* Posts by The BigYin

3080 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2008

Ofcom balks at Beeb's HD DRM dream

The BigYin
Flame

Eh?

Two things:

1) I have yet to see any benefit to HD. Who the hell wants to pay for a new TV that consumes more power and yet fails to deliver a better picture than your current set*. I not that no shops EVER have a side-by-side comparison of a movie SD playing on a SD TV and an HD version on an HD telly.

All they have are the split-screen fake-ups as and they were made by the manufacturers....I wouldn't trust them.

2) DRM...are you feckin' kidding me? I have already paid for BBC content via my TV Tax (license fee). If I want to tape it and copy it around for my own personal use, then that is my choice. It has been paid for. You can go and shove your DRM up yer arse.

If I start distributing said content to all and sundry (possibly even charging for it) then I believe there are laws against that. I can be found, charged, brought before a judge and they can state their case with evidence to back it up. Not that I am about to start doing this.

DRM is the presumption of guilt and has no place in a modern democracy.

*Well, me; seems our old (free, second-hand) telly is on the way out.

Microsoft buys Teamprise tool for Java bridge

The BigYin
Thumb Down

Phase One - Embrace

Phase Two - Extend

Phase Three - Extinguish

Hopefully there will be a F/OSS answer to this.

Play.com emails customer details to other customers

The BigYin

Simple defence

Play.com should just say what the government would say: "We are sorry for the distress cause, but employing proper data control would not be practical. Now shut up and get back to paying your taxes, citizen."

Kingston SSD Now V 40GB boot drive

The BigYin
Flame

I see a problem

Windows will still put "Documents and Settings" crap on C.

Programs written my morons will still put crap in "Documents and Settings" on C.

This is a *very* good idea for Linux boxes that have proper hadling of user prefs and whilst it may help lardy Windows units, they won't be able to extract maximum performance.

Government rejects call to secure snoop data

The BigYin
Flame

Whit?

If it is not encrypted, then all reasonable steps have not been taken! Encryption is not hard. Any moron can do it! And I should know, I am one of those encrypting moron.

WarMouse pushes gamers' buttons with OOMouse

The BigYin
FAIL

No

That's all "No". It looks shit, will probably feel shit and is has a wire. Urgh. Like their interface, this mouse looks like "Attack of the Worst of the 90s". They should spend less time feckin' around with crap like this and more time ironing all the simple, and bloody annoying, bugs in their software.

Swedish cyborg gets haptic hand

The BigYin

Reg Headline from 2025

"Robo-hand worm strikes!"

"Users of the Robo-matic Tug-Master series were waking up today to the first ever cyborg worm. Those foolish enough to jailbreak their neural adaptors so that they can connect to non Robo-matic devices (such as the Ann Summers "CyberRabbit" [see reg: The Rabinator has come]) and forgot to change their default SSH password discovered that their limb was no longer under their control.

"The worm causes the rampant limb to give the on-fingered-salute every thirty seconds. Attempts by the user to remove the worm prompt a back-hack into their own brains causing them to speak like they are on the set of a Carry On Film. Ooo, matron.

J. Q. Jackbadger of MS's Cyborg 9 OS team said 'This is why it is dangerous to use opensource for such crucial systems. With everyone knowing the default passwords it is too easy for this kind of attack to happen. This would never happen with close, proprietary code'

"Of course not J. Q., users of MS Cyborg 9 would be too busy punching themselves in the head for paying the the $1,750 upgrade; assuming their limbs had't crashed."

Nutt sacking row deepens

The BigYin
Flame

Respect?

Look, there are only three types of epople Labour will treat with respect

1) Big business with loads of money and a bribe/directorship in the offing

2) A foreign power (e.g. EU) with loads of money and a bribe/consultancy in the offing

3) Another Labour MP

That's it. Not scientists, not the general public. No one. Show them the money!

Pretty much the same holds true for the Tories.

Scum the lot of them, without exception.

EU block to Mandelson's filesharing laws removed

The BigYin
FAIL

Mandy is a moron

Thieves use cars. BAN ALL CARS!

Rapists wear clothes. BAN ALL CLOTHES!

All paedophiles are addicted to hydric acid. BAN HYDRIC ACID!

The failure of the record industry to monetise file-sharing is squarely the fault of said records industry. The porn industry seems to have found way to rake it in using various means (and rather radical ones from a business viewpoint).

Just because a technology/device CAN be used for an illegal act does not mean it IS being used for an illegal act in all cases. If someone is doing something illegal; gather the evidence, go to court, prove your case. Job done.

Ah, wait. This is Labour. I forgot. They are moving to presumption of guilt and you have to foot the costs of proving your innocence even if you win (and no, that is not a joke; it's real, and it is happening).

Mandriva flashes its small aggressive penguin

The BigYin

Is it better tha Karmic?

How about a Reg install-off? That way those of us who have been fighting with karmic can maybe find a distro that's stable.

Although...I think I may have been handed a fix for the ATI performance regression.

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

The BigYin

@miguelmonkeyman

Wine 1.2 (well, 1.1.32 to be exact) is not production stable, so is not included by Canonical. The fact that you want to use something that is not production stable (even according to WineHQ) is hardly Canonical's fault.

If Linux gets better adoption, perhaps Spotify will do a Linux-specific product, meaning that you won't have to rely on unstable, developer versions of third-party software.

And perhaps there will be a proper Pulseaudio equalizer so you can stop Spotify sounding like it's in a toilet.

Yeah...and pigs may well indeed fly!

The BigYin

What I may do...

...in a month or so (once my gubbered drive comes back from WD) is back-up /home and then flatten this puppy so I can go to ext4.

Should be faster, should pick-up any fixes as well.

Or maybe I'd best leave it alone....

The x-texting Metrotextual comes out of the closet

The BigYin

@Geezh, lighten up

Your prejudices are showing....

The BigYin
Thumb Down

Would piss me off

Even more from from someone I did not know well. Strong (precious?) emotions such as love, hate etc. should be reserved for the situations/people they actually apply to; not just bandied about willy-nilly.

Would you "kiss" them in public? No? Then why kiss them in a text then?

Got nothing to do with being manly or not, it's everything to do with saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Too many people say things they do not mean these days.

If you love someone - tell them. But if you go around telling everyone you love them (unless you're about 5) then it no longer carries any meaning, does it? It's just something you say. A verbal tick with no emotion behind it.

Big Blue red-faced over Congestion charge crash

The BigYin
FAIL

Customers?

TfL have Customers? There was me thinking they were tac-payers, i.e. "employers". Not "customers".

Or "marks", "victims", "walking-wallets" etc.

Ubuntu's Karmic Koala bares fangs at Windows 7

The BigYin

@Trevor

If you are lucky and have well-support kit, then I don't think you will have any problems at all (e.g. Nvidia cards). But for more edgy stuff (read: old) then it really is pot luck.

You want too much Trevor. If you want Puppy's size and boot speed, then use Puppy. But don't expect all the bells and whistles of a full-fat distro.

I guess you might be best going Slackware style-ee and rolling your own.

The BigYin

@Trevor

Mixed bag for me too.

1) Video still a problem (ATI is unstable and Intel is slow)

2) Wireless network continually drops out

3) Flash is slow, but then it always has been poor on Linux IME

4) Sound suffers glitches

5) The "notifications" appear at a weird place on screen

Fonts seem to render better, boot time is slightly faster (but not "Wow!"...not that boot times matter much).

Shame really....I was expecting so much more. I am sorry to say it, but I don't think Win7 has much to worry about.

The BigYin

It's that time again

After the RC install totally hosed a laptop, I backed-up the home folder (yes, I should have done that first...but there was nothing essential on this laptop; just stuff that would have taken a while to copy over/install. Anyway, the fact I could still do this on a hosed system shows how resilient the underlying architecture of Linux is) and will be hitting it with a full, ext4 release install. It's an old lappy and it'll be interesting to see how it behaves.

I'm curious about UbuntuOne, but I don't get the whole cloud thing to be honest. It smacks of the whole fat-server/thin-client ethos of yesteryear. And unless UbuntuOne can *do* something for me...how is it any better to an FTP site and some local scripts? Still, everyone seems to have a hard-on for "cloud" these days...so a bit of dicking around is probably a good thing.

The encryptions is interesting. I am a fan of TrueCrypt, but if the baked-in encryption allows me to move files about (encrypted) and then de-crypt them in a more seamless way, then that should be good. I wonder if there is a Windows app for working with the encrypted folders?

Oh yeah, Windows. I'm going to have to fight with Samba again. Oh god. To be fair, I think there is something up with my home Windows network, but Samba is a total ARSE to get going and set-up so it works seamlessly with Windows (then again, I don't have a lot of spare time).

At least on the lappy I'll be able to test the multi-screen support. I wonder if that is still totally bollocks? If there are three things that are light-years ahead on Windows, it's multi-screen support*, RDP and printer support (although the last is not the fault of the Linux community).

Still, I've been really happy with 9.04 on various systems and whilst there are still usability issues with Linux when compared to Windows (some are simply the fact that Windows is familiar, others are Linux still being geek-centric), Linux is rapidly becoming a viable contender in niche areas (small PCs, netbooks).

Will Karmic make an impact on Win7? No. Not to the average consumer anyway. Perhaps on the back-end, but almost all new desktop PCs will still come with Win7 and what Linux kit you can buy will be lower-spec'd crap when compared to the Win7 stuff. Unless the Linux-distros can find a way to break MS's restrictions on the supply chain, I seriously doubt they will ever hit consumer mainstream.

*Yes, I know it can be done on a Linux distro, but it sucks. You cannot guarantee that you can control which desktop is primary (random driver issues), and you have the whole "square" virtual desktop thing to contend with which can also be an arse (one desktop left scrolling). Oh yeah, and you need to manually install xrandr and hack scripts to have a hope of getting anything even half working. That's been my experience any way. On Windows...Desktop Properties/Settings/a few clicks/job done. Linux distros *MUST* make it that easy. End of gripe.

Firefox 3.6 beta promises speed injection

The BigYin
WTF?

Optimized for Linux?

Wait...is this because it's "Open Source" and Linux is "Open Source" so they are actually the same thing? Is that how your mind works Defiant?

TalkTalk steps up attack on government

The BigYin

I read...

...that in Korea they get 1,000mbps for around £10 a month. Are we still a first world country?

Europe plots black boxes for cars

The BigYin
Thumb Down

@Martin 19

Rail shouldn't need any help to be competitive, it is way more efficient that trucks. And yes, the rail used to go to all the factories etc; until massive under-investment in rail infrastructure started in the UK (and continues - e.g. lack of electrical upgrades).

The only reason that rail is such a shambles (and this mostly applies to the UK) is because Labour have been in thrall to the road lobby for ages and the trains are run bunch raging incompetents who are dependent of subsidy to even have a hope of returning a profit.

Freight should go by rail from the port to the depot, only the last few miles to the should ever be by truck.

Eurostar frustrated by 'illegal' e-Borders scheme

The BigYin
Thumb Down

Thin end of the wedge

The monitor people who cross the EU border

Now they want to monitor those who cross the UK border

They already monitor those who cross the City of London border

Where next? Monitor those who cross various council borders?

Just where does Labour get off thinking we want o need this constant monitoring? Just because MPs are a bunch of crooks does not mean the rest of us are. Perhaps they should turn the eagle eye and iron fists to their own ranks before trying to bring the entire populace under their jack-booted heel.

Westminster readies 'wave and pay' parking meters

The BigYin

What?

On what planet to Westminster council live? Never mind the whole motorcycle parking issue (luckily I live in an enlightened area that, by and large, offers decent parking for all types of bikes powered or not)* but do they think I am going to pass my card details on to some random device?

Sod that.

And how do they authenticate? Do I get a receipt? How do i say how long I want to be there? How does it know which vehicle?

*I was in one area dahn-saff that did charge bikes...but they only had car spaces. So you squeezed five bikes into one car bay, buy one ticket, job done. And the council were nice enough to advise you to do that (ticket contained partial reg num, so they were useless to anyone who lifted them off the bike). It's annoying to have to pay (we all like free) but it was also nice that the council had THOUGHT about ti an applied some logic.

Mandy declares 'three strikes' war on illegal file sharers

The BigYin
Flame

Government scum

Let me understand this. MPs can falsely claim tens of thousands of pounds on expenses, blatantly commit tax evasion, bring their party and the entire government into disrepute and get away it.

But if a prole downloads a few songs you can get chucked off the net?

Is it just me or do our most imperious leaders have their priorities tit about arse?

And isn't the 'netd eclared an essential service? Do they cut the gas and leccy off at the house of a rapist because he uses leccy to watch porno?

MPs, no clue, no honour, no morals. Every man-jack of them.

El Reg receives message from planet 'Female Pigeon'

The BigYin

Names...pfft...

We should just give them a number until we confirm they are barren with no intelligent life. Then we should go there and once landed, name it.

That will delay the whole name problem for a few centuries at least.

J.

ID Card scheme banking on 28 million volunteers

The BigYin
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Pseudo-voluntary

"Johnson has ruled out making ID Cards compulsory."

He doesn't need to, they will be de factor compulsory as they will be the only accepted form of ID.

Back accounts aren't compulsory, but you try getting a job or paying bills without one and see how far you get.

We do not need ID cards, nor do we need the database. You think it's bad now when the DVLA screws your entitlements, imagine what life will be like when the same set of muppets screws your ID records! *YOU* will not own your house, whatever ID record is pointed at in the DB will. And if that is wrong...good luck. The DVLA mentality will prevail; "The computer is right, you are wrong, kindly piss off".

Quite when we became a nation of criminals that needs constant tagging and monitoring is beyond me. Or maybe it's because our MPs are crooks. Perhaps they assume that the rest of the nation are amoral, dishonest, dishonourable and repugnant scum like they themselves are.

Shuttleworth stretches Ubuntu from netbooks to heavens

The BigYin
Thumb Up

@Gil Grissum

Can you please let us know where you got the instructions on how to run office? There's loads of guides on the net, but many are out of date/wrong.

Ta much!

Digital River makes total hash of Windows 7 upgrade offer

The BigYin
Jobs Horns

Translation

"There is a widely accepted standard for passing images of discs in file form. This standard is cross-platform, supported by many pieces of software on many OSs and understood by just about everybody.

But as MS do not own this standard, it lacks MS-specific extension, gives tacit support for interoperability and cohesion in the IT world; MS cannot use it.

We therefore went for our own proprietary system that is totally MS centric and perfect for MS needs. It does not fit with customer needs, but those are not our concern.

Any customers with problems should go and buy a new PC from one of our partners.

This will let MS count the Win7 install for this user twice, stimulate the economy, drive down prices through increased consumption and save the world."

Karmic Koala RC drops into the wild

The BigYin
FAIL

Small bugs?

Small? This is some new definition of the word "small" to which I was not previously privy.

I dropped the RC on to a non-essential laptop (stupid, I know, I should have used a virtualised box) anyway...the install worked. Then rebooted. Then hung. Then rebooted.

The login screen it fugly (seems to have got confused about the theme).

The "Login Window" entry appears to have vanished, so fixing the above will be non-trivial to the average user (command line and "gksu /usr/sbin/gdmsetup" is non-obvious).

Fast user switch panel is dead.

Desktop is broken (no wallpapper, no icons, no conky, but they briefly appear on logout - just a black background when logged in)

Cron is dead.

Firefox is dead.

Pulseaudio is dead.

I'll grant you that the first three are small, fourth is medium but the last three are huge. I didn't have time to test anything else, nor log bugs (I'll be doing that as soon as I get a chance). I hope the final release can correct these issues, either that or it's flatten and re-install time.

I may try the RC again in a virtual machine after taking a snapshot, but I will say one thing; unless you are technical expert (and if you are running Ubuntu, you are probably not) DO NOT install the release candidate. Once again Linux (this time in the guise of Canonical) shows that it is not ready for the average user.

Oh, and before the morons start slagging. The "average user" thinks Facebook is the internet. M'kay? They don't care about how their PC works and, to a large extent, nor should they.

Microsoft's Windows 7 buy early plan builds to climax

The BigYin
Thumb Down

Discounts?

It's UKP150 for an upgrade! Sod that for a game of toy soldiers.

Atheists smite online God poll

The BigYin
Thumb Down

It's simple

God is all knowing, all seeing, and all powerful. God can see your past, present and future. Everything you have done, are doing and will do. Ergo your future is pre-ordained as God has already seen it and you have no free will.

or

You have free will. Your actions are unpredictable and God cannot see what you are doing in the future. Thus there are limits to God's powers and God cannot be all knowing, all seeing and all powerful.

Paradox! You can't have a God *and* free will, the major cornerstone of the Abrahamic religions.

This, of course, does not stop you continuing to be a decent, honest and moral person (despite what Americans may think).

Mozilla Labs opens umbrella with Raindrop prototype

The BigYin

Mozilla shuns?

If they have built to the agreed standards, then they are not shunning anyone or anything.

If someone decides not to build to those standards and to inter-operate with others, that is entirely their choice and they simply limit their customer base.

Historian slams 'absolutely crazy' UK time zone

The BigYin
FAIL

Yawn

This swings round every year. It's a bit the whole "Post Office bans Santa!" that the Mail starts every two years.

Other countries cope perfectly well with multiple time-zones, why is it so hard for Europe? I have been told that more people live closer to the GMT meridian than GMT+1, seems unliekly to me but I can't say I've been arsed to check. The time zones are geopolitical anyway and have little to do with the actual, true, off-set from GMT.

Steve Ballmer's Windows 7 dance party

The BigYin
Jobs Horns

CBS you say?

I've been watching their (and other people's stuff) on my hacked xBox (running XBMC and Navi-X) for quite a while now and I live in the UK. Been watching the original "Battlestar Galactica" - god it's shit!

I'd be interested in knowing more about what the OS can do for me, not the applications. I've been playing with Linux and I LOVE the home folder idea. "My Documents" is close, but when I tried to shift it all onto another drive in XP, half migrated and half stayed on C. Has this been fixed in Win7? Are all user settings now isolated from OS ones making migration/update a breeze; or is it still cocked in the horror called the "Registry"?

Does it support any new file systems? Such as ext3 or ext4?

Is it still riddled with DRM? Can I play recorded TV on any other PC?

What about USB support? Will it still moan that something is locking, but not tell me what? Will it still offer no "Force eject" option or similar?

Do the windows not have nice, handy features like "Always on top", "Roll up" etc?

Can I have multiple desktops that I can quickly switch between? (Handy for my work)

Does it, in a nutshell, do anything that XP does not do well enough to justify the £155 upgrade price?

Windows 7 lessons - the must know before you buy

The BigYin
FAIL

I like my XP

But I would upgrade for the right price (say, under £50). £155 is way too much for an upgrade (I checked the prices, I'm moving from full-fat XP) - I can almost by a complete new PC for that!

It's a crazy price and just a money grab by MS. If Apple can do an upgrade for £25, so can Redmond.

At £155 it's touch and go which is cheaper; Linux or Windows7. And before the Lintards start; yes, Linux will cost me that much (new printer for a start, never mind my time).

Honda designs mainstream e-bikes

The BigYin

Acid test

Here is what ElReg should do:

1. Get a new EV Cub;

2. Throw it off a 5 storey building;

3. See if it can be ridden away.

The old C90s were (pretty much) unkillable and laughed in the face of things that would make a Dakar special get twitchy. The C90 may have been ugly, it may have been basic; but it was cheap, simple and did the job. It sold buy the bucket-load. These need to be the same.

@Jason 23

The Japanese did learn, that's why they are the biggest manufacturers of powered two wheeled vehicles. Honda alone makes the most engines of any company in the world. And Vespa isn't even the main seller of Scoots in the UK (that'd be Peugeot).

@A.N.Other

I wish you are right, but I doubt it. Bikes always have performed better in economy and commuting ability than cars, but there has been a steady move away from biking in the UK .

If you live in a town and can't take the bus/train for whatever reason, and it's too far for a cycle; a bike or scoot makes perfect sense...well it would do if the government hadn't implemented draconian and discriminatory government polices back by the EU.

@swaygeo

Makes no odds really. Bikes are strangled by EU regs (unless you fit an illegal can and then deal with the fuelling) so can't be heard over the car drivers stereo/MP3 player/mobile phone. I can't see there being much increase in risk.

There is an interesting phenomenon called "looming" that happens with bikes (not sure about cycles) where, in the distance, the bike appears to be going slowly. As it gets closer, it will suddenly seem to speed up. Thus the bike seems to "leap" at the driver. This is why they pull out in front and this is also why they freeze.

Having your lights on makes it worse. That you EU, you bunch of tossers.

As it is, a bike is about 13-16 times more dangerous than a car, this is why the EU policy is to eventually ban bikes from the roads (and yes, that is the policy of "Vision Zero").

Rigid sky-train to fly through magnetic rings on sticks

The BigYin
FAIL

Erm...

...150mph in a giant mag-lev wotist that can only go in a straight line? This is somehow better than a normal train? Err....yeah. Right.

Probably fool the Brits whose trains struggle to break 70mph without going off the rails (chuckle), never run on time, stink and are over priced (despite massive government subsidies). But it doesn't fool the rest of the world!

Windows 7 - the Reg reader verdict

The BigYin

XPsp3 2005 Media Center

That's what I have at home. I was perhaps a bit dim and didn't jump on a pre-release version, but XP is working fine and I have as yet no compelling reason to upgrade.

Win7 Ultimate (which is what I think I need) is about £160) and a decent, Linux compatible printer would cost about the same, so there is no difference in price.

Windows 7 will do multi-screen properly* (a serious failing of Linux IMnsHO) and that is what will probably swing it for me. Oh, that and my Logitech mouse will work fully in Windows. Yep, guess I'm sold really. Once sp1 ships I'll look into a migration.

Unless, of course, the Penguin has got its act together by then.

*Properly; different screens at different resolutions with no square virtual screen, one must scroll lameness.

Auto thief foiled by guardian satellite

The BigYin
Flame

Soon to be mandatory in the UK

Well, not OnStar, but a similar systems. The plan is to force all vehicles to be fitted with EVSC (now dubbed ISA) so that it is impossible to speed (what do you think Galileo is for). One up-shot will be that the police can disable any vehicle at any time for any reason (and that includes motorcycles).

Oh yeah, don't forget that this will be used for road charging, movement tracking and other forms of privacy invasion. OnStar is just showing Labour what they need to do next.

Remember citizen - you must obey the machine.

Dell refunds PC user for rejecting Windows

The BigYin

@qwertyuiop

You may get a PC with no OS, but you more than likely still pay the Windows Tax. Dell Ubuntu is more expensive than it should be because Dell STILL has to buy a Windows license for every unit sold! And, of course, the Ubuntu based units are lower spec and few and far between.

As for a "major online retailer" selling naked boxes, who exactly? Smaller operators/parts-sellers, sure. But major chains? Nup - always Windows whether you want it or not. Either your are in error with regards to the truth, or our definitions of "major" differ.

Having said this, I am probably going to have to move from XP to Win7 as the limitations of Linux (multi-screen and printer mainly) prevent me from using it how I would like. Major stumbling block? X and it's stupid, stupid, STUPID "square" virtual desktop. How will that work with an older CRT TV and wide-screen monitor? It won't. Sure, I could buy a new TV (and printer) and conform to the needs of X, but that would cost me 5-10 times as much as an upgrade to Win7! It's a shame, I want to like Linux, I really do; but it just keeps throwing up too many stumbling blocks.

PS: Check this out http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1239048.html

The BigYin
FAIL

Actaully...

...after looking at he blog, I call some kind of PR bullshit. Not sure what game Dell/Ms/Linux Foundation/Whomever is playing, but it doesn't ring legit.

A blog with only 2 entries (one of which just appears to be a picture) gets billing on El Reg and other mainstream media? Too convenient by far. It stinks of PR astroturfing bullshit.

If only there were some journalists who could investigate...

The BigYin

Huzzah!

Common sense rules.

And, by the way, installing any decent Linux distro (OpenSuse, Ubuntu, etc) is pretty much a piece of piss. I mean...I can do it FFS.

Can't get dual screens to work the way I want...bloody Intel bloody drivers....mutter, grumble, bitch....

West Antarctic ice loss overestimated by NASA sats

The BigYin

Let me translate

"We have no clue what we are talking about, but we are sure it is still big and scary, please keep the funding rolling in or we'll be out of jobs."

The more I read about "climate change", the more I come the conclusion it is bull-crap.

Of course that doesn't not mean recycling, increasing efficiency and cutting pollution are bad ideas. They're good ideas, they should be done for a whole host of reasons, but "climate change" ain't one of them.

Tabloid hack scum face jail

The BigYin

Labour scum

So now Labour want to gag journalists under threat of jail AND they want to block the public from recovering costs when they challenge illegally issued penalties (e.g. speeding tickets and the like)?

So never question a Labour MP and never try to challenge any fines issued by the Labour state (you may win, but you'll be paying more than the fine would have cost).

Labour - You WILL obey the machine!

Aussie Sex Party in evangelist head-to-head

The BigYin

As Ghandi onces said

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

It was true then, and it was true now.

This reminds me...how much does "Rev" cost again? £20 or something? Rev. BigYin. Yes...could have some giggles with that.

@Ralph 1

A very wise man said something along the lines of this to me:

"When someone annoyed, upset or made me angry; I would analyse what was in myself that allowed them to destabilise my emotions and grant them such power over me. Now I rarely get angry or upset, even why they are being very insulting and aggressive, I just smile and say 'Thank you'. It's a much more pleasant way to be..."

"...that and it really bugs the hell out of them!"

MS, US take aim at data protection laws cyber trade barriers

The BigYin
Flame

How should I put this?

Err..."Twat off" covers it I think.

The USA is one of the most protectionist and anti-free trade countries in the world (yes, you read that right). The USA expects the world to bend over and take it from them, but they refuse to do likewise (the UK's totally one-sided extradition treaty anyone?).

So, quite frankly, either they agree 100% to reciprocate equally in all matters (which means agreeing to extradition of their citizens without a hearing or proof of evidence to a trail in a foreign power, for example); or they can ram it up their fundament.

As for MS...I don't want them having my personal data. Hell, I get twitchy about the amount of crap my own government holds about me. And as for websites...most believe I live in Afghanistan because, quite frankly, they do not need to know where I live (and if they can't work it out from the IP addy, they're a bunch of retards) nor do they need to know anything else about me usually.

Sky confirms telly-on-Xbox launch date

The BigYin

OR...

...Get and old xBox

Soft mode

Install XMBC

Maybe Navi-X

Profit!

Well, maybe not profit as such, but certainly no real cost.

Child porn threat to airport's 'virtual strip search' scanners

The BigYin

What happens if I refuse?

Am I labelled a "suspect" for not wanting to be violated and then, well, get violated with a rubber glove?

Where does Labour get off thinking it can force ID cards, 100% surveillance and a presumption of guilt on us?

Hands on with Acer's dual-OS netbook

The BigYin

Why?

Why lumber a professional, highly functional and innovative OS with that sack of refuse masquerading as an OS?

The above is platform independent and should run equally well on the Lintard and Windtard brains.

Microsoft ropes in Family Guy to pimp Windows 7

The BigYin
Flame

@Sean

"Damned-near all commercial TV programming is smothered in a thick, thick layer of advertising, product placement and name-dropping!"

Not so in the UK....right up until the spineless nancies caved in and ITV et al can now engage in crass product placement like the USofA can.

Where's the "Off" button....