Posts by Martin

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard: Further poster outrage

Nice Flags

laughed when I translated those :P

Hint: http://www.gma.org/Tidings/snailtale/flags.html

Hoax: German IT boss sacks three non-smokers

Article

Here's the original article, if your German is up to it :P

http://archiv.mopo.de/archiv/2008/20080108/hamburg/panorama/chef_kuendigt_allen_nichtrauchern.html

His name is "Thomas J.", not just J. It's usual in German papers to abbreviate the surname to a single letter to protect the privacy of the people mentioned.

His lawyer has now apparently told him to shut-up and there's a final comment on the article by a employment law expert who says people cannot be punished (specifically by sacking) for insisting on the right to healthy working conditions.

I hope they throw the book at him... or drop a container full of imported fags on him.

Data breach costs soar

Can't Take Business Elsewhere

Since we can't take our business elsewhere the one option for the victims of the HMRC data breach is to change people running the business. Looks like labour won't be in power much longer then.

Maybe that's the silver lining of this fiasco.

Amazon opens DRM-free music store

Would love to pay for this stuff

Never thought I'd say that about music downloads... but I've already spotted some stuff I'd like to buy, it's DRM-free and the price is about what I'm prepared to pay for download music, even allowing for VAT.

If only they'd actually sell it to me, they might make a bit of money.

The question is, what will happen when this finally arrives for UK users? Will we be forced to pay pounds for dollars?

Microsoft finds good facts to sell Windows Vista

Vista Facts

I tried to install vista (Luckily I had an MSDN version, and didn't pay for it).

It installed beautifully, although I did have to get out my driver disks so that it would recognise my hard drives.

I rebooted... and it blue screened. That's it. It installed, said it was happy and now it BSOD's everytime I try to boot.

I got the facts all right. I reinstalled XP.

Investigators find secret White House email accounts

Tricks?

What we are talking about here is not one or other political party, it's all about accountability of elected officials.

When it comes down to it people with that much power and responsibility need to be accountable to their electorate. Hiding their actions behind closed doors, or in this case deleted emails and secondary accounts, has airs of the sort of totalitarian regimes that Bush calls the "axis of evil" -- operating in the dark and shadows.

In any free society politicians are elected by the people, employed by the people and must be accountable to the people, if they aren't then we have no way of being sure that they aren't working against the interests of the electorate or are simply corrupt.

Washington backing for Brit arms biz coming unstuck

Should clean their own back yard first

While I could never condone bribery or any other form of corruption, I rather think the FBI and the US should leave BAE alone.

Just how were the contracts in Iraq awarded again? Why was that never investigated? Maybe because certain high ranking political figures had money to lose?

It's always easier find fault in others. The FBI should tidy up in America's home grown industry before it picks on other people's.

Fancy an earful? Click here for tech support

Tech support gets younger everyday

Well, it seems that tech support employees are getting younger everyday. The attitude shown and the grammar and spelling used as well as the phrasing ("For being mean.") would seem to indicate that this tech support worker is a petulant child.