Michael Rimmer?

The rise and rise of, surely?

Duping Twats*

Shurely that happened once they signed up for the service?

*The name affectionately given to users of the Twatter online timewasting service.

I'll have one, ta

Jaqui, you fat slag, just as soon as you recognise the independent Republic of Mancunia.

And it was such a good week for the government in Manchester what with that nice Mr. Burnham being full of praise for FC United.

It's called subsidiarity

And it's actually one of the good things about the US political setup: not everything gets decided in Washington. The Bush administration's meddling was simply another example of "big government" in state issues. As has been noted in several places, not least by The Economist http://www.economist.com/search/search.cfm?rv=2&qr=epa+emissions+california&area=1&x=0&y=0 , once a state like California passes such legislation many other states adopt the same law and manufacturers adapt generally pretty quickly to reduce the number of production lines they have to support. There are, of course, some notable exceptions with German car manufacturers infamous for lobbying against tighter European emission legislation ("it can be done") whilst selling models that meet California's even higher requirements.

So politically it's a smart move: Obama gets to look green while making it Schwarzenegger's problem. Effectively done it even becomes a job saver as American manufacturers might get a head start on the next set of restrictions which can be tailored to suit their abilities, ie. reduce the level of "XXX" in emissions once they know how to do this, the free radicals produced by lead-free petrol would be a good place to start.

@Matt

IP addresses can be treated as personal information particularly on a corporate network. The Data Protection Act certainly does prohibit passing on personal information electronically to third parties. On top of that, of course, is the Google cookie that gets set which is not at all required for the service. I know that the issue is currently under review in Germany with the recommendation to ban the use of Google Analytics likely. One of the companies I work is looking to ban the use of Analytics worldwide. But as I said in my initial post the use is currently only a possible breach of data protection legislation.

re. Data Protection

While there is indeed some discussion about whether you should even be allowed to keep webserver logs, the real data protection issue is making them available to a third party, ie, Google, without the *express* permission of the owner.

@TW Burger

They're not really from the same company: Google bought Analytics when it bought the company Urchin. I think Googlemail is their own vomit.

Does Mr. Abbott advise his clients that using Analytics is possibly in breach of data protection legislation?

Missing the point

The decision is one about unfair competition and that the media player decision can be seen as a precedent. There have been many analogies for other industries which don't need repeating here. What probably is important is that it makes it less likely that Microsoft can railroad Silverlight through as the rich runtime. But the decision also sends a warning to Google's nascent ambitions with Chrome.

Lester for king!

Fucking ace.

Like others I'm looking forward to the Hudson river crime scene investigation: Airbus thwarts Boeing sabotage plans?

If you build them they will come.

While telco's are probably not desperate to upgrade their entire networks to support any new standards, they do now have established mobile data customer bases. So, as long as they don't have to bid for spectrum they will continue to roll out new kit and upgrade key locations: stations, airports, etc. just as they have with UMTS to HSDPA and then HSUPA and LTE fits in nicely. Probably available first as a USB stick before getting Jobs to tell everyone how great the JesusPhone 4G is - the fanboys. As for what the bandwidth will be used for - porn, just like normal highspeed internet connections.

Father Ted

I was hoping for some festive fecking swearing from Father Ted.

About the only thing I agreed with in the article was the petulance of the open source zealots who love features and fluff over reliability and is often as loggerheads with production requirements.

Intel needs to do more

Their chips need more transistors to do the same amount of work as other chips which is why Intel chips routinely drown more polar bears than the competition.

But as for technological innovation: it's still almost always IBM that comes up trumps with the really interesting stuff.

One word

IPv6

re. backwards compatibility

Python 2.5 is the fastest version of Python. Python 2.6 was released mainly as a forwards compatibility release with 3.0 for library developers. Most code will run unchanged on Python 2.x and 3.x or need only minor changes (print statements to functions, etc.) So the change is nothing like as dramatic as say PHP 4.x to PHP 5.0

Take up at Mountain View is likely to be pretty fast, I would guess. ;-)

Deeply flawed article

1) Governments don't charge for spectrum. They hold auctions. Very free market. Nobody forced the networks to bid.

2) UMTS take up is not coverage related. When they were bidding for spectrum the networks had grand plans for UMTS services (video calls being one of them) and wanted to avoid being mere data pipes. But seeing as customers didn't want any of the new services they had to do something to increase use. UMTS price expectations were set by the smaller operators (ie. 3 in the UK). Once the flatrate genie was out of the bottle...

3) Dongle owners don't arse around on sadness networks on their phones. There has been sustained demand from heavy corporate users since UMTS became available. There is still significant differentiation on availability of HSDPA and HSUPA allowing for a premium but only to the corporate sector.

4) What about convergence? Touted in the late 1990s, most networks ignored in for most of this decade. Only to resdiscover the importance of brand loyalty and across products and simplifying the customer experience.

Is this the level of consultancy the telcos get? No wonder they keep getting it wrong!

This page

El Reg's comment page currently uses the following external code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://edge.quantserve.com/quant.js"></script>

hm.

Bulgarian funbags anyone?

Surely that's a very popular neologism. Or is it euphemism?

@ AC with the morning undergarment dilemma: any pair that isn't stuck together will do!

Mine's the one with the pockets filled with high-gloss "research papers".

Confusing the issue

This article conflates two issues. Firstly, the security issues related to including external client side scripting in a page. The problems associated with this are pretty well covered in the article.

Secondly, even if the external javascript is not used to execute malicious credential stealing code, it is a danger in itself. That this danger is poorly understood is clear from comments like this by "schill":

"Practically all web tracking counters work this way."

Tracking is the keyword here. Google Analytics (previously known as Urchin before the Larry and Sergei like the razor so much they bought the company) is all about tracking users as they travel the interweb and is a pretty hefty violation of most data protection laws. Idiots use it because they think they are getting some statistics for free when in fact they are selling valuable information to an advertising agency in return for some pretty graphics.

Thirdy, just because "everyone else is doing it" is never a justification for an action: siphyllis is a very popular sexually transmitted disease. Does that make it desirable?

Add *.googleanalytics.com/* to your content blocker.

It's a joke

Traffic management has to be done in the network. Seeing as,at least in Germany, you can use the same SIM on the same contract connected to a PC with no download restriction this can only be a dead herring related to the fact that the network can't properly distinguish between internet "radio" and VoIP.

I like Mac OS but some of the comments from the dullards on this are starting to make me feel ashamed.

New Unit of Measurement

The PornFlick? - data transferred per second? Like it.

Brainbox versus Boffin

Why choose? ;-)

Well said Cade

If the internet is all about websites and not about browsers then who gives a toss whether it's Windows, Apple or Linux as long as it's still googlemaps, googlemail and the rest of the googleverts? Personally I think they're all shit but I'm in a very small minority.

Where's the Max Headroom icon?

Sad bunch of twats on this afternoon

1) Nothing to do with profits. Public transport is largely funded by government grants and most people have some form of season ticket. There is little or no additional money made through direct ticket sales which are there to scratch the itch that people should be seen to pay to use the system.

2) Screen-scraping is a copyright issue because even if the data collected is publically available. It is the form in which the information is available which is important. Most German train (and the Dutch one) websites use software developed by a private company, HAFAS, which naturally has a vested interest in not seeing the data thus made available to possible competitors. Making this data available in other forms without their consent may constitute a material breach of contract and as the development of the software has been paid for the majority of customers, the minority is benefitting at the expense of the majority. Nothing new, there, then.

But basically JesusPhone users are idiots who should be made to pay for their gullibility. Nice to see if Apple's prepared to act as gateway keeper here by booting such applications off the phone as they've presumably promised the music and phone industry.

IBM's in the right

Not sure if the PowerPC stuff is relevant. He's left the building from a senior position with lots of detailed knowledge. A one-year restriction is actually very lenient for that kind of position. Wonder what Apple would do if the situation was reversed? Jobs would be crying Ives' beautifully crafted tears, no doubt.

I like vla

http://lecker.dubbel.vla

Nice boost to the campaign

I like it, although I hope it gets a bigger take-up and spreads round the country to include train stations and airports. That'll make the place popular with religious *zealots* everywhere.

It's probably too much to hope that if they are any protests against it that there will be a debate about freedom of speech.

@Evil Graham: class! Must add that to my stock when the god botherers come round.

Playmobil?

Title says it all.

@Mr Hat-and-Coat

Govtard - like it.

@ The rest of you. We're all a bit pinko liberal today, aren't we? Can't we get some nice redneck flames on how good Guantamo Bay has been at obtaining evidence and preventing terrorism?

It should go back to 48 hours. It's a bit sick that we're celebrating the fact that detention without trial hasn't been extended to 42 days but it's still four, fucking long weeks. It's the job of the secret services to take out the really dangerous and naughty people even if the break the law doing so and not the responsibility of those civilians in uniform aka the police.

Oh, and can we have a reminder that MI5 officially reckons that the IRA is currently still a bigger problem than any putative jihadist, despite repeated attempts to fasttrack discontented Asians into radical fodder.

text/plain is the solution

HTML mail is the real culprit but Jobs deserves a good kicking for embracing it so wholeheartedly. AppleMail is okay (not as good as Mr. Carruthers own mailer but that's by the by) but it has never had a "Display mail as text" option and comes with a load of "templates" which suggest that you can reliably style ASCII text.

FCUM!

Might work

But Life on Mars itself depends largely on The Sweeney for it's anachronism. Wonder if that's why it was set in Manchestoh what with Mr. Thaw coming from there. Who is the yank equivalent of Regan?

And Mr. Haines: "cultural flatline" - we didn't get that till Maggie got in and fucked everything up.

The bleeding obvious

Not sure about nanotechnological demons although it's bound to give rise to a heap of user reported errors to go along with "byte rot" and "drive worms": "nano gremlins" The easiest thing to do is to use superconducting materials that don't generate heat. We'll probably all be fine using our laptots (sic) in the LHC at CERN! In the meantime replacing DRAM would go a long way to reducing power consumption as would dropping x86 compatability.

Good article

Informative, concise and well-written. Bit low on the swearing but you can't have everything!

Shock! Horror! Ofcom is incompetent!

Up there with the FSA and the SEC for this year's "not fit for purpose" prize. The number is "owned" (I don't think id's can technically be owned but that's another matter) by the regulator and not the chuffing network who'd probably been auctioning the most "desirable" ones.

And there already is a database for which number is using which network and all the national networks and many international ones subscribe to it to get their daily updates. Number portability has already been demonstrated in court to be an essential part of competition and I thought this was a European judgement. Got to love British regulators: let the companies fuck the customer as long as possible.

@Evil Graham

You're scum. Ray's the daddy.

Works for me

First of all:

"but as long as I can still post utter toss in the comments sections and quality of the scribblers who send the articles in is still good, then I couldn't give a rats ass if the whole site was run through Upside Downterweb, It'll still be in my bookmarks."

Can't disagree with that, except that it's probably not quite as rude as if I'd written it.

@all the knobheads complaining about fixed-widths: go and read up about what 400 character-wide columns do to readability.

@font size fetishists: twiddle your browser and plan to buy reading glasses within the next five years and wrist support a lot sooner.

@numpty complaining about adds: real vultures use content blockers and have done ever since they existed.

@the Reg: In general a great improvement but please do CSS properly and add a print css and presumably one for mobiles. Site does render fine for me on Presto 9.6 and on my G900 but the background grey is too dark and the icons are mainly cock except for the coat one. Looks like an updated form of 1970's naive style and let's face it the 70's was the decade that style forgot. As for you symbols: either photorealism or iconographic but never, ever both. Smells like an opportunity for a competition. The Economist recently reinvented itself to good effect (except for mobiles).

Mine's the one with the nearly completed manuscript "How I made the internet" and would you order me a taxi and a couple of coke whores? Ta,