Posts by John Presland

Team Macron praised for feeding phishing spies duff info

Re: On fake news

Re your marginal note, you'll find a lot about fake news in at least the Spanish and Polish press.

Oh snap! UK Prime Minister Theresa May calls June election

It belongs to Murdock and I wouldn't trust it an inch.

Squirrel sinks teeth into SAN cabling, drives Netadmin nuts

Re: I'd rather deal with a squirrel than a huge nest of spiders...

Putting your hand into a dead sheep lying on a ledge and then belaying your partner while he leads the next pitch leaving you to endure for a very long twenty minutes the aroma of a well-rested corpse is not a lot of fun, either.

Nokia's 3310 revival – what's NEXT? Vote now

In the mid 1980s I - chief user rather than a techie specified, had installed and then looked after a network of four PCs and a printer, three of the PCs had just a floppy drive to allow them to be booted. All of the output of the journalists who used the kit was saved on what was then termed a Winchester drive of a whole 20MB. Concurrent CP/M worked well.

Totally not-crazy billionaire Elon Musk: All of us – yes, even you – must become cyborgs

Re: Balderdash!

The car plants don't belong to Brits and Brexit will encourage their owners to develop new facilities in the EU. And while today's Triumphs are excellent, they're built in Thailand.

GoDaddy CEO says US is 'tech illiterate' (so, yeah, don't shut off that cheap H-1B supply)

Re: It's not about pay

There should be.

Grumpy Trump trumped, now he's got the hump: Muslim ban beaten back by appeals court

Re: Although ...

Exactly - we claim to be civilized so we can't do anti-semitic shift like that. And it was appalling that Trump omitted Jews from his Holocaust Day statement.

President Donald Trump taken on by unlikely foe: Badass park rangers

Re: no bias nor inflamatory tone, move along

Stop shouting!!!

Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death dead in latest Windows 10 preview

Re: Useful?

Sincere query: If we shouldn't use Defender, what should we use?

CES 2017 roundup: The good, the bad, and the frankly bonkers

Re: Well...

Get a Garmin SatNav designed for a bike. Mine wrongly thinks the roads in my village haven't yet been asphalted and that when I go through the nearest motorway tunnel I'm actually driving across a field, but it doesn't wobble.

Apple sued by parents of girl killed by driver 'distracted by FaceTime'

Re: Stella Awards...

This is, to put it politely, an urban legend. See http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/cruise.asp

If only our British 4G were as good as, um, Albania's... UK.gov's telco tech report

It's not granite; it's sandstone, and very handsome at that (I say as a former resident). If you want granite, go to Aberdeen.

Spain's Prime Minister wants to ban internet memes. No, really

Francoist, Seat. Otherwise, nice comment.

A cardboard desk? I won’t stand for it (actually I will)

Re: Embodied energy

Office supply, nothing. Go to a builder's supplies store. Two A-frame trestles and (basic spec) a door or (looks better, lasts for ever) a 2-metre solid timber board of appropriate width. Saw the latter in half and place on the former. Disassembles in a minute when you don't want it where it is.

Britain must send its F-35s to Italy for heavy overhauls, decrees US

Re: I don't get it...

Buy a couple of hundred F16s

Re: Take back control

You carry on, don't you?

I lack the energy to respond to each of your líes - and I don't get paid for doing so; what's the rouble rate today? - so I'll just respond to one in each of your posts.

The missiles to be installed in Poland are anti-missile missiles. They can have no offensive use, unlike the nuclear-capable Iskanders that you have moved into Kaliningrad, whose targets undoubtedly include Warsaw.

Re: Take back control

I didn't know the trolls of St Petersburg bothered about what's written in the Reg.

About one -sixth of Georgian territory remains under Russians occupation. Your comments about Ukraine are equally misleading.

EU announces common corporate tax plan

Re: Tax Consumption

What rate of VAT do you reckon would be needed to make up for the loss of income and corporation tax?

Re: Well

In how many constituencies could you vote for an MP?

Re: Ubiquitous VAT scams are the real EU tax system problem, not the corporate tax

You're wrong about so many things? Here are a couple:

1) The US does not have a federal sales tax system. Which is why sales offers talk about adding X% if you live in Y, etc., and why a myriad legal cases are underway about whether a firm based in A can apply that state's sales tax when selling to a customer in B.

2) In the EU most VAT crime is domestic.

Re: finally a brexit benefit (for EU) Oi! Lars! Do pay attention

And I'm equally delighted that I will be part of it, thanks to my grandmother's having had the foresight to be born in Belfast, earning me an Irish passport, and my having the foresight to sell my house in London at an outrageous price, sell the proceeds for Euros and move to Spain before the referendum.

Getting your tongue around foreign tech-talk is easier than you think

Re: Cul de sac

Guillaume d'Orange arrived 622 years later and brought with him Dutch.

EU privacy czars mull privacy regulation for Skype, WhatsApp

Re: Good show.

The EU's better off.

The exploding Note 7 is no surprise – leaked Samsung doc highlights toxic internal culture

Not necessarily. I have turned rough translations by Koreans of Samsung documents into passable English and these have included documents for internal use. Samsung understandably uses English rather than Korean for communications with managers in its subsidiaries abroad.

Is Apple's software getting worse or what?

Re: Preview

Better "170329filename"; your directory will then show files in date order. In six months' time you may not remember the filename but you'll remember more or less when you created the file and it should be easy to find.

Breaking 350 million: What's next for Windows 10?

Re: Pacman & cancer

Most music software I use comes in two flavours - Win and iOS. I don't want to be locked into Apple's walled garden so I opt for the Win versions. I could try Linux but running some software in WINE creates unacceptable latency. So I'm using Win10 on all my kit. And I'm finding it pleasant to use.

McCain: Come to my encryption hearing. Tim Cook: No, I'm good. McCain: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you

Re: Boo fucking hoo.

From the people who brought you Obama's a foreigner and muslim to boot, John Kerry was a swift boat coward, etc.

A trip to the Twilight Zone with a support guy called Iron Maiden

Re: Not sure it's your brain Dabsy

"lose" not "loose"

'Leave EU means...' WHAT?! Britons ask Google after results declared

Re: "I'm sure I heard passing references to Polish delicatessens"

Dip in. There's some good stuff there. Try Krakowska sausage and Bryndza cheese.

Chrome lives in dog years: It's seven years old but just turned 50

Whereas I use Firefox on PCs, because I can mod it with addons to suit my needs, but Chrome on my phone since FF falls over too often.

You can't dust-proof a PC with kitchen-grade plastic food wrap

Amazon sell them. So doubtless do other UK suppliers. Ask Dr. Google.

Furious English villagers force council climbdown over Satan's stone booty

Re: The compensation culture at work!

Three-point turn in the middle of the day.

Spanish launch heroic bid to seize Brit polar vessel

Re: Seriously

Read before you rant! He said they brought sailing to a bunch of farmers.

Re: What?

There's one "o" in "losing".

Which keys should I press to enable the CockUp feature?

Re: I've been april fooled

Ctrl+Alt+Right arrow another three times and you're back to whwee you started

Too Naked for the Nazis streaks to literary glory

Re: Lovely!

A brilliant contribution to discussion of the efficacy of homeopathy. Deserving of publication in journals other than El Learned Reg.

Snowden WAS the Feds' quarry in Lavabit case, redaction blunder reveals

Re: I wonder...

What you write is clearly nonsense. The British were in Vietnam in 1945. The French withdrew after Geneva in 1954. Neither were there in the 1960s and 1970s.

Get lost, Windows 10 and Phone fans: No maps HERE on Microsoft's OS

Where I live in northern Spain HERE as implemented for Garmin is awful. It doesn't know that roads in my village that were just reasphalted were ever asphalted, it doesn't know that my village exists, it doesn't know that my Postcode, shared by 1000 people, exists, it doesn't know that the nearby stretch of motorway was completed three years ago and when I'm driving on it through a tunnel shows me as being in the middle of a field.

A high-quality product owned by German luxury firms, just the thing for my Merc (a 1985 190D)?

Boffins: There's a ninth planet out there – now we just need to find it

Re: If Pluto is taken.

Please, "its" not "it's".

Facebook conjures up a trap for the unwary: scanning your camera for your friends

Re: Yeah.. No thanks

FOUR orifices plugged?

Understand 'Safe Harbor', Schrems v Facebook in under 300 words

Re: It would be madness to think

Which, unless Murdoch wins the referendum, which I doubt, it will. The question is just "when".

I survived a head-on crash with driverless cars – and dummies

Re: 'Platooning' Already do this...

Derrrrr ... Have you heard of Google?

Google can't hide behind Alphabet, EU competition commish warns

Re: No, just one...

Do you own a map? If you do you should look at it: you'll see that, UKIP fantasies notwithstanding, Britain is part of Europe.

We can't all live by taking in each others' washing

Seamus Milne's left a gap at the Guardian, whose readers would benefit enormously from reading, and arguing, with your articles. The paper hosts columnists who are far from toeing a guardianista line. Perhaps you should ask whether it might offer a enw home for your column.

Post-pub schnellnosh neckfiller: Currywurst

I've somewhere - Amsterdam?, Hamburg?, somewhere in Czecho? - eaten "currywurst" which was a bratwurst enlivened by addition of curry spices to the mix during its making. Not enough chilli, I seem to recall.

Nippy, palaver and cockwomble: Greatest words in English?

Rumpety-pumpety.

Top boffin Freeman Dyson on climate change, interstellar travel, fusion, and more

Re: (sigh)

Consider, please, not only the extent but also the depth.

OH GROSS! The real problem with GDP

Ah, but look at the "consumption measure" of GDP/GNI. Does any visitor to France not feel that they're better off than us. Most of the country looks much better, the infrastructure works, they think they've housing problems when the number built in a year falls below 400,000, and the food eaten by ordinary people is so much better than in Blighty.

175,000 whinge to Microsoft about phone tech support scams

Say you'll get the person - son, wife, husband, whatever- who deals with these things and put the phone down. If you've got the energy pick it up every now and then and say he/she's just coming but has got to deal with x first and was able to tell you he/she's worried about the issue and wants to speak with the caller ... If you can run this through speakers while keeping the mike turned off this can be quite amusing.

Lies from VW: 'Our staff acted criminally but board didn't know'

Re: Rich but not clever

If I got a payoff like him I'd be admirable.