* Posts by Paul Smith

533 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2007

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Vote now for the WORST movie EVER

Paul Smith

confused

Having watched most of the movies that didn't make the cut, and considering that they were, by and large, worse then the ones that did, and none of them come close to being the worst I have seen, I have to conclude that "worst" means different things to different people.

Take Eyes wide shut as an example. Beautifully made and lit, includes Nicole Kidman's arse and various other bits of tasty totty, but a completly meaningless storyline. So bad, I walked out of the cinema before the end. Worst ever? Not even a contender. How about the Postman? Kevin Costner at his self important best? Drivil certainly, but worse then Waterworld or Dances with Wolves? Perhaps, but not by very much.

How many have sat through Eraserhead and only realised that nothing was actually going to happen when the credits rolled up? (Thats the David Lynch one, not the Swarchenegger one).

Bad remakes of bad movies? Rollerball, DeathRace2000, Fame, Posidon, Taxi, Get Carter all have to be considered. All are brutal, but worst ever?

Bad sequals? Jaws2, Back to the Future 2, too easy (see what I did there? 2, too? forget about it?)

Bad Franchises? Fast & Furious, Matrix, Planet of the Apes, National Lampoon, Dumb and ...

I think this competition should start again, but this time with a debate about what makes a movie bad. I am now off to root out my copy of "Wombleing Free!". The true life retelling of the famous storey of the Wombles of Wimbledon Common.

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Paul Smith

Eyes wide shut

First movie I ever actualy walked out on in a cinema.

IBM boasts of Power-AIX win at E-Trade Korea

Paul Smith
WTF?

sinking ships and unfaithful rodents

Yet another Sun shop looking for alternatives to Oracle, no matter the cost. Lets be honest, a 16% improvement on five year old kit is not an 'investment', it is desperation. I don't think this is one IBM should boast about, but it is one that the Oracle board should be looking at and saying wtf is going wrong.

SUNKEN LINER Titanic iceberg riddle answer FOUND ON MOON

Paul Smith

Astronomical odds?

"In astronomical terms, the odds of all these variables lining up in just the way they did were, well, astronomical."

No... they were a certainity and a few minutes with a calculator will tell you when the next time this will be. And the time after that, and after that...

Intel: The data center will be 'Xeon E5 Inside'

Paul Smith
Black Helicopters

good enough for the goose?

"...That, said Rodriguez, is enough encryption capability to secure all the data on a DVD in nine-tenths of a second..."

Sso we can asume it is pretty good at decrypting as well?

Oz says 41 hits a day turn bloggers into publishers

Paul Smith

Bias?

If I want to claim that a blogger has defamed me and I want that defamation treated seriously, I have to show he got 15,000 or more hits a year. Why is this a bad thing?

Paul Smith
WTF?

Bias?

Very American reporting, don't you think?

Attack the report by attacking the sponsors of the report: "the Greens, who felt that News Ltd was out of control..."

Attack the report by taking bits of it out of context..."These numbers are arbitrary, but a line must be drawn somewhere...15,000 hits per anum translates to just over 41 a day."

So as a journalist and reporter, does the author of this article feel that the Ozzy's are right or wrong in attempting to establish some way to hold media to account?

Lithuania rules beer brewing 'vitally essential' to life

Paul Smith
Pint

newsworthyness

Why is this news? Of course beer is essential to life.

RIP: Peak Oil - we won't be running out any time soon

Paul Smith

Definitions

The power of positive thinking never fails to amaze. Current US production is at about the same level as it was in the 1940's. It is not trending upwards, it is just not trending downwards as quickly as it was.

The number of productive wells has increased significantly in the last three to five years, but that was after thirty years of decline.

Woman spanked for dissing ex in Facebook snapshot

Paul Smith
Mushroom

Typical

Bloody foreigners! Wouldn't happen in my day!

Overclockers UK swallowed by private equity firm Afinum

Paul Smith

Customer service

I have used them, liked them, and recommended them to others.

As far as I am aware, every one I suggested to try OCUK still gives them repeat business. Yes, of course there have been problems, faulty goods, and misunderstandings, but the reason I and others give them repeat business is because those problems are sorted politely and profesionally.

Apple tells authors: All your books iBook files are belong to us

Paul Smith

"includes..."

I seem to read clause (ii) differently to other commentators :

if a) "...the work is provided for a fee..."

and b) "... and includes files in the .ibooks format ..."

then c) "...may only be distributed through Apple"

This would appear to mean that if an ibook format version of my work exists, then I can not sell it by any other means - even if apple refuse to sell it.

York CompSci student pleads guilty to Facebook hack

Paul Smith

A little honesty at last

"At Facebook nothing is more important to us than the security and integrity of our site,..."

Users, privacy etc. all came a poor second.

Does your smartphone run Carrier IQ? Find out here

Paul Smith

Money!

Would it be fair to assume that since the end user did not request this service, the carriers were honest enough to exclude these 'diagnostic' reports when calculating the end users data bill?

Is the electromagnetic constant a constant?

Paul Smith

Universal constants

I always considered universal constants to be over rated. The only reason we need 83% of the known universe to be made up of matter that we can not prove the existence of, is because without it, some of our 'constants' wouldn't be constant. Well guess what fellow physicists, beware of interesting times ahead!

Newtonian physics gave us a concept of gravitation that related attraction to mass over the square of distance, and we knew of no reason to doubt why that should not be univeral, so it was called the - all together now - Universal Constant of Gravitation. Einstein however, missed a golden opertunity. He came up with something that showed that the measurement of mass and of distance was not absolute but relative to velocity, so instantly, Big G should have become suspect.

When I fell in love with physics, it was its simplicity and honesty that attracted me. If the evidence proved a theory wrong, you dropped the theory and tried to come up with a better one. Dark matter and super string theories are not, in my humble and outdated opinion, better theories, they are attempts to bodge disproven theories and should have been strangled at birth.

Vegas man begs web for $1m to fix gigantic scrotum

Paul Smith

Wow

I am so happy that I live in a country where doctors ask "What seems to be the matter?" and not "How will you be paying?"

An ode to rent-a-nerds and cable monkeys

Paul Smith
FAIL

If writing for El Reg has taught you anything...

...it should have been that your perception of the number of syllables we commentards are prepared to tolerate is orthogonal to the clarity of the conceptualisation you are attempting to portray. It should also have tought you to use your dictionary as frequently and as carefully as your thesaurus. You might then have known that an ode is supposed to rhyme.

VeriSign demands website takedown powers

Paul Smith

It gets better,

The Mothers Union of outer Mongolia/Bromley decides that they want all .com sites with the letters 't - i - t' anywhere in the name, ***le or on the home page to be taken down. There would be nothing left in the cons***ution to stop them.

CyanogenMod 7.1 brings 24 Android phones into fold

Paul Smith
Paris Hilton

Xperia is coming - but not yet

From the CM web site...

"Users of Sony Ericsson devices have been left out of the CyanogenMod experience for a while now. We are happy to announce that users will be able to enjoy a full-fledged CyanogenMod with nearly full hardware support (we are still working on FM radio) starting in our next release. You can also expect nightly builds and more instructions soon."

The key words are "starting in our next release"...

Paris, for getting me all excited, then leaving me flat...

Ease data traffic jams with some network improvements

Paul Smith
FAIL

Make you mind up...

The whole point of the motorway analogy was to show the massive gains to be had from a seperate and seperated path introduced for dedicated traffic purposes. But then went on to suggest that we should just make the existing cart track wider!

Should your system offer Mr, Ms ... and Mx?

Paul Smith

Pipe dreams

Can anybody tell me an acceptable word to use for the third person singular that is gender neutral (rules out 'he' and 'she') and not offensive (rules out 'it')?

Gravity wave detector gets more sensitive

Paul Smith
Thumb Down

Lies for children

"lies for Children" - Great expression which nicely sums this article up.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle simply says we can't know the exact position and the exact momentun of a particle - and this is the important bit - at the same time. The reason is simply because measuring one affects the other. This does not, as suggested, lead to vacumn fluctuation since it is possible to know exactly the position of a particle, there fore it is possible to know, with absolute certainty, that it is not there.

If you want to play with energy-time uncertainties, then you need to be able to play with Schrödinger's cat without getting scratched.

'Major' C++ revision receives standards blessing

Paul Smith

Re: Excuse me, but...

"... any language can be used to write ugly."

Sadly, very true, but some languages make it much harder to be elegant then others.

LightSquared blasts GPS naysayers in FCC letter

Paul Smith
Coat

Galileo

Looks like another good reason to invest in the Galileo system. Mines the one with the map in the pocket.

German Green extracts tracking info from mobile operator

Paul Smith

Statistics

"we're all being tracked all the time just in case the police want to know where we were at some point in the future."

Ah, no, not quite. We are all being tracked all the time in case we want to actually use our mobile phones. The data is kept so the operators can see who wants to use there phones, when they want to use them and where they want to use them so that the operators can make sure they have enough capacity so you can use your phones. The fact that the police can request access to that data is secondary.

Praying for meltdown: The media and the nukes

Paul Smith

Lewis taking a day off?

I assume that everything is continueing to go well in Fuxs Ville, allowing Lewis to take a well earned rest. There was no plutonium in the soil samples, when the looked more closely, it was the day-glo from the firemans boots, and the dirty water just has a bit of scum on the top. Nothing to worry your pretty little heads about.

Never the less and just to give this a bit of context, ten thousand dead and rising, fifteen thousand missing and rising. There are decent sized towns where no one can remember the dead, let alone bury them.

Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

Paul Smith

"I have never been so ashamed to call myself a journalist."

"slightly heightened radiation - occasionally reported in scaremongering fashion as "10x normal"'

I am not surpised you are ashamed, you should be!

To a physicist, 10x Normal radiation level is slightly heightened (for a given Normal on a given scale) but instead of dealing with the physics or the facts, you prefer to use "scaremongering". In what way do you think you are any better then the Red Top brigade who also bend the truth to sell copy.

Croatian brainboxes deploy calculus-based CAPTCHA

Paul Smith

Touchy today?

"So someone who doesn't understand calculus or advanced math is an idiot then? "

Artists, peace campaigners and any body else attempting to join a Croatian advanced math club without a good knowledge of advanced math is probably an idiot, yes.

FAA to pilots: Expect 'unreliable or unavailable' GPS signals

Paul Smith
FAIL

Re: Nameless Faceless@12:08 - Non Issue

"Commercial pilots do not use GPS for navigation." - Fail.

Commercial pilots use GPS, INS, VOR/DME and the have been known to look at compasses, maps, and even out the window. Have you heard of RNAV, or GNSS approaches? These rely strongly or exclusivly on GPS. The 45meter deviation reported by one poster earlier is enough to completly miss a runway. That might proove to be an issue, don't you think?

VFR stands for Visual Flight Rules - that means lots of looking out the window. GPS is handy because it can tell you where to look and what you can expect to see, but under VFR, it is no different from having a map. Quite a clever map, admitedly. I think what you meant, and completly failed, to say, was that private pilots flying light aircraft under IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) rely heavily on GPS navigation, but do not have the luxury that commercial pilots have of knowing how accurate their navigation data currently is. For them, 45meters out is not a huge issue, but suddenly fluctuating data can serious upset an autopilot.

Paul Smith

AC @23:46 - How will we tell?

Aircraft have multiple navigation systems including GPS, INS and VOR/DME and each system is constantly being compared to the others to spot exactly these sort of mistakes. It is why so few pilots end up driving into rivers etc.

Judges reject Operation Ore appeal

Paul Smith
Flame

DPP laziness

So what, in effect, the DPP is saying, and the judge is agreeing to, is that if you want to do something illegal with the internet, first steal someone elses ID and use it to get a credit card. You will be then be left completely alone since the DPP is far to busy to bother checking that the credit card used was actually issued to the person accused. And as we have seen so often where 'kiddie porn' panic is concerned, suspicion is conviction.

This approach does have lots of advantages as it seems that it makes everyone happy. The police and the DPP get easy prosocutions, politicians can claim they are doing something and have the convictions to back them up, newspapers have headlines that sell papers, pressure groups have hate figures to scare us with. Even the peados get to carry on as usual. In fact, the only people to suffer by doing things this way are the idiots who allow their ID's to be stolen and the kiddies that are being abused, and lets face it, nobody really gives a fuck about them.

DARPA, NASA team on '100-Year Starship' project

Paul Smith

"No human organisation...

"No human organisation has yet appeared with both the financial clout and the long-term commitment that would appear necessary to get humanity out among the stars."

Does the Catholic church not count?

Airport screeners go for the groin

Paul Smith
FAIL

winners and losers

Just like the war on drugs, the war on terrorism was based on grossly incorrect assumptions but has since become so profitable for the incumbents, that it will not be allowed to end.

UK border police seize £500k from Nigerians' hand luggage

Paul Smith

Currency rules

From the IATA website: http://www.iatatravelcentre.com/GB-United-Kingdom-customs-currency-airport-tax-regulations-details.htm

"Currency rules

Import and Export: local currency (Pound Sterling-GBP) and foreign currencies: no restrictions if arriving from or traveling to another E.U. country.

If arriving directly from or traveling to a country outside the E.U.: amounts exceeding EUR 10,000.- or more or the equivalent in another currency (incl. banker’s draft and cheques of any kind) must be declared."

Notes from HM Revenue & Customs "Cash Declaration" f orm C9011: "Notes on completing this form

You do not need to complete this form if you are travelling to or arriving from another EU country or are carrying less than 10,000 Euros."

Youth jailed for not handing over encryption password

Paul Smith

Nostalgia

This story just proves how old I am getting. I can still remember the days when a person was presumed innocent until proven guilty.

That said, I am pretty sure that the European human rights charter includes the equivilent of the 5th, i.e. that you can not be forced to incriminate yourself.

Paul Smith

Nope. I was wrong

I just checked and it seems that the European Charter does not protect you from having to incriminate yourself. Poor kid rightly screwed now.

Intel chief: Obama (still) driving US off cliff

Paul Smith

Falling behind

"...He also told his audience this year that the US lead in technology training and research has dissipated. "We [once] seemed a generation ahead of the rest of the world in information technology. That simply is no longer the case,..."

Recent surveys have suggested as much as 40% of the US population may belive the Earth to be about 10,000 years old. I am sure that figure has been grossly exagerated but even so, these are not the people who are going to come up with the next technological breakthrough, are they? Oddly enough, these are people are not typically Democrats either.

Conroy, Family First isolated on Oz internet filter

Paul Smith

Re:- They've got my vote...

Sorry to state the bleeding obvious but people often seem to forget that with PR, preference voting and alternate votes, last place is still a vote. If you have six candidates, and give one of them your sixth vote, then if your first five choices don't make it, that person gets your vote. If you do not give them your preference, they CAN NOT get your vote. Only give your vote to the people you DO want, in the order that you want them.

Malware gang steal over £700K from one British bank

Paul Smith

Credability

"the cyber criminals have successfully stolen £675,000 ($1,077,000)" and how exactly would the amount be known by anyone other then the criminals?

Does the bank is question know it is being scammed and not care? Perhaps it thinks it is cheaper to ignore then acknowledge? Either way, I am sure they wouldn't publish the figure.

Or does this 'security consultancy' have the means to monitor the exact amounts being transfered? So why didn't they stop them? Perhaps they were waiting for it to pass the Million Dollar mark to make it interesting 'news', or perhaps they are touting this around to sell their services. "Pay us X amount and we will tell you if you are the victim of this scam." Now there is an idea I could sell on Dragon's Den.

Tory MP's email fail stirs up bloggo-fury

Paul Smith
FAIL

Oh yes it is...

Spam = Unsolicited commercial email. Fail!

Quoted from Spamhaus:

The word "Spam" as applied to Email means "Unsolicited Bulk Email".

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

* Unsolicited Email is normal email

(examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries)

* Bulk Email is normal email

(examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)

I would say this counts as SPAM.

Feds admit storing pervscanner pics

Paul Smith
Big Brother

is this really such a big deal?

So if the images are too blurry to whack off too so we should not be upset? Hmm... If someone want's to enjoy themselves looking at a blurry image of me, why should I care. Even if the images were much sharper then the ones we have seen, it still doesn't bother me.

If a public official wants to take a picture of me for clear public safety reasons and catagorically states that the picture can not be stored, and that checks and safeguards have been put in place to ensure that my trust is not abused, then I will reluctently give my consent.

If that public official turns out to have been lying through there teeth about not storing the image, then I have to assume that they were also lying about the uses that image will be put to. And while I do not know what they have in mind, I do not think I am being paranoid in assuming it is something I am not going to like, otherwise why risk lying.

India bags BlackBerry interception rights

Paul Smith
Big Brother

"most of us accept that..."

"...most of us accept that there are times when the security services need to intercept electronic communications. ..."

I don't. Not anymore. The only electronic communications that the 'authorities' can intercept are those between people not trying to hide and those who are technically inept. How many drug dealers have been busted because of intercepted emails? Not many. How many bomb plots were broken by judicious phone taps? Three or four? How many political scandels averted by knowing what the journalist was investigating? Probably more then we will ever find out. Where is the safety and security we were promised in return for giving up our rights?

What we actually got are cheating parents caught lying to try and get their child a better education. What we have is a society where the citizen is not assumed to be innocent, where they are no longer even assumed to be a citizen.

In the bad old days when terrorists/revolutionarys/freedom fighters used violence to get to the negotiating table, bad people ended up in jail because a court of their peers were convinced of their guilt by the evidence presented. Mistakes were made, some of them deliberate, but the basic assumption was that you were a citizen and had the rights and obligations associated with being a citizen. Do we now live in a society where you are assumed to be a threat?

Cell phone eavesdropping enters script-kiddie phase

Paul Smith
Big Brother

@boltar

What makes you think that GCHQ can (or would want) to do this. If they want to listen to a call, they go through the phone company with bribery or blackmail, the same way any self respecting journalist would.

Quit Facebook Day flops

Paul Smith

I quit

I quit last week when I logged into facebook to be presented with an intimate conversation between one of my daughters friends and her potential boyfriend, no photos sadly...

Samsung NX10

Paul Smith

Surprise result

80% yes? For that sort of money you can get a proper Nikon or Canon DSLR system that will outperform this in every single catagory. How does this deserve 80%?

Madoff geeks charged for writing book-cooking code

Paul Smith

Duh...

"Investors sunk about $36bn into Madoff's ponzi scheme, according to CBS News. Of that, about $18bn was liquidated before the house of cards collapsed and the other half is missing. Madoff is currently serving a 150-year prison sentence."

It was a Ponzi scheme! That means one suckers investment is used to pay another suckers bonus. Nothing is missing, it was paid out to suckers to encourage them (and their friends) to invest even more.

IT contractors convicted of UK casino hack scam

Paul Smith

Dumb and dumber

"...was investigated by Scotland Yard's clubs and vice unit. Police used CCTV footage from roulette table terminals at the casino and computers seized from the mens' homes in unravelling the case"

CCTV footage of the table terminals? Computers seized? WTF? The only thing that unravelled in this case was how thick everyone involved was. The Casino for paying out on unverifed slips. The thieves for such stupid mistakes - a tenner at 35 to 1 != 600, ffs! The cops for being unable to prosecute such an open and shut case without CCTV footage and seizure warrants. (I wonder how much overtime was involved?) And the Judge who ordered £32,000 restitution for a £33,000 theft.

Carlos Slim is world's richest man, Bill Gates now number two

Paul Smith

Old News

This headline should have the word AGAIN tagged onto it. Slim, Gates and Buffet have been the top three for years, simply changing places now and again.

Ubisoft undone by anti-DRM DDoS storm

Paul Smith

criscros @ 15:49

"I'm officially boycotting Ubisoft and all their DRM-infested shite. Even if they publish the BEST game in the world, I'm not touching it until they remove the DRM.

What, do they think we are stupid or something?"

No, they do not think you are stupid. Theiving shits maybe, but not stupid.

SeaWorld killer killer whale must die, Bible insists

Paul Smith
Coat

Nuts

Does this guy call himself a Christian or not? If he claims to believe in and follow the teachings of Christ, then "turn the other cheek" superceeds "eye for an eye". Or is that only when it suits them.

Mines the one with Religous Intolerance on the back.

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