Posts by Promotor Fidei

Your poster guide: A fascinating glimpse into North Korea's 'internet'

Re: Coincidence?

It is also only one letter away from DORKNET.

Trolls prevail because good men do nothing: boffins

Since when is bullying not acceptable?

From my own experiences since Kindergarden, bullying is perfectly acceptable and even praiseworthy as long as enough people do it.

Face it, bullying is normal in primate societies. Someone has to be the butt.

Why did it take antivirus giants YEARS to drill into super-scary Regin? Symantec responds...

Re: Out for tender

They did - but unfortunately their version was completely undetectable, so a new one had to be made from scratch and in a hurry.

Slap my Imp up: Bullfrog's Dungeon Keeper

DK2, too.

It's so good to be evil :)

I didn't even look at the mobile version, though. EA buying a famous game and bringing it to mobile without pumping me for cash at literally every turn? Yeah right.

I did however just pay almost 8€ for DK and DK2 from Gog (package deal). Which is more of my money than any freemium game will ever see.

Installing now - so see you later.. much later.

City hidden beneath England's Stonehenge had HUMAN ABATTOIR. And a pub

Re: Wonder where they get their data

As to the age of the wooden house: dendrochronology and carbon 14 dating.

As to the rituals: tools marks on human skeletons found buried in the area.

Pirate Party runs aground in European Parliamentary elections

Piratenpartei

The pirate party in Germany has gone to the dogs - infiltrated by either complete idiots or shills posing as complete idiots. It's no longer a sane choice. Actually it wasn't one from the point they declared they'd vote with the Greens on any issue they did not have a position on.

I voted for those horrible populistic right wingers. Populistic is wrong of course because politicians must never have the concerns of their constituency in mind and right winger means everyone who takes votes away from us.

There's a good chance I'm not voting for them in the next but one election (next is local, that's strictly candidate based). That chance will turn into a certainty if they do go into a block with the Tories as they have threatened to.

Justice minister tries to further delay snoop silo laws in Germany

It's only one minister.

The coalition partner and the minister of the interior have already been frothing at the mouth about it and demanded full implementation by the time the EU court has decided on a verdict.

Our former minister of the interior famously declared that the right so security trumps all human rights. Of course to the mutton farmer nothing is more important than the safety of his flock.

Revealed: HUNGRY frosty Arctic cleft that could eat 2 Grand Canyons

Get your glasses on.

It's a Starbucks,

Bill Gates offends Koreans after sticking hand down trousers

Re: Little Mss. Manners

Yeah, that's where the line

Shaking hands is always formal.

comes in.

Little Mss. Manners

I suppose this is a cultural thing.

But I was also taught not to keep any hand in any pocket when addressing someone unless the occasion is really informal, like a passing greeting in the hallway. It shows a lack of respect for the other person as a person, never mind social status.

Shaking hands is always formal.

Manners really are the grease on the wheels of society. Having a set of simple rules to follow makes the simian mind feel more at ease and able to concentrate on the content of the situation, not the form.

Makes me wonder if it has something to do with the different views on society in the states and the older and more densely populated European/Asian countries. The USAsians divide people into "Me" and "Everybody else" while Europeans have more complicated and graded relationships with persons. The tribe model is still a part of the mindset.

Who wants a smart meter to track'n'tax your car? Hello, Israel

I still don't get it

People need a job to live - if you are on the dole you are expected to take any job offer that's reasonable. Reasonable is (in Germany) a 2 hour drive morning and evening. Reasonable is any wage, if it's lesss than the dole, you get the difference from the jobcenter.

However - you still need to pay to get to your job. Even if that leaves you with less than the dole - which has been set up to be the minimum you need when sitting on your keister all day. No money to spare for proper work dress, transport, education, anything.

So wtf make getting to work even more expensive? Trains cost, cars cost, fuel costs - with most jobs, you have no say about where or when you work. That's why there is a rush hour. Not because every Tom, Dick and Harry spontaneously decide to cruise around at the same time, but because Tom, Dick and Harry all have to be at their desks at nine sharp.

So Tom, Dick and Harry must be punished for working? Or for taking a job where they have to travel? They should just up sticks and move next door to work? Where should they live? 8 to a room, spending half their wages on rent alone, paid to the company as the railroad workers in Victorian times did? What about families? Of course, Tom, Dick and Harry should not have families - families are a luxury for the upper crust. not the serfs.

Transport is a necessity these decades - not a luxury, so why should it be taxed as one?

I've just had (another) hefty salary increase and I still don't have as much money to spend as I did when I was a student working part time 10 years ago. My car is 15years old and on the verge of breaking down. It's a stinker so I pay big fat taxes on it. It's extremly fuel efficient - less than 4.5l of Diesel per 100km and every two months some home-working green bicycle driver in a major city politician demands Diesel tax to be raised because: look it is cheaper than regular. - Yes, you twit. Because it is more efficient and to punish me for driving an efficient car (please remember this is a 15 year old car) you have already raised vehice taxes by 200%.

Would I buy a new car? One that produces less emissions? What from? What I have left each month pays for rent and a minimum of food for the two of us. I've looked at cars. They'd all cost me a lot more in fuel each day, than I pay now. Ditch the car and take a bus? Oops - I'd have to take a bus to the station, take a train to the next city, take a train to the city I work in, take a bus to work. 2,5h morning and night instead of 50min. I work 9-10 hours so that'd leave me with a life consting of sleep - work - wolf down dinner (only meal of the day) - sleep.

Veggies tricked into dating meat-gobbling escorts

Very misleading, indeed

I thought veggies referred to vegetables: as in rich, old and comatose.

The perfect husband: 98 years old, 30 million quid in the checking account and 40° fever.

Valve pushes Portal freebie

Great unless

you happen to live in Germany where Steam only supplies the Low Violence version.

Which unfortunately makes me feel very violent as I am an adult and do not need others to decide what is too violent for me to see. I know there are workarounds like importing the game and then registering it with Steam, however this removes the convenience of Steam in the first place.

Why is there a low violence version of Portal anyway? I understand the whole concept of the game does not include violence?

Yeah..Steam is coming out of my ears.

Much of the human race made up of thieves, says BSA

To be fair

There are businesses in developed nations who totally rely on pirated software.

One of them tried to hire me for the IT position. I said: I'm not gonna be legally responsible for that lot. General manager told me in no polite terms to get my priorities straight and using 10s of k€ of pirated software in production every day is like driving 10km above the speed limit. You need to do it to get things done. You cannot start a business if you waste time and money on buying your tools.

I did not accept any position or cooperation with that company but started my own business, since getting work is easier than getting a job. All software I work with is properly licenced, most of it GPL or similar licences. Photoshop is very very powerful but the prices are just too steep for me. By the time I can afford it, I'm probably not going to look back from Gimp, though.

Funny thing - there was nothing in the company that could not have been replaced with GPL software except maybe one piece that needed to work with a special plotter - and even that is only a maybe.

Gov removes 'general appeal' rights for accused freetards

Just wondering

What kind of chance does anyone have with a: 'I didn't do it' defense?

Let's imagine that some company actually does start firing off letters en masse to random IPs in the range used for dynamic IPs from ISPs reasoning that most people are downloading sometimes and most of them do not remember exactly what they downloaded a month later. (or the downloads they aborted or never checked, so they don't know for sure what was the actual contents of a file).

Let's say user #n receives a complaint and knows he did not deliberately download infringing files. So if he replies: I did not do it. What happens? Is it just shrugged of as : Yeah right..wink wink or does the complainant have to provide any proof? What level of proof? Just a text log of IP x.y.z.a downloaded a file named xxx which we believe contains content X? Is the onus of proof on the user?

For each user who knows exactly he did not download anything there are at least 1000 who cannot be sure. Hell - maybe that game mod I tried to download that did not unpack and was deleted was a misnamed mp3 or something.

So the company in this example makes sure that user #n gets three warning in less than a year and they can get at his data and sue him for say nnn quid. Enough to make money but not enough to make contesting the claim the cheaper option. Sounds like a viable business model if you do it often enough and the process can be scripted.

There is no restriction to rightholders with a validated business address in the UK, is there? So the actual risk of such a business model is ...0.

I think I'll write a song and register a business somewhere abroad. I hear Lybia offers good taxes at the moment. No sorry - make that a porn movie and somewhere in the former GUS. The rate of contests will be even lower.

Rugby World Cup reporters swap identities in login glitch

Sounds familiar

I've had that at a company where I had worked for a week for evaluation purposes.

They had a shop-in-shop system and some shop administrators would get logged in into the wrong shop backend. Turned out the login function just compares user and password hash, not the actual shop id. So the first match was used, which was not always the correct one. Especially with the shops the company administrated since those all had the same user/pass.

They never offered me a job so it hasn't been fixed and there is no one at the company even capable of understanding the problem, never mind fixing it. I left a note for a hot-fix (never ever use the same username for two shops) but I doubt anyone there can even understand that.