Posts by Trinity

YouTube Lad from Lagos gets a bite

Brilliant!

Looks like someone's group assignment for end of year 2 drama college - nice work! And easily one of the best "don't send these people your money" messages around.

Beware evangelists

*evil grin*

The original article pays compliments to the Register and its commenters for having "attitude" and "taking no prisoners" in the face of "tripe".

Cue small avalanche of trollish posing and instant self-caricature... ;p

Miami health centre starts RFID soap snooping

Excellent!

It's a shame that the people most qualified to know about the deadly effects of bacteria and the importance of clean hands need such measures. But if they do, then go for it! Shame the filthy sods into caring about who they kill with their dirty hands!

Lad passes gruelling 'getting on bus' test

Classic.

What about a gold star for saving the environment while they're at it?

100 freetards an hour join Pirate Party UK

And why not?

Enough pirates in the House already - an official party could be regarded as a long-awaited move towards MP honesty...

Blogger silences Google ads with death and destruction

Where's Dogbert when you need him?

I suspect the point of the article wasn't to criticise Google's advertising policies, but to report on an interesting quirk that allows you to sidestep it.

Not because anyone seriously would want to go this far, but because Google's ways of doing things are so rigidly obscured from anyone outside the company, that experimenting to discover them is Fun.

Icon - pint of beer, because some of the commenters in here really need to get out more...

Tories plan health record giveaway

You need a *headdesk* icon, stat.

*sob*

Mel Gibson to put hand up Jodie Foster's Beaver

Scared now

Wow... that Aaron Kempf must be truly terrifying - this article's been here for aaaaaaaaaages, and there are no comments at all!

Yahoo! takes notes on your searches

Cool

This is a nice little feature - really handy, really simple, and less hassle than using third-party plugins and other stuff.

2060: Humvee-sized, bulletproof meat-eating spiders attack

Send for Optimus Prime!

End of problem ;)

Half of 10 year olds now mobile connected

*headesk*

If parents are worried about the sort of things their kids might see and hear on a mobile phone, WHY DO THEY LET THEM HAVE ONE?!!

I really wonder if the peace of mind afforded to parents by giving their kids phones (e.g. cancelled club meets etc.) is actually justified? For example, the two children beaten half to death by two other children in Yorkshire recently had their phones stolen by their attackers. In fact, since the attack was motivated by theft, the immediate question anyone might ask was, did having mobile phones actually create the risk?

How the government uses dirty data to legislate morality

Bad stats?

While I agree that stats are used very badly to make a shaky piece of "evidence" sound legitimate, you haven't really explained where the process is going wrong or how it could be done better.

In some of your examples, the question might be, not "are these statistics correct?", but "is statistical evidence appropriate in this case?". The idea of empirically determining if watching porn increases the incidence of rape is a terrifying one. And it's just not possible to statistically prove that opening lap dancing clubs increases crime against women: you can only demonstrate a correlation, and "correlation" is virtually synonymous with "coincidence".

Nice article, but could do better. And... where's the I.T. angle? You haven't even mentioned SPSS!

Scottish hospitals laid low by malware infection

@Wize

Probably true; but using a "familiar" operating system just because people may have used it before doesn't obviate the need for proper training.

I wonder how much training NHS staff actually got? Nobody seems to train people in the basics of good practice, either for security or even good housekeeping. The number of people who create a file in Word, rely on it to use the first sentence as the default file name... and then can't find the damn thing because they can't remember what that first sentence was!

It would have been much more sensible to have saved the money they spent on Windows by implementing a *nix-based system, and spent it on comprehensive user training instead.

Gamers risk early graves, claims advert

Doesn't seem that unreasonable...

There have been cases of people dying from spending an insane length of time playing games...

... plus children of that age (boy in the picture) are more prone to epilepsy than adults, and videogames (and some types of monitor; more rare now with LCD) can aggravate this...

... and it's a bit of a no-brainer, that sitting around all day will make you fat, even if you eat a reasonable diet, because you're not burning off the energy you've consumed. Not to mention the risk of deep-vein thromboses caused by sitting in the same position for hours at a time.

So it seems quite a good advert, really. And there are probably rules against a third party promoting Wii as a health aid while condeming the rest.

Obama balks at recovery of lost Dubya emails

Email archive

Obama wouldn't be the first CEO to give low priority to I.T. backups.

Maybe he thinks saving the economy is slightly more important just now?

419ers take Canadian for $150,000

u wot?

Is it that early victims of the 419ers didn't get reported, or is there a sudden upsurge in rich morons falling for this con?

I just find it incredible, that with all the news reports, with full details of the kind of stories the scammers use, that anyone could still fall for these scams.

Not sure that "stupid" really covers it. There must be a large component of "living under a rock" in there somewhere.

Spinning the war on the UK's sex trade

@A J Stiles

Selling human organs is a crime. It still happens; criminalising it hasn't stopped it happening. But nobody's ranting about this, even though allowing the sale of human organs could undoubtedly save lives.

Prostitution is, effectively, the sale of a human organ. The business structure surrounding it is absolutely irrelevant, as it is in the case of kidneys. It is the thing itself which should be regarded as unsaleable, for moral reasons. (People can be injured and/or die.)

As for decriminalising prostitution... I'm not sure that's the argument. It's the suggestion that the law should prosecute those creating the demand - the punters - rather than those supplying the service - the prostitutes - that seems to have got so many people (almost entirely male) outraged.

This is only the first step: make it an offence to buy sexual services from someone who's been forced into it, as an extension of rape.

Wii grasses up cheating wife

Eh?

Since when did playing bowls with someone (IRL or virtually) constitute adultery?

Googlewhack trick used to slip junk mail past spam filters

Title

Is this why my earlier search for "aubergine" got this?

"We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. "

http://www.google.co.uk/sorry/?continue=http://www.google.co.uk/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Daubergine%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch%26meta%3D

(BTW: How about giving us the option of an icon that looks like someone banging their head on the desk? )

Miserable Brits declare War on Comfort

Unnecessary luxury indeed

Surely it's a no-brainer that patio heaters are a complete waste of money? All the heat, just radiating straight up and out into space. Meanwhile the overpriledged owner & guests huddle closely round it for a tiny amount of warmth, because if you stand more than two feet away you can't feel it (OK, so the more expensive ones manage up to five feet... but that's still not far).

If anyone out there is laughing at the stupid Brits and their patio heaters, its surely because we ever thought they were worth owning in the first place?