Posts by druck 4108 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
I read that there as traffic police for a second, my experience of whom was "I know you weren't going any faster than other cars in lane 3, but we've got targets, here's your fine". But then again, I'm expect a similar reasoned and fair result to an enquiry of the police by other police, of whatever flavour.
As the FCC have just approved the use of whitespace with religious zeal, relying on faith rather than any working physical proof of concept, it should come as no surprise they are backing a puritanical service which also wont work in the way they are expecting and cause considerable difficulties to legitimate users.
When the Berlin wall came down we thought that democracy and freedom would spread eastwards, and indeed in most parts it has done. What we weren't expecting was the wall would be put back up in the west, with a virtual cloning of the invasive security and mass surveillance culture of the freedom hating former regimes of the east.
Even if there wasn't a strong possibility of a conviction in this case, it still achieved the desired repression of a journalist, trying to do her duty of bringing abuses of the state to the attention of the public. Her life has been ruined, spending 18 months fearing conviction, and is seriously considering giving up Journalism according to the BBC. Of course if she does, the enhanced CRB check will ensure she is barred from ever holding a responsible job again.
So the advice still comes down to whether it would be offensive to a bitter old woman who's judgement is so poor she sees nothing wrong with roughing up opposition MPs with anti-terror police, and an angry grieving mother who clings to the belief that murderous tendencies must be the fault of pornography rather than sick individuals.
Oh, clause 21 means my defence is void, as I'm the author of a disc repair tool, which has the limited ability to recover to deleted data. So if I ever get any extreme porn spam, I have to wipe my hard disc. I better go an add a safe delete feature.
"The Government have (oh so kindly) offered a "defence" that if you were a "direct participant" in the images then you are allowed to possess them."
So you can have as much extreme porn as you like, as long as you've convincingly photo chopped your own face on to one of the participants? Now that really is sick.
AC wrote: "Do you honestly think that the NSFW image that you linked to qualifies for "a reasonable person would consider the action depicted to be real"? I would like to consider myself reasonable, and to me it is obviously staged."
You can never put your faith in a law which can only be judged on the criteria of a reasonable person's views. People have hung on differing interpretations of reasonable, take Derek Bentley and the meaning of "Let him have it" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_Him_Have_It
Re: Sooty, you are right in that this legislation is primarily a catch all. If you should cross any branch of authority you can expect to be investigated on some trumped up charge, which will come to nothing. But rummaging around on your computer is bound to find something chargeable, even if you have gone to great lengths to ensure that no one in any picture could be considered to be under 18, the extreme porn law makes anything else fair game for a prosecution.
I think Asus scared themselves with the EEE PC, it made people realise that useful computers didn't have to be big and expensive, and although it sold it large numbers it put downward pressure on pricing. Since them they've done everything they can to try to move the price points ever higher and back to full sized laptop territory. However without any sort of sweetener such as a 1280x900 screen, it's just not going to sell.
I keep misreading that name too, but the difference was that the leader of the 3rd Reich and his henchmen had a very organised plans of how to destroy the liberty of millions of people. This government is rushing headlong in to a fascist nightmare handing out billions to commission systems which they don't have the first clue about. They've got no idea if it will work well enough for the majority of the population, and no idea on what to do about people it definitely wont work for.
"No surprise there with more and more middle class folks losing their incomes while CEO's and other upper management merely forgo their Christmas bonus"
You are joking? Their bonus might be ever so slightly smaller than last year if the company has made a massive loss, but they'll still get it, and it will still be several times the salary of the sacked guy. We can't get guns here, but hammers are freely available.
The ambilighting effect is one thing, love it or hate it, but the screen bezel just about making the screen look slightly bigger. Why not get a TV which has a couple of inches larger screen and a minimal amount of bezel? it will look much better and is probably cheaper than this one too.
Of course fitting flare dispensers to commercial aircraft means anyone with the right type of laser pointer*, be it terrorist or numpty, can generate a rather impressive fireworks display, and probably set light to the houses of the poor sods living right under the approach path.
* Many automatic flare dispensers have a laser warning receiver to detect laser range finders / designators used by IR seeking MANPADs.
You have to fill out such a form for music today, but it will be to protest tomorrow, but hold on it's already today if it's anywhere near parliament.
Its just like the form the Chinese had to fill out to protest during the Olympics, automatically denied, and the now spot light is off the country they will be participating in China's much longer version of 42 days.
There are more emergency numbers than you think. I was washing my car one day when I heard a faint "hello which emergency service do you require" coming from my pocket. I fished out the phone an quickly cancelled the call. I then looked to see what number I'd accidentally dialled while leaning against the car, expecting to see 999 or 112, but was surprised to find it was 08. I rashly dialled it again to check, and it did put me through to the emergency services. That only happened on one particular Nokia phone, which for some reason had 08 enabled for Bosnia or somewhere.
RE: should be removed from the curriculum, and replaced with scepticism classes. Children would be taught to think for themselves and question the fallacy of religious beliefs of all flavours. There would then be no need for nonsense such as creationism or ID to come up in science lessons.
Is there anyone in spectrum regulation that has the slightest clue about physics, or are they all paper pushing bureaucrats looking to squeeze every penny out of the airwaves, never mind how much chaos it causes?
Sorry, I can't believe I needed to ask that, we already know the answer.
"It is much less stigmatising - no judgement is required about who should be included or not."
The risk of stigmatising anyone justifies tracking everyone from cradle to grave? I really don't know how these people's heads are wired, and what on earth have we done letting them get in to positions of power where they can bring about this nightmare?
In many ways Windows 3.1/3.11 was better than anything that came afterwards from Microsoft.
If copying multiple files with 3.1;s File Manager there was a problem, such the a source or destination files was open, it would warn you about it and allow you to continue copying the rest of the files. Win95 File Manager and all that follow, just abort the entire process with half the files copied, forcing you to find the culprit, exclude it, and copy everything again.
If you had an iconised application window in 3.1 would allow you to drop a file on top it, and the file would be loaded in to that window. In Win95 and later you can't drop files on to the taskbar icons, you get an error box telling to go through the utterly ridiculous palather of hovering over the icon mid drag, waiting an age for the window to deiconise, then dropping the file on to it - why for fucks sake?
Such is progress when it comes to the worlds worst operating system.
Hopefully this will mean we can welcome the US back in to the family of democratic nations which don't lock away foreign citizens in off shore legal limbo, and don't fingerprint anyone wishing to visit their country as if they were a common criminal. With any luck that will also discourage the UK from going down that path, and maybe then I'll consider travel to the US for business or pleasure again.
In addition to officially announcing the trial, on Thursday Jacqui Smith is expected to announce a "prospectus of market engagement" which the paper says will invite organisations with a high street presence to bid "for contracts in areas such as fingerprinting, application checking and photographing linked to the new biometric passports and ID cards."
Rush down to your nearest Marks and Sparks or Woolies for the latest two for the price of one offer; be fingerprinted like a common criminal, AND hand over all your personal information for the government to lose (again). All that for just £5.4billion, £9.1billion or £25+billion depending on who you believe.
me wrote: "Have WHS for over 1 year now and no troubles with it. This is the best M$ product I have used so far (not saying much, considering its company). Does all it is suppose to do and does it well. I have used the restore capability at least 4 times and it worked 100% each time."
So you are saying that every 3 months, or sometimes less, you have to restore the system, and you think that is good? You Windows fanboys really have to set your standards low.
You do realise that if you were using just about any decent NAS box, or server running any other operating system, the only time you'd have to restore is when the hardware dies of old age?
As reported here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/02/dvla_data_sharing/ the DVLA will sell your data to anyone for £2.50, actively encourage all sorts of parking fine scams and worse. So if you owe them money do your really think they wont had over every last scrap of data on you to the thugs that will come round to take away your telly?
"Likewise, a human can drive a car in traffic - and so can a computer, perhaps. But that computer currently weighs more than 200 tons and requires power levels typical of a warship, not a car."
The ones in the DARPA Urban challenge http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/04/cmu_wins_urban_challenge/ weren't quite that big, although still no where near as good as a human.
Do Asus know what an EEE PC is? It seems the executives have seen a nice health sales figure next to the EEE brand, and have decided to slap it on everything. Everything that is except for what drove sales of the original EEE 701; small, cheap and with Linux. They seem to heading ever further away from that concept.
AC wrote: "its a little sad really but if when you say "Mpeg4" you actually mean..."
JFC! What's sad is you felt necessary to insult all of our intelligences with a display of arse clenching pedantry and hair splitting. I think everyone here understands the concept of a digital tuner, and I'm terribly sorry I didn't state the full title of MPEG4 codec including all relevant paragraph numbers in it's specification, but it's pretty bleeding obvious to everyone else.
