDF files

Poor explanation = scaremongering

"The potentially sensitive data is included in PDFs that have been printed using Internet Explorer."

The explanation in this article is so poor I had to go to the linked site because I couldn't see how printing a pdf could possibly add anything to it. The information is not included in pdfs that have been printed with IE, it is included in web pages that have been converted to pdfs using a pdf printer driver from IE. That's very different to the explanation given in the article.

The number of pdfs that are created by printing a web page will be much lower than the number of pdf that have been printed while viewing them in IE. The poor explanation given will cause a lot more people to think they are at risk of exposing info than actually are. Is this CNet or El Reg?

Apple cult leader emails outside world

The morale of the story is...

you shouldn't have dropped out of school to pin your future on iCrap.