Posts by SW10

You wanted innovation? We gave you Clippy the Paperclip in your IM client

I will pay good money...

No, really, I will.

I will pay good money to have good, uninfected, private, reliable online services. And I mean news (yes, El Reg - keep it good and clean and I will pay for it), communications, entertainment, research...

Good money. I will pay.

I can't keep firkin about with blockers, extensions, add-ons, and all the buggering about I have to do to keep all those sticky nasty fingers off me and my family... I've just about had enough.

Charge me a fee, give me what I want and take this ridiculous hassle and aggro off my plate!

Anyone?

Look out, Windows Phone 8 users – yes, both of you – here's ... Windows 10 Mobile

Re: Can people opt-out?

Yeah, I was sure that I got a 'lifetime' licence to use HERE maps when I bought my 925...

El avión de papel del proyecto PARIS aterriza en un libro de texto

Traduction

Nous sommes heureux d'informer nos lecteurs que notre mission légendaire « PARIS » (Paper Aircraft Released into Space) est apparu dans un manuel en espagnol destiné aux enfants et qui racontent l'aventure extravagante stratosphérique de notre Playmonaut.

Apple fires legal salvo at FBI for using All Writs law in iPhone brouhaha

Terminology

I tell you what, the next time uses the term "comfort break" in a meeting, I shall deny it and suggest we move for a motion to vacate.

Feds look left and right for support – and see everyone backing Apple

Re: Let's help you out then :)

Like your post - one quick comment:

At one point, someone in the US legal profession came up with the idea that if a certain judgement is accepted, there would be no point in arguing about it again and again, so a decision establishes "precedent" - a kind of seal of approval that because it was OK at one point, it should be OK the next time around as well.

It wasn't someone in the US legal profession.

That's English Common Law, the roots of the US legal system. What it also means that English court cases prior to Independence are precedent in the US.

(In very exceptional cases, it's even possible to argue judgments in other Common Law countries, so an English solicitor may point to a US or an Australian judgment.)

Hey cellcos: Guess who's got your backhaul still? That's right. Big daddy BT

Check facts, reconsider wild assertions

Crippling debt forced BT to sell off its own mobile operation O2, to Telefonica, in 2004

Er, no. BT spun off its mobile operation into a company called mmO2 in 2001. This was a decision that was taken by shareholder vote, not management alone.

The Telefonica takeover of O2 came later.

seen largely as the worst mistake in its history.

Really? By whom? You're just making stuff up, aren't you?

Have you looked at the relative performance of BT, O2 and Vodafone shares since the spinoff happened?

How would you have solved BT's 'crippling debt' if they were to have kept BT Mobile and thus avoid the worst mistake in its history?

College kids sue Google for 'spying' on them with Apps for Education

Re: Normally I hate the lawsuit mentality

Sorry if they did not understand terms of trade.

It's not clear to me that they made this trade. My kid has just started at a school where everything is powered by Google Apps for Education. As someone who has routinely and actively avoided Google as much as possible (and it's practically impossible) this weirds me out no end.

At the moment I've got my brave face on, and even tried to kid myself that they might be slightly more ethical where kids are involved.

This is very unpleasant.

El Reg nips down to the Hewlett You Inn?

Wait!

Does Clare Loxley really have a corporate-coloured scarf?

Watchdog says yes to BT's EE takeover deal. Shrugs. No 'significant' harm in it

Re: To be welcomed

It would probably pay rather less tax in the UK than it does today though if that happened.

Er, no.

Even if BT were owned by a consortium of oligarchs from Iceland, Kenya and Brazil the profits from selling products and services in the UK would attract the unwavering attention of HMRC. You don't get out of paying taxes by being foreign.

Incidentally, if anyone reading this is an oligarch from Iceland, Kenya or Brazil then I have a very interesting business proposition...

Re: To be welcomed

Define British.

Shares are publicly-listed in London and New York, available to anyone wishing to buy irrespective of nationality.

Staff (including senior managers) are drawn from and work in many countries around the world - and don't necessarily work in their home countries. I recall some very senior non-Brits at the helm, including (ahem) Verwaayen.

Granted, HQ is in London... But the point is, even if BT were bought out by a firm with its HQ in another country, it wouldn't be any less (or more) British...

Periodic table enjoys elemental engorgement

No. 118

Now there's a line of them, I think Element 118 should be named Deslynam.

EE's chief exec Olaf Swantee to step down

Re: BT mobile historic flip flopping

Divesting BT Cellnet and creating mmO2 was to give the shareholders some relief and keep things afloat. It's easy to forget how disastrous things looked back then; BT had monstrous debt following the mobile auctions and its peak valuation was just prior to the dotcom crash.

The idea was to keep all the debt inside the boring company with steady revenues (BT plc) and hive off the mobile arm so it could grow more freely.

You could argue it worked - shares were worth a shade under 83p when mmO2 was spun off and Telefonica later bought it for £2. By comparison, Vodafone's price was (about) 220p when mmO2 was spun off and (about) 175p in Oct 2005 when Telefonica's buy-out was agreed.

[Disclosure: I hold BT shares. So that's the nasty capitalist view.]

Bigger than Higgs? Boffins see hints of bulbous new Boson

So Bosun, it's a...

...boson BOGOF bonus?

(Mine's the one with the unseemly particles in the pocket.)

Old jet bits, Vader's motorbike gear, sonic oddness: Hats off to Star Wars' creative heroes

Re: Old car parts too

Any fule kno that all this took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away:

the real question is how Fiat got hold of said switches...

Teenage boy bailed until November over TalkTalk incident

Am I right in assuming...

...that the sophisticated cyber skills of this dangerous individual—who clearly has so little regard for the law and TalkTalk customers—need some brushing up?

Or is Dido Harding actually quite tech-savvy?

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

You want to send me to 21 Oct 2015?

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

I'll head down there now.

Wheels come off parents' plan to dub sprog 'Mini Cooper'

Re: So you can attest to the oddness of some parents' sprog naming?

And what is it with giving your offspring a surname as a first name, especially when the family name could also be a first name?

Oi!

I have a first name as a surname and a surname as a first name. Some people write it the wrong way round, some imagine it's double-barrelled, some get it right.

I quite like both and they're essential to my identity even though I chose neither.

My mate Mr Law...

...throughout his wife's pregnancy, threaten to call the lad Marshall.

LOHAN chews the fat with US TV station over Spaceport's FAA-ilure

Your problem's right here:

before Spaceport America can move any further on a project like Lohan’s Vulture II.

Yep, Spaceport America actually think this is Lindsay Lohan's project; so obviously all the paperwork has been sent to her.

Easy mistake to make. Seems to me you just need to nip round hers and get it...

'RipSec' goes to Hollywood: how the iCloud celeb hack happened

We can smirk...

...but ultimately this is about our sisters, our cousins, the people you have a drink with, that woman who puts in a few hours to serve food and drink at the sports club, the guy who always has a set of jumper leads to start your car.

In every other aspect of their life, when they lock something they know what level of security they've chosen. Big padlock, little three-wheel combination lock, 5-lever mortice, whatever; by-and-large, they have a gut feel for the risk level.

And when something is locked in the safe in the house, that's where it bloody stays.

That's largely the image they have with their phones as well. How do you explain that the stuff locked in their safe in their house isn't actually there, but is spirited off to a distant warehouse on the busiest street they can imagine. A warehouse where maybe the fire exit is left permanently open, or that a window has been forced and no-one noticed for months?

Something has to change.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Pay attention now, 007...

ESA tries UPLOADING PATCH to Philae lander to fix radios

Will REG try UPLOADING PATCH to journo to fix basic English?

Cancel | Retry

C5 tablet-using newsreader hotness

Correctitudinal quadrantification

I think to qualify in the top-right bell-quadrant of neuro-grammatical correctitude in the field of satiristic info-tech journalism, then the aptitude of the usage 'less' demonstrated by the post-Friday lunch journo should be rapidly assimilated into a conversion-substitution algorithm in order to produce 'fewer', thusly:

no fewer than 96 respondents

Drum roll, please .... Results are in for the collective noun for security vulns

Irrelevant

viz. Roger of that ilk is the only person who can get away with using the term 'hatstand.'

First pics of flagship Lumias for 18 months released … or maybe not

6310i

It's an oversized claim, I know, but I think my Nokia 925 is shaping up to be remembered alongside the 6310i in my little mind*: it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of its competitors, but with a mighty camera, HERE maps and wireless charging (yes, via a cover) it does a few things that I need very well. For everything else, there's t'internet.

I've dropped it, kicked it, splashed it and put it on bar tables covered in the kind of mixture that would eat into stainless steel and it's still going. Any other phone I've had disappears into the quatermass of inaccessible memory never to be properly recalled.

Two years old, and for the moment there's nothing I'd swap it for—and certainly not a plastic 'flagship.'

*I recognize that your brand of fanboi-ism may tell you different—but please don't tell me I'm wrong; I'm just giving you benefit of my own personal view.

That thing we do in the UK? Should be ILLEGAL in the US, moans ex-State monopoly BT

Re: An American called Bas Burger

You couldn't make it up

You'd have to- he's Dutch.

Any crass prejudice jokes we can make about your name, AC?

Hacking Team hacked: Spyware source code torrent blurts govt customers

Re: "claiming to only deal with ethical governments"

--- which ones are those then?

We'll be the judge of that—stop worrying your pretty little head.

Multiple fondling on the MIGHTY 12-INCH iOS 9 SLAB — so, so close now

Re: Double the pane?

2 or 3? Why not 4?

Would that be awesome or some foursome?

Clinton defence of personal email server fails to placate critics

Convenience

Oh yes, I've always noticed that users find it a lot easier to set up, configure and administrate their own email server at home rather than the one provided as standard by the organization they work for.

Friday: SpaceX will attempt to land rocket on floating, robotic 'spaceport drone ship'

Supersonic retro propulsion burn

Although I am in awe to see a real-life rocket land like those in the Sci-Fi of my distant youth, anyone who comes up with the term "supersonic retro propulsion burn" should be in curry-marketing and not rocketry...

Sony to media: stop publishing our stolen stuff or we'll get nasty

Re: Cooperation in destroying the Stolen Information..? WTF

"Most celebrity-obsessed media, I think, don't even know what Stolen Information is, so why should they care about it?"

With apologies for mis-quoting Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG's Global Digital Business President (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989260)

Two driverless cars stuffed with passengers are ABOUT TO CRASH - who should take the hit?

It won't take long for the lawyers...

...to sort this out:

"Put brakes in there for emergencies, and maybe a steering wheel; then the occupants will cop the liability. The last thing we need is a class-action suit because of a ballsy belief in the superiority of our programming."

GCHQ and Cable and Wireless teamed as Masters of the Internet™

Re: "Vodaphone...""..has denied the GCHQ had direct access to its network"

"We will only supply information to government when we are legally compelled to do so, we won't go beyond the law and we will comply with due process," Deadman said.

I'm sorry Mr. Deadman, you're talking about the future. My question concerns the past.

Nokia: Buh-bye Lumia and cash-sucking handset pals... let's make some money!

No fear Nokia

You've got to hand it to a company that happily adjusts its strategy from wood-pulp to rubber boots to cables to telecoms to networking.

So many other corporates are too afraid of reality - or can't even see that, for example, digital cameras will kill off their selling-chemicals-to-make-pictures business (Kodak, that's you) or that online news sites will kill off the distributing-and-selling-paper-with-advertisements-in business.

To say nothing of "we accept we've been pushed to the margins by [our own idiocy] [cheaper/faster/better competitors] "

Consumer group SLAMS NASA for letting Google rent $1bn 'playground'

Federal law and pot

Whatever the legality of weed at the Federal level, it is interesting to note that the IRS are quite happy to tax State-legal, er, pot-joints.

Which perhaps sets an interesting precedent...

BOING, BOING! Philae BOUNCED TWICE on Comet 67P

Re: Dude, I'm a comet. Do you even have a landing permit?

The thrusters didn't fire and the harpoons didn't launch. Maybe the lander is standing tall on the tips of the extended screws.

They didn't engage first time, they didn't engage the second time why would they engage third time?

Unless the landing surface was different on the third occasion, it is surely standing on tip-toes?

We must SMASH the Democratic Deadlock with MINDFUL EVIDENCE

Wasteful

Two elements of Thinkfluence simply wastes the psychodriven confluence layer and I prefer a reverse-flow model where the Thinkfluence node is backreferenced during the second pass so as to maximise the synapse efficacy quotient.

European astronaut exposes eerie snaps of ISS in Twitter feed

Do as you darn well pleasey

Fooled me with his East-on-is-the-left view of that great city!

10 Top Tips For PRs Considering Whether To Phone The Register

Your mother—and mine

If I said “Hello, can I speak to [x] please?” to my mother, she would say "Yes you can, but you may not."

But perhaps you're setting the bar intentionally lower for PR types...

Cracked it - Vulture 2 power podule fires servos for 4 HOURS

Re: Sufficient lift?

Having made the point myself and subsequently seen a curt reply to another commentard, I think Lester is getting a bit miffed off with this question.

His answer is along the lines of "plenty enough, and then some."

It's official: LOHAN's arboreal avoidance algorithm is PANTS

Re: The whole thing

Why, thank *you* Lester

That's a weight off my mind.

Would Apple godhead Steve Jobs have HATED the Watch?

Re: should have waited

I do rather think that Apple Watch 3 might be an interesting product

LOHAN tunes into ultra long range radio

Weight a mo

Was all this gubbins anticipated by the Southampton students?

I'm increasingly worried that the plunging/crashing tendency may supersede the soaring/navigating tendency.

Banking apps: Handy, can grab all your money... and RIDDLED with coding flaws

(Understanding VFM)

Very few people truly understand value-for-money. They focus on the money and forget about the value.

I've got problem getting the same outputs for a lower price - I positively encourage it. However, less valuable outputs for a lower price is NOT the same thing.

Hold price constant and you have:

More valuable outputs > my outputs > less valuable outputs

Hold outputs constant and you have:

Higher price < my price < lower price

Try varying the two and... well, you work it out.

HUGE iPAD? Maybe. HUGE ADVERTS? That's for SURE

It looks like you're waiting for a App to load...

...in the meantime, here is a word from our sponsors.

I'm guessing that Apple reckon people will tend to blame this on the app rather than Apple.

But then, if free apps turn into a grinding bore for users who then turn to paid versions, what's for Apple shareholders not to like?

BT: Hey guys, we've developed NEW MOBE TECH! It’s called... 2G

Re: But...

With the BT system technically you can transfer calls, have calls transferred to you and make calls as if you were connected directly to the internal phone system (because you are)

Switchboard operators (remember them?) and geeks aside, I don't know anyone who has ever been capable of transferring calls with any confidence—often the last thing you hear before random button-stabbing takes place is "Sorry, if this doesn't work then call her on this mobile number..."

This is solution for those rare confluences where someone:

1. takes a call on a landline,

2. wants to pass the buck,

3. can't just look on their move and say "Sure, here's her mobile number."

4. has the PABX number to hand.

How often does that happen at yours?

REG MAN penetrates GOOGLE'S LAIR

Body language

I can see that the woman in the first pic is not at all bothered by a large bloke wearing Glass.

Oh wait...