Posts by John M

Coming soon: Spider-Man - The Musical!

Dancing on the ceiling - Not

Aaargh. Enough with the musicals.

'Extreme porn' law could criminalise millions

@Steve Kay

You forget that not handing over the password to your encrypted files when requested by the police, gets you banged up for, I think, 3 years.

This country is going mad. How long before we have to carry, the little red book of Chairman Brown, (RFID included) and the party card (Biometric ID).

Mine's the one with the body armour, and tinfoil lining.

Ofcom says yes on more TV ads

Madness

ITV has been in the doldrums for years, because it's programmes with a few exceptions are crap. It needs to show better programmes to encourage more viewers, not advertise more to fewer.

The interruption of programmes by adverts are a source of annoyance as it is, to increase this, would be most unwelcome, and would have a negative effect on the number of viewers.

DNA sequencing for the masses

@amanfromMars

not for a Honest to Goodnest reason, but for a dishonest reason.

Physicists fire up strontium atomic clock

@Stu and AC

I'll monitor the bet and hold the money. Please pay it into my account at Bank of Nigeria...

Appraisals are dishonest, waste of time

The main reason

I became a contractor, no performance reviews. Oh, and the extra cash.

Even after a stellar year, the managers would find something to mark you down on. Client contact - when I had three layers of BA's between me and the client. My chance of having any client contact was nil, but there it was as part of my objectives, which I obviously failed. Therefore crap bonus and payrise.

Six-month hangover for 60-pint Scotsman

Lightweight

When I was a lad, 60 pints were a quiet night out....

Now, of course, more than 2 pints and I spend half the night in lav, and all the next morning suffering a raging headache.

The Paris Icon, because after several pints, I probably would.

Mandriva bigwig (nearly) accuses Ballmer of b-word

Bribery Allegations

Ohh, I'd calm down on those. Alleging corruption, without proof. After the recent football + message board ruling. You could soon find yourselves in court facing the might of Microsofts lawyers.

3,000 chickens paralyse central Scotland

mortality rate

I fear that the mortality rate for the poor old chickens will be 100%, I don't see many of them living past sundown.

Content delivery firm trials novel authentication method

Not a nice thing to say...

about Peggy Mitchell.

Grant and Phil will be around to sort them out soon.

Vodafone UK loses roamers worldwide

Orange

I'm in the City of London today, and Orange is helpfully diverting all calls to me straight to my voicemail, without giving me the opportunity to answer them. Whilst this is doing wonders for my productivity, it's annoyed the hell out of my wife. Anybody else having a similar problem?

UN moves to preserve Bounty mutineers' lingo

No trouble

Looks much like the normal standard of English as used by teenagers in the uk, if graffiti and text messages are anything to go by.

European court protects file sharers

Happy to pay.. but

I am a happy user of Napster; I pay my £15 a month. I download as much music as I want. Some months I might not see anything I fancy, some months I might have 20 albums.

I'd like to be able to burn tracks to CD, but it's not essential, I'd rather a company built a car stereo, I could plug in and download tracks to.

As my 3 kids get older and want mp3 players of their own then the device limit may be a pain, hopefully they'll introduce a family plan.

For DVD's I use lovefilm.com, again £15 notes a month to rent as many DVD’s as I can get through, limited only by the post.

I'd love to download movies or TV on a subscription basis; I'd happily pay for the convenience, of a one-stop shop where I can download digital media.

What the record and movie industries should realise is that if they make it easily available at a reasonable cost then there will be little piracy as most people want to be law abiding. It's their intransigence and continual blocking the way that leading to more people being involved in piracy.

A legal version of bittorrent with all the TV, movie and music content for a reasonable monthly fee (I’m big on the subscription model) is the way forward.