Posts by Bez 36 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007
“When the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that you log on and change your password”
Hang on. They "recommend you change your password"? Sothey're going to bring the system back up with the exact same passwords that are in the hands of the hackers, rather than suspend the accounts and send out randomly generated single-use passwords via email on request once the system's back?
*SRSLY?*
Have I missed something or are they completely mental?
Apparently the stuff I want from a phone is "not adventurous enough" for Nokia to consider it. Apparently I either need to have a screen so big it won't fit in my pocket, or with an aspect ratio that makes it useless for most applications such as web browsing, or - seemingly - do away with the on/off switch (which, I'll concede, is adventurous but perhaps not useful).
Capacitive screens are allegedly adventurous, but no use if you want to use it as a GPS in the outdoors with gloves (without the need for a sausage) or within a waterproof sleeve - which counts as me being adventurous perhaps, but clearly not the phone.
On the other hand, doing away with hot keys and replacing the touchscreen kepboard with a numeric keypad is considered adventurous. Both of which are technologically backward steps, no?
If this is Nokia's idea of how to progress then I worry for their sake.
I'm always a bit baffled by the praise lavished on the AA1. When I went shopping for a netbook I went straight to it, but found the touchpad unusable: it's incredibly imprecise, too small, and has the buttons in totally the wrong place. I didn't look at it any further. For me it makes the whole thing an unusable brick - they might as well have gone the whole hog and put the keyboard on the underside of the thing.
(A happy Eee 901 owner here, and loving the two-fingered touchpad...)
Let's pitch for more remakes:
1. Bod
Now called "Bo!", our little triangular friend marches along to the sound of MP3s on his mobile phone. Aunt Flo is now aged 73 and undergoing IVF. In episode 1, Farmer Barleymow complains about the Common Agricultural Policy and barricades a footpath. In episode 2, Bo! is tagging tube trains when he is shot in the head by PC Copper. Freddie the Frog and the Animal Band are voted off the X-Factor.
2. Mr Benn
Mr Benn is a spy who is investigating The Shopkeeper in connection with an Al-Quaeda cell. In episode 1, Benn travels to a cave. Here we find out he is not related to Tony Benn, although we do discover that his name is Hillary.
3. Bagpuss
Bagpuss misses out vowels and has many spelling errors. In episode 1 he rides an invisible bike; episode 2 sees him set up a monorail service in Emily's garden. New characters include Basementpuss and Ceilingpuss. In the final episode, Bagpuss is killed by God when someone masturbates. God has taken on the form of hummus.
4. The Magic Roundabout
One of the creatures has a huge Freddie Mercury moustache and is made of a spring, and constantly begs people to go to bed with him. There is a rabbit, which is on drugs.
I assume that - in keeping with changes in Royal Mail services since Pat's original storylines - he will no longer be aired in the early hours of the morning before the kids leave for school, instead showing in the middle of the day when no-one's bloody well in, leaving a calling card saying you can watch it on iPlayer but only till noon on a Saturday and please be ready with your credit card to pay a fee to cover the fact that the sender didn't pay for sufficient bandwidth.
Still, it's a good job it's not DHL Deliveryman Pat, otherwise you'd sit by your telly waiting for it only to find out they'd lost the original recordings and would have to broadcast some snooker instead.
Plus the alliteration would be all shot to cock.
Note section 9.4:
"Other than the limited licence set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights that subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist)"
Section 11 does seem to suggest it is a rights grab solely for the use of promoting Google Services (you omitted the closing sentence "This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.") but it doesn't seem terribly clearly written.
However, that EULA appears to apply to all Google's services. And presumably that means Google has sneaked itself the right to publicly display everyone's Gmail content to the world (if only to promote Gmail - which seems unlikely, "use Gmail, look what we do with your emails!"). Surely all your KML belong to Google and it also pwns all your photos on Picasa. And since in 11.2 "You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organisations or individuals" then anyone can ask Google for it. Seems at odds with 9.4.
I'm also curious about the term "display" - what constitutes "displaying" something via Chrome? On first read, I took it to mean displaying web pages - which, unless I'm looking at my own website, are clearly never my IP to hand over in a EULA. Either "display" means something I can't fathom, or the EULA is nonsensical if you want to use Chrome to look at the Internet.
I'm not a big conspiracy theorist so I'm assuming it's a well-intentioned EULA with a couple of misleading (but technically dangerous) bits in it. And IANAL so there's a good chance I just can't interpret legalese properly. It would be nice to have a lawyer give their view...
"Rather more plausibly, council operatives are advised to avoid dismissing old timers as "old woman", "old fool" and "old codger" in favour of "old person"."
Surely that's *less* plausible? I can readily imagine people referring to "the man on the street" but how plausible is it really that on issuing that statement, hundreds of council staff will be hastily reviewing their annual reports and Tipp-Exing out the phrases "old codger" and "old fool"? It seems the sort of advice that should be superfluous, like suggesting that staff don't refer to pensioners in council documentation by using the phrases "blue-rinsed wrinkly" or "senile old twat".
"Younger teenagers would not have been able to see it, and they are the very people who are going to love it. We would have ended up with far more complaints from people who wanted to see the film and couldn't."
Sorry, this is the spokeswoman for the BBFC? Have they taken their remit, rolled it up and used it as a roach in a massive bifter or what?
Of course young teenagers want to see people getting stabbed, it's exciting. (And in some parts of the country probably constitutes part of some sort of urban YTS programme.) Kids want to see all sorts of things they really ought not to, because they're exciting.
Kids love vodka and ciggies as well - is the BBFC about to campaign for a free-for-all on everything just in case the kids complain?
Will the BBFC tell us, "Well, we've given Danish Spitroast Bangfest a 12A rating because 13-year-old boys tell us they just love it, and frankly we can't be doing with all the letters from the spotty oiks telling us that mum's disconnected the Internet and in absence of an overactive imagination they need some sort of material so they can yank themselves off round the clock without fear of any worse punishment than an upholstery cleaning bill from the cinema manager."
Can we get Supernanny in to teach the BBFC a thing or two about standing their ground?
Anyway, all this media kerfuffle is fine by me - never been interested in Batman movies before but this one sounds worth seeing. But then, my mental age is probably somewhere between 15 and 12A.
"All three models have a maximum cruising speed of just over 3mph"
Slower than walking, then. Fantastic. So you pay a load of money for something that can't go over kerbs or gravel, isn't environmentally kind in manufacture or disposal, means you take longer to get anywhere, requires storage space and is awkward to transport in any other vehicle - all just to do away with what last dregs of physical activity you retained by walking round the block to the burger shop on your fat creaking legs.
Truly, I have to congratulate Toyota on this milestone innovation: Finally something has taken the title of Mankind's Most Pointless Invention from the leaf blower.
Still, at least the 'S' model means you can buy one for your cat as well, so it can be as fat and lazy as its stupid owner - who will happily no longer have to chase partially-disemboweled mice around the kitchen, because Tiddles will be too slow to catch the damn things on his electric lard chariot.
Personally I've never figured out why the importers for the new camera support aren't carved out of the application, so they can just add new support without re-releasing the whole product.
(Lightroom user, still safely on 1.2 and never the first to install non-essential updates for anything ;)
"...claiming the falls are sign of the market maturing, and of fierce competition."
I would suggest the reverse is true. Look at the search engine market, look at the online auction market. Both now mature, and both totally monopolised by a single player. Why? Because if you want to find stuff, you go to the engine with the biggest index. If you want to sell stuff, you go to the auction site with the most buyers.
Likewise, if you want to waste time, you go to the site which has the most timewasters on it to hook up with. If Facebook isn't gathering momentum, it seems a pretty good sign that social networking is *really* struggling to find its Google. Either no-one has yet managed to muster enough 'stickiness' to keep the fickle users coming back, or the nature of web-based timewasting is simply *so* fickle and whimsical that even hitting new content on the same site is too uncool, and the whole idea in terms of a financial venture is another load of stupid investors pumping up another stupid bubble of bugger all.
If, as per a standard barbecue, the camel wasn't properly cooked and gave the diners a dose of the two-bob-bits, causing them to note that they could 'shit through the eye of a needle,' would a billionaire thus finally be confident of chancing his way through the pearly gates?
Finally I've found a use for one of your stupid icons.
The sentence for jerking off with a bicycle in a locked room whilst pisht seems to be almost identical to that for downloading abusive child grot over a number of years and then covering it up.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/6980329.stm
So that's perfectly fair then.
"OK, so I've not seen one of these scratch cards but, going by what the young lady interviewed said, she has a point. If the card says to look for a lower number, then 6 is lower than 8."
Umm... The whole point of the story is that the numbers 6 and 8 are completely and utterly irrelevant.
The only point she has is the one she scored in an IQ test (miaow).
This is mind-boggling.
What we have (sorry, had) is a place where people can post links to sites which host copyrighted material. A seemingly popular site, at that. Can you see where we're going with this, kids?
Now, I may only have a brain the size of a melon, but I'd have thought that a site like that would have been a valuable thing to anyone looking to shut down copyright violators because, effectively, it's just a bulletin board for dobbing in the pirates.
So either Fact or plod have essentially taken the decision to just shoot the stool pigeon. Nice one, Ironside. You da man.
Is it just me? Wouldn't you leave it open and just let the public happily post up links to actual culprits, then pick them off as they come in?
It is, it's just me, isn't it. Oh well.
"...a letter from the minister a few days later saying I couldn't have the hall, with no reasons given."
-vs-
"...when we let rooms out to people we want them to understand that they must be fully in line with our Christian ethos."
Religion in total hypocrisy shocker.
Mind you - baby yoga? I'd have just written them a letter saying "you can't use our hall for your activity because it is plainly bonkers."
So if you live in a Googlescanned area, you need to check everywhere you've walked or driven in order to see if you've been caught.
What a surprise, then, that they've had so few requests for removals.
Though I note that "the request does not have to come from the person whose face or number plate is pictured" - splendid. Someone send them an email to request that everything's deleted. Job done.
"There's a time and a place, we don't all want our children to be 4 year olds using mainly 4 letter words - leave that to the chavs."
Would I be alone in finding some hypocrisy in being so upset by an innoccuous four-letter piece of slang whilst making pejorative generalisations about other people with another four-letter word?
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