Posts by Mike

Canon EOS 5D Mark II

Pedants, the lot of you

Yea, it was not the first (and only arguably the best), poor comment from the author either badly researched or a typo, but unlike the view of many posters this is not a history of digital article (which would be interesting, anyone remember Studiokit from the mid 90s? or the leica S series, again larger than full frame in the mid 90s?).

Stu hits the nail on the head when he brings it back to lenses, although it's not quite as simple as saying over 12 needs better lenses;

. Lots of pixels (to give the definition)

. Physically large sensor (to ensure enough photons hit the pixels)

. Big glass (to allow lots of light in)

This is why the 10Mp £49 ASDA compact is a world away from the 10Mp EOS 400D, there's lots of detailed reasons why (bokeh, circles of confusion) but it all comes down to the three factors above, get lots of light and chop it up into small bits (but not too small or reciprocity and wavelength becomes a factor).

I remain unconvinced by the article, there's a lot of space that says loads of things (some of the example images used were useless) but makes no relevant comparisons or real reasons why the 5DMk2 is so good, I have some great pictures that directly compare images on my 400D and 5DMk2 using both the 70-200 F2.8L IS and 400 F2.8L IS (the 100-400 pictured is a good lens but poor compared to these two) - A Mk1/Mk2 comparison woudl have made far more sense.

It has really undersold the 5DMk2

Archbishop says Catholics confusing confessionals with couches

You can just imagine the conversation now......

I've had sex with young boys, I've told people that using condoms spreads aids, I repress womens rights all over the world, I prevent vaxcines being used that would save lives.....

OK, you've got the job, when can you start taking confession?

Egyptian cuts off todger to spite his face dad

Re: yeah yeah

>Bet you lot wouldn't cut off your ponytail for love of a woman.

Hmm.... better not be to specific or it will be moderated out, but lets just say she asked me to shave, I did, it is still so very itchy growing back and now I have a rash.

Sharp creates true-hue five-colours-per-pixel LCD

Why?

The answer is simple;

Normally we see green, blue, red but to see the opposites (magenta, yellow, cyan) we must assume absence of one of the primaries, which is why we need the white backlight, so all three colour tv's are "fake" and trick our eyes because you can only add colour, imagine mixing paint, you'll never make true black or true white, you don't need to change the source, you need to interpret it differently and instead of "absence" logic you show an inverted colour.

Although, what about the tetrachromats (the people who see in four colours)? when will we have TVs which display 4 "real" colours (the extra one is "sort of orange") for them?

Gov spunks hundreds of thousands on mobe condom clip

£250k sounds like a lot

But...

If it saves one life (out of the 5,000) then it's cheap (HIV/HPV)

If it stops a handful of teenage/schoolchild pregnancies then it's cheap

Don't forget it's all about raising awareness, if each of the 5,000 has raised awareness that they share with just one partner (not in the 5,000) then that's 10,000 and so on, I'm not sure how the £50 a head compares with the cost of MMR/HPV vaxine.

OK, not a roaring success but way off being a failure.

Weary locals scratch Butt Hole Road

I live on......

Anal Cumshot Soapy Tit Wank road.

Actually some scrote wrote in on the wall above the road sign which has been painted out, so no doubt it will become adopted as it's correct name soon.

Tasmanian devil whirling onto endangered list

Decimated

Means every 10th was killed (although common usage really means a significant proportion; language changes over time so the original literal meaning isn't it's only meaning any more).

Technically when the population dropped from 100% to 90% it was decimated, then when it dropped from 90% to 81% it was decimated again, then from 81% to 73% it was decimated a third time, then from 73% to 65%, 59%, etc. etc. until you hit 30%

So the population HAS been decimated (at least eleven times).

What's that?

it's a Wallaby* in a box.

What are you going to do with it?

I'm going to f..k it and eat it.

*It was a fox in the orginal comic strip in Viz - rhymes with "box"

'Thieving' sperm whale caught on CCTV

Lazy fish.....

Is anyone else singing "keep on swimming" in the heads?

Massed x86 ranks 'blowing away' supercomputer monoliths

Re: A standard mistake

>>You sound like one of my junior SEs.

hehe.... flamebait? (25 years in IT, worked on everything from SS4's to E25s and the newer T5440s, superdomes, ICL mainframes, IBM 590s, Sun, Oracle & Cisco certified)

>> For awhile it will. But a 5440 will never hold up the the pounding an E25K is designed to take.

What does this mean? will a T5440 wear badly? this is the kind of marketing junk line that managers swallow. In reality it all *Depends on your workload* but they aren't that far apart in performance.

I'd argue that a fully spec'd T5440 will outperform a fully spec'd E25 using the same SAN for any real-world business processes, for a fraction of the orginal cost, more threads, faster memory architecture (OK only 512Gb rather than 1Tb but hey!), E25s are crippled by the non uniform memory architecture and scale badly over 5 processor boards, the T5440 doesn't suffer from this, most companies with big E25s either chop them up into smaller domains or have to optimise for them (we shouldn't have to do this).

>>Their virtualization is pretty weak, too.

"pretty weak" nice vague statement again with no substance, the Sun zone/container/domain model is one of the most complete (except perhaps for IBM LPars, but don't get me started, 0.1 of a proc? no fine processor affinity?). We've saved hundreds of thousands with virtulising the Sun kit, it runs faster, cooler, cheaper and so much more flexibly (not that weak).

And a s a final note.... M9000 (faster than a P595, I think I just creamed myself)

Old kit can be replaced by newer, smaller, faster, cheaper kit?

Shock!

Does the pope shit in the woods? (or something)

We're replacing our Sun E25k machines with Sun 5440 for fraction of the cost and does the job faster and cheaper (no dynamic reconfiguraition, but not such a loss as it never worked properly anyway)

AMD: 'The dog didn't eat Otellini's homework'

Moore was wrong over and over again.

Not only was his original prediction wrong, but his subsequent "tweaking" was also wrong.

He took Turings [genius] ideas (from the 50s) made it look like he thought of it and tried to predict the growth numerically, he was wrong originally and then wrong again when he tried to retrospectively change what he originally said (I'm a great at predicting last weeks lottery numbers once I look them up).

@Chris C

Actually he did mention cost in his original quote "The number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost" does that make you one more idiot misquoting and misinterpreting it?

Moores law is a big white elephant as nobody really knows what it is (including Moore).

Facebook denies denying Holocaust deniers

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

The trouble with this sort of group on Facebook is not the free speech aspect, it's motivation.

Good quality, independent testible reseach from Compton, Davies, Eckhardt, Ellis, HarperCollins, Kinder, Urlanis and Wallechinsky roughly agree on hollocaust numbers, but the uneducated (or those that wish to promote an undue bias) will take a snippet of the statistics such as "less then two million German civilians were killed", which although probably true doesn't reflect the six million Polish civilians, then comes the reply "ah... but the records only show three and a half million killed", neatly ignoring the fact that over two million died in camps of disease, overwork and of untreated injuries.

By using misleading statistics and unsupported "facts" some people use this type of forum to further their own agenda, remeber there is genuine and reasonable debate about the number of Jews killed based on records and other evidence, which ranges between 4,200,000 and 6,000,000 people and the "deniers" that ignore the facts and say at most 30,000 Jews were killed.

There is indisputable evidence from multiple, sound sources that show millions of Jews were killed, 4, 5, 6 million is accedemic, I'm perfectly happy to supress someones "freedom of speech" if it goes towards stopping it happening ever again.

Apple: No Jesus on the Jesus Phone

Is it just me?

This whole thing is mental.

There's no such thing as "an image of Jesus", it's possible that someone like Jesus existed, many prophets "exitsted" or at least there were stories about many miracle workers, including stories of resurections, cures etc. which one of these people Jesus was is anybody guess. What's sure it that none of this rather tenuous documentation included pictures, and the "images" that people call Jesus are of a white european man, certainly not a dark skinned arabic looking Jew.

Muhammad did exist however (his family and life are well documented), images existed too, there's nothing in the Quran forbidding images of Muhammad, even the hadith only forbids Muslims from creating images and this is to stop people worshipping him (worship should be for God only)

What's really behind this is that religous people have stupid faith based beliefs that they live their life by, you don't expect a rational response to people who trivialise it do you?

NASA sticks to 2010 shuttle retirement

Re: Am I the only one...

You probably are in that case, if you think that the space shuttle program is just some bloke lighting the blue touch paper and a few astros then you're forgretting the huge industry behind the space program dedicated to space shuttles, decom is a major part, but you can't just turn an industry off, "OK, time to go home, nothing to see here".

Pudsey Bear refused UK passport

Re: What about...

>>When will this bear discrimination end?

Yea, but lets face it she raised £4k by being stupid (fair enough) and Grylls is a cock, it's more observation than discrimination.

eBay scammer gets four years in slammer

Caveat Emptor

OK so the people he scammed should have known better than parting with cash for vapourware and eBay does give advice against this sort of thing, but what gets me is the 1% scammers, building up a nice book of happy customers when they sell make little or no money then sell a few high value items (like cameras) which "get lost in the post, you should have bought insurance" and bang several hundred dollars profit, very low bad feedback and stays looking trustworthy. Oh and there's the ones that buy 10 lots of 1 cent ebooks then happen to have a $1000 laptop for sale at $400 or 100 memory cards at 80% of everybody else's price.

Lesson of the day, check the selller and not just "is their feedback over 98%", what have they bought, what have they sold, if there's a bargain that's too good to be true then maybe it isn't.

Obama pledges 3% of GDP for science

I like him

Someone in charge who doesn't think that science is the devils work.

@Andrew Fraser

GDP (G as in Gross, as in before deductions)

@Alan Esworthy

Umm... you see this is how democracy works, people vote to put a government in place to make these decisions, so yes he decides how to spend the peoples money, because the people asked him to.

Of course this is all accedemic, some evangelical nutter will probably off the guy (because god told him to) before he has a chance to undo the damage that Bush has done.

Swine flu apocalypse: Batten down the hatches

Re: Re: I can only assume that El Reg is taking it's own advice

>However, I'm not offended because frankly I'm not entirely sure what you're on about.

He's just being a suck up, he doesn't know if you're lovely or not, just taking the opportunity to say it (but you're flattered as you call him a boob, which is a cute name), I however know what you look like and still think you fit the parameters of "lovely", maybe a bit old for me 'tho, thirty something.....? (does 0 could as something?).

ps. H1N1 will never kill people in large numbers, it's the H2 strains that you have to watch out for, if that jumps to mammals (leucine at 226) we're fucked.

Twitter riddled with worms and scams (again)

Twitter is important

You people don't understand, Twitter is a worthwile, exciting service, I'm sure if I didn't have a life of my own I'd want to borrow someone else's, or if I thought I was really, really, important and exciting then I could share my wonderful life with people who aren't as fun as me.

In the same vein, you can't expect them to consider things like XSS, after all this particular hack is really hard to exploit and has only been around 5 minutes..... ahem.

'Vista Capable' judge tosses class-action status - again

Re: It was a misleading marketing exercise

How much wrongness can you fit in a post!

You make so many statements with no basis in fact such as "Many end consumers were ripped off", but lets focus on your assertion "Meanwhile the consumers who bought a PC/laptop for Xmas thinking that within a couple of months it would be running the flashy OS promised in marketing blurb by MS have been ripped off."

How many people bought a PC before Christmas because Vista was coming? let's be clear about this, how many people would not have bought the PC without the promise of Vista? Ignore the fact that the possibility of getting cash out of microsoft makes people say "Oh yes.... I was taken in".

OK, you're assuming/implying that this would leave a significant number of people? (I'm not convinced, nor have I ever heard first hand from a single person who considers themself "ripped off").

BUT, lets imagine there is someone (I believe there's six people in this world who consider themselves such, hence the lawsuit), these people must have seen a PC running Vista, gone into a shop (or online store), seen the "Vista Capable" sticker and assumed that the PC attached could do everything that the PC in the advert could do?

With me still? see the flaw yet? if you buy something that is not identical to something that you saw then it may be different in some respect. The "Vista is Vista assumption" is like saying I put petrol in my Honda Blackbird and can go 185mph so why can't my girlfriends Dawoo Matiz do 185mph when I put identical petrol in it?

I am a great believer in "Caveat Emptor", if you spend money on something then you should understand what you are buying, if it's not important enough to research then you do not deserve any recourse (when I give people my money, I want to know what I'm getting for it, if I could get the same thing cheaper or if I could get more for the same money), this whole debacle would have been solved by the buyer asking "will this one do what I saw the other one do on the advert?" - the Vista six are either greedy or stupid (possibly both).

@Charles

>>>>Thing is, when you buy something that says it's capable, common sense dictates you should be able to use it fully (it's not just Aero that's as issue but also DirectX 10 and other key multimedia features). It's like buying a "road-worthy" car only to learn it's not allowed on motorways. Now, if the tag had said "Vista Limited", that would be truth enough to leave the user high and dry.<<<<

Why don't you people get it? look at it round the other way just because an OS has a feature it doesn't mean that the hardware HAS to support it?

Vista supports readyboost - what if you have no USB thumbdrive?

Vista supports IR devices - what if you have no IR port?

Vista supports serial/parallel ports - what if you don't have these?

Vista supports hibernate - what if your MB is not capable?

Vista supports DX10 - what if you don't have a gutsy enough GFX card?

Can you imagine the kind of machine you would need to support every feature of Vista? (SCSI/Camera/Serial/Parallel/USB/Firewire/ISDN/Modem/Tokenring/Scanner/webphone/wireless etc.)

"Vista Capable" is an accurate description - maybe it would have been better to have idiot cards explaining what it means, but maybe, just maybe a buyer ought to have some responsibility for what they are buying and realise there is a difference between a £300 laptop and a £450 one without assuming the £300 is "a much better deal".

btw. any car that can go 30mph can go on a motorway, but can you imagine the traffic problems that would be caused by a car doing 30mph on a motorway? it would be perfectly legal but not very practical (sound familiar?).

One in ten PCs still vulnerable to Conficker exploit

Re: Oh Noes

"Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. And there are 5 people in my family, so it must be one of them. It's either my mum or my dad. Or my older brother Colin. Or my younger brother Ho-Cha-Chu. But I think it's Colin."

- Tommy Cooper

Goldman Sachs threatens blogger over demonic domain name

Re: not wanting to be an arse...

>>surely his use of that domain IS copyright infringement?

Nope, you're thinking "trademark", and his site clearly indicates no association or similar services.

Otherwise, by the same logic you wouldn't be able to say "that halibut was good enough for Jehova" for fear of religous organisations stoning you to death (ahem) but seriously, for trademark infringement you'd have to show a deliberate intention to mislead.

Yahoo! engineer in murder-suicide riddle

It is *not* the gun laws

America and Canada have very similar gun laws, they also have a similar level of gun ownership, the gun laws probably make no difference in this case, the guy had psycological issues and did things that nobody in their right mind would do.

The general problem in america and the reason why there is a disproportionate level of gun related murders is americans and their fear culture, not the gun laws, there is also a disproportionate level of afro-american people in prison, povety line families, creationists and media hype, it is an awful place.

btw. The UK does not have a problem with knives, it's media fear culture, and it will get worse.

How gov scapegoats systems for man-made errors

Idiot-profing

There is a balancing act between ensuring that bad data cannot be entered and bloating the code with complex validation (complexity increases issues, you can either make a system so simple that there are obviously no errors or some complex that there are no obvious errors).

So either your users are competent and understand garbage in->garbage out or are incompetent and assume that "the magic box" knows everything, so if it's wrong it must be its fault.

Grey squirrels invade Nutt house

@Mike Shepherd

>>B&Q do a squirrel trap for about £15.

This may be true, however if you capture a squirrel it is illegal in the UK to release it into the wild again (as it is vermin), besides it will come back.

Popped their claws?

It's a good job the don't wear clogs, imagine the noise in your attic.

Thread hazelnuts on to string, put them in the garden, a full power air rifle, logan silencer and you're away, completely legal way to shoot american invaders in the UK (oh the satisfaction).

Moderatrix quits El Reg: Latest

You had me until.....

£30 for a pair of shoes?

The woman has more style than that......

NYC granny shoots mugger with .357 Magnum

@What is it about gunmakers?

The .357 is (oddly enough) identical diameter to the .38 and in fact the .38-44 rounds were almost identical to the .357 and you could load early .357 rounds into .38 revolvers (if you didn't mind them blowing up sometimes), conversely .38 rounds are usually fine in .357 revolvers (and are cheaper, give far less kick).

Which of course still begs the question, why .357? simply the chamber and barrel has to be larger than the round (snug but not to much), the .38 was designed to go through a degree of sheilding (car doors, bullet resistant jackets) and still reliably punch big holes in people, it doesn't need to be bigger, bigger would give you less control, smaller would mean peformance reduction, it's the optimum size to kill people.

Given granny harry probably knew that the .38/.357 is designed to kill (not wound or scare) she carried it with the express purpose to kill, the opportunity she was given (either a dog kicker or bag snatcher) was used to attempt to kill someone, he might be a bad man but all this teaches anyone is to be worse than the bad guys and that the bad guys should carry guns and shoot first.

You may get killed by a mugger, because they will shoot first and doesn't want to take the risk of you having a gun, this woman has just made the world a little less safe.

The Pirate Bay punts BitTorrent cloaking device

Talent? @Colin

>>These people have talents beyond the understanding of the average joe

Not really, talent rarely comes into it, saleability is the comodity they have, I have found that the average session musician has far more actual musical talent than those that are famous for their music.

As pointed out above, there are far more rare skills which are hardly ever rewarded, but vacuous popular "artists" get rewarded in vast quantities for talents which ARE very common, with advertising, showmanship, production (basically investment) they become popular and the investment of the record companies pay dividends.

Don't get me wrong, there are talented popular musical artists, but please don't assume that just because they are popular and work hard at what they do that they have any musical talent whatsoever.

I wonder, if the music industry was less about saleability and more about talent, would people be more likely to pay for it? personally I think that if the music was truely artistic and less disposable then people would give it more respect, but as it is, the downloaders pay what it's worth (nothing), I paid a lot for my original Dylan and Joy Division albums (as they are worth it), who will be looking back with the same affection on their SClub 7 albums? (ps. Britney is a real artist, in a different era she would have far more respect and a far less manufactured catalog of music, she is very misunderstood).

Software generated attendance letter about dead pupil

What's the problem?

Surely the kid would have no problem getting a note from their mum then?

Seriously, if you want to "save costs and drive efficency" you use computers and software, if these don't work properly then it doesn't remove your own responsibility for the task, regardless of who you pay to do the work for you it's still your responsibility (yes you can blame somebody else for the failing, but it's still your responsibility).

US mums sue anti-sexting crusader

You send me yours.....

This is almost identical to the you show me yours, and I'll show you mine (which lets face it happens to humans of all ages once they realise there's a difference).

The big problem is that there is a permanent record of it, the kids were too stupid to realise that the pictures could exist forever*, they need to be told (just the once, probably by a parent) but not attending a course for weeks, that's lame.

*Imagine in 5 years time the 18 year old bloke looking back at a 13 year old girls naughty bits he got sent remembering how it was great to be a kid, maybe a little smile on his face (oh yea, that would make him a paedo, and nobody in their right mind could justify that)

'Nanodiamond' asteroid tracked from space to desert impact

Neildiamond?

"Love on the rocks"

Someone (old enough) had to say it "ain't no surprise"......

Bletchley Park fires up replica Turing Bombe

Bombe?

A bomb! What are you giving him a bomb for? Thats a dangerous animal!

ps. NB.... don't engage.... it's the only way to retain your sanity, you should know by now that amanfromMars is like the times cryptic crossword, but to find out the cryptic clues you have to work out an additional two levels of cryptic indirection like cluse to the clues, when really all you're waiting for is the answers so you can then work out the route how you would have got there.

Mormons demand ICANN plugs net smut hole

Hate Mormons?

Nahhhhh.... we just think they are stupid.

They're like clowns at the circus, but instead of big floppy feet and a flower that squirts water they have a book which they interpret in their own quaint way (but know beyond doubt that their version is the only true version).

Objects of ridicule aren't hated, they just hate being ridiculed.

Prof pooh-poohed in pig-v-whale hippo genealogy brouhaha

The IT angel

It has to be said......

Tried to install linux on a hippo once, difficult? it was a pig of a job.........

(sorry, it is Monday)

Bollocks

It is quite obvious that the Hippo is nither a pig nor a whale, it's a Hippo and has always been a Hippo forever since God created it.

I don't understand why these "scientists" keep making this evidence up, everyone with any common sense knows evolution is (as the title says), the so called "fossils" are probably unrelated creatures from the great flood (about 2345 years BC).

People actually believe this.

PC buyers fail to prove MS deceived in Vista 'Capable' suit

Ignorance

Some bloke from MS realised that some of his customers may be more ignorant than most?

Doesn't mean that everybody was ignorant, nor does it mean that it was deliberately misleading.

How many times have you seen a sign something like "All items $1", would you expect to be able to take home every last item and only pay 50p for the lot? more correctly the sign should say "Any item $1" or "All items $1 each".

Even if it was misleading (and for the uneducated this may be true), it doesn't remove all common sense.

Why do people in the US insist on legal action when you're saying "Please pay for my stupidity, I'm buying something I don't understand, I don't want to research the product".

If you bought a digital camera and had a budget of $300, would you buy the first one you found under $300 or perhaps check out all the features or this "photo capable" device? If you didn't understand the difference between digital and optical zoom, 5mp and 10mp, webcam mode etc. perhaps it would be time to do some research?

These people bought without thinking and their greed is driving them to sue (I suspect for much, much more than the cost of the PC).

Brussels: Old-school lightbulbs to be gone by 2012

No good for my snake tanks

No overhead heat means I would have to turn up the heat mats and risk them becoming cooker hobs (no thanks), being more fragile than bulbs is not practical when the snakes press against or squeeze the cold bulbs.

The idea of a low energy bulb is good, in some cases they are better than the alternative, the problem is we shortly won't have an alternative and the technology isn't quite there yet.

IBM 'in talks' to buy Sun Microsystems

Sun will die soon

IBM will buy the corpse before the autopsy, Storage is great, their servers are great, however the market has changed so much that E25s are underpowered, overwatted windtunnels, dynamic reconfiguration was a great idea, but is rarely reliable, virtulisation is king now, Zones are great, but why bother on E25s when you have nice domains? the X5nnn series are truely wonderful but only when they are used properly for the correct application (in many cases replacing obscenely expensive E25s).

All of which leaves Sun in no mans land with great technology, fantasic OS but a limited hardware line-up (or a limited target), Sun *needs* IBM to have a market and the gloss that Sun brings could make IBM shine (ditch AIX, port Solaris please......)

This will be a giggle.

BBC Click paid cybercrooks to buy botnet

The Law

It was illegal, this is not in question.

However, compare this with how Daniel Cuthbert was treated when he tested two non existent URLs and got done under the computer misue act, probably spoilt goods now and has a wrecked career;

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/11/tsunami_hacker_followup/

If Daniels treatment was appropriate, why isn't aunty beeb being nailed to the wall for this?

Simple, the law is not understood nor applied evenly, because it's a bag of shite and tries to shoehorn traditional laws such as "break and entering" and "theft" into the virtural environment, with no practical way of applying them, a complete overhall is required.

Scientology spokesman confirms Xenu story

Popular misconceptions

>>There's lots of historical evidence that Moses, Jesus and Muhammad etc. were real and great leaders of people.

Moses

Not true, outside of the (damn) bible there is no evidence of Moses.

Jesus

All accounts of jesus are non contemparaneous, that is, all records were done after he was alive (not at the time), the fact that a man was crucified and came to life again was not in any records of the time is interesting in it's own right, the fact that other "miracles" by other "messiahs" were recorded at the time is also interesting, jesus probably did not exist, but someone like him may have done, why wasn't in the Roman records? (did the Romans hide everything? while keeping similar records about other people?) the fact that Bethlehem village did not exist at the time of Jesus's birth is also interesting.

Muhammad

Almost certainly existed, there is lots of non contradictory information about him allowing very accurate dates of his birth etc, he came from a well to do family which was also well documented.

But don't forget, Hitler existed and was a "great leader of people", doesn't mean it's a good thing.

Science-boosting thickie questionnaire backfires

@David Wiernicki

>>>At least we're not stupid enough to let our government photograph and film every waking moment of our lives, let them jail us for reading the wrong web sites, and ban video games for adults because they're not appropriate for infants.

You are such a numb nuts; (nothing to do with the article but OK) there's lots of CCTV, so? the US is way ahead on this front (if it's a problem for you), as for laws..... it's only recently that the law was stopped (Georgia?) that would put a woman in jail for 20 year for giving her husband oral sex in the privacy of her own home, do you want another 100 examples? Just because you *think* you live in the land of the free doesn't mean you do, keep with the blue pills my friend.

>>>Oh, and one other thing - the 'average IQ' will -always- be about 100, because 100 is defined as average intelligence! Yikes.

Yes..... average, as in the US is below average (UK, about 100 so not great but on the water-line), compared to the rest of the world, the US is lacking (50th), so my point was - Americans are dumber than most, this means a boost in education (generally) is required, not specifically science.

Why bother?

We already know the average IQ in the USA is 98*

The stupidity of creationism is just a symptom of a stupid nation, educating people about evolution won't magically make the nation smarter.

*'IQ and the Wealth of Nations' by Dr. Richard Lynn

Obese cost London fire brigade £300k

On the other side of the coin......

Fat people usually* consume more than they need, which brings in more tax, this is exactly the smoking costs money/no it doesn't argument, and, like smokers, fat people don't live as long so they are less likely to be a pensions burden in later life.

Personally, I think the skinny non smokers are scum because they contribute less to the economy.

*yea, usually - as in almost without exception, it's not genetic, you consume more calories than you burn therefore you are fat.

Ethernet — a networking protocol name for the ages

@Haters

So unless you keep doing really cool stuff you're a twat?

These comments are great, so Bob;

. Turns gold to lead.

. produces "pure crap"

. is a con artist

. is guilty of plagiarism

. held up WiFi

. can't play tennis

. doesn't believe in linux

. produced inferior standards

. does not understand politics

. is irrelevant as it would have been someone else if it wasn't him

Just listen to yourselves, it doesn't matter if what you say is true or not, you sound like petulant children, knocking the man doesn't demean the pervasiveness of ethernet, the best one of you underperformers can manage is "he did OK with 3Com" OK? OK? WTF? that's like saying "McDonalds did OK with that burger selling thing".

In my considered opinion, you are wankers (not in a good way, you have made a wank-fan of pictures of yourself and are furiously spanking as your mum and her friend from church enters your bedroom, to be met by a milk truck crash at the billy mills roundabout).

Have a word with yourselves.

UK IT should 'fire men first', says Kate Craig-Wood

Southpark

Mrs Garrison is only doing this for publicity.

It takes, on average 10,000 hours of something to become an expert at it, most of the highly paid IT geeks have spent a long time being IT geeky (most of them male).

How many geeky women do you know? how many geeky female teenagers? Despite 20+ years in IT I have not met a single female IT geek that knows 75% of what I know, IT is dominated by male IT geeks because they (generally) know more because they have been geeky for a much longer time.

I have met a few women who were in IT 10/20 years ago, most of them moved on to management, other unrelated jobs (oddly, usually teaching) or full-time motherhood, whereas the men stuck at it, increasing their skills experience and knowlege and their reward is a good salary.

How many girls were given ZX81's for christmas? OK, maybe the rot started at home and at school, but you can't magically make an unexperienced person experienced by sacking the ones that are experienced, Men should not be punished for doing better than women because they had a better start.

Notwithstanding, if anyone here sees injustice in their workplace, where someone is being unjustly rewarded because of their gender (taking into account their ability and experience), then it's your responsibility to shout (I have) sexism can only be prevented by education and only resolved on a case by case basis.

Oh and I once worked with a very smart young attractive woman in IT (UNIX admin) so not all IT women are munters (although it's likely).

YouTube blocks music videos in UK

@Simon Brown

If you do music primarily to make money then you're exactly what's wrong with music today, if it's your major concern then I guess you'll let money drive your ideas.

So you think that having music on adds 2% productivity, and you deserve some of that? what about having a clean towel in the washroom, that nice tree outside, being allowed to nip off early when it's not busy, giving credit to customers, or the millions of other things which make it a better place to work or increase productivity? methinks you over-estimate your importance, besides how often have you been in a place that has the radio on and it's actually a distractor, it costs productivity (we used to have radio on at work and call stats went UP after the radio went off) actually saving nearly £1000 pcm, so the choice is pay £44 to PRS and lose over ten grand a year or leave the radio off and increase productivity (the workplace isn't so nice but we all have bills to pay).

Talking about money, you think just because Google made lots of money it's OK for YouTube to make a loss? in that case because U2 is getting lots of royalties you can get stuffed.

Swedish police claim massive anti-piracy bust

Theft?

I believe, for something to be considered theft there has to be some loss to someone (oddly enough, so does the legal system).

If someone downloads a film is there a loss?

NO

If the person was never going to pay to see it (cinema or DVD etc.)

YES

They would have otherwise paid for for the film (cinema or DVD etc.)

PROBABLY

They distibute it to somebody else, if this film is distributed to anyone would would have spent money on watching it.

If you download a film via bittorrent and you seed any part of the film then you could be contributing to loss, therefore you are contributing to theft regardless of your intention to pay for it or not. If you watch a film illegally and then tell someone else not to watch it because you don't think it's very good, again you have caused a loss.

The only way you can justify "no theft" (to yourself) is to download the film without sharing any part of it, watch it and do not distribute or comment on it, it would be impossible to prove that you had no intention to go to the cinema or buy it on DVD as the mere fact that you downloaded it means that you wanted to watch it so loss [must be] implied regardless of your intention, if you wanted to use this defence in court, apart from having a snowballs chance in hell, you would have to prove your intention (either by having no money or a signed, witnessed statement of intention) there is a possibility of a test case, a child perhaps with no income but access to internet and computer equpment, but remember you must also never share a single byte of the film with anyone.

Discovery ISS gig go for Wednesday

@b166er

>>you're new here ;p

Of course he's new here, he said:

>>All this serves to do is to minimize the program and the heroic work of the astronauts.

In what way are they heroic? jeez they couldn't even get a cat out of a tree, they want to be in space because it's cool, they are risking their lives for an opportunity that almost nobody gets, it's not heroic, to call them heroic is to minimise what a real hero is*.

Astronauts are not heroes, it's the same as a 200m freediver or someone who climbs everest without oxygen, great achievement and everything, cool but not heroic, can you buy hero status? was Dennis Tito (the first space tourist to the ISS) a hero or just a bloke wth a lot of money?

The article was written with a degree of triviality, it deserves nothing else.

*e.g. Any Fireman