@Mycho

What do you suggest? Making him Gordon Brown's letter opener?

Amazed nobody else has asked...

What offer did Claire Bath turn down?

Ahhhh... Just wait

"The glassy frogs can have children, also transparent, but the following generation die at birth."

Maybe at the moment, yes... But such is the way with mutations, nature will find a way to fix that.

About time!

I've been wanting something like this since the first time I saw it on a crackberry.

Pity we had to wait for the iPhone before Nokia extracted finger from rear passage, but at least I have something nice to say about the iPhone! :o)

@Anarchy

"Israel aint European either, so why do they play in our footy/singing competitions? They should learn to play nicely with thier neighbours"

So that's the French out too then :-p

Oh, and the Poles would want the Germans out...

And we haven't forgotten about the Spanish Armada, and don't forget about the vikings! All that pillaging will never be forgotten!

So where does the fine go?

So Ofcom now has +£2M, where does this go? Will the CEO take a nice bonus at some point?

I think all telecoms related fines should go towards upgrading our telecoms infrastructure, cos BT aren't gonna do it when they can happily charge a large percentage of the country for the 50 year old copper/aluminium pair they have installed.

The security giant blamed the erroneous alert on "product testing"...

...or the lack of it

@ Greg Mills

You wouldn't happen,by any chance, to know the cheesy nightclub?

:o)

While they're at it....

Maybe Barracuda Networks would like to inject a little bit of intelligence into their anti-spam product...

For example, putting a bounce notification limit count on the system so an email address which has been used as a fake "reply-to" as mine did the other week, doesn't get burried in thousands of "Your message was rejected by the Barracuda spam filter blah blah blah".

They caused me more of a headache than real spam has managed for many months.

Lefty/Righty

I have a few friends who are lefties, and I end up fixing their PCs from time to time (such is the life of a techie), and I've actually got used to using a lefty mouse with my left hand, it's certainly easier than trying to remember the left and right click are swapped and using it with my right.

As for the study based on photos, well that's just using unreliable evidence as a foundation for a wobbly theory.

Not so much a study from the department of the bleedin' obvious as from the department of the pointless!

lmao!

There are some fantastic comments in here! Cheers guys/girls!

Personal fave being

"A highly ironic refund is no doubt due; surely the whole *point* of getting Bulgarian airbags is that you're fed up with your bee stings in the first place?"

"I don't see many scientists dumping this for back of a fag packet pints and pounds."

Actually, you're quite wrong there.

IIRC, a certain mars probe went smashing into the surface specifically *because* scientists mixed up metric and imperial measurements!

Then again, only American scientists would even attempt that kind of madness!

@DaveK

I don't mind admitting I'm a Marmite fanboy, but please don't tar us with the same brush as the Apple fanbois.

1) When was the last time you saw queue for a new version of Marmite?

2) When was the last time a new version of marmite dropped it's price 40% just after it had been released?

3) When was the last time marmite cost 5 times more than superior, more available spreads?

4) When was the last time you had to send a jar of marmite back to the factory as you're not permitted to take the lid off your own jar?

:-p

I rest my case... Now I'm off for a marmite and frostie sandwich.

I <heart> Adblock!

As a long time Firefox and Adblock user on various platforms, I never cease to be amazed at just how messy most webpages are when viewed with their ads intact.

Usually this is when I'm fixing someone elses IE only PC, which is often closely followed by a Firefox download, a quick Adblock and a cry of "Wow" from the PC owner.

Don't get me wrong, free websites are good, and for that there is obviously a price to be paid somehow, but does that mean I have to try and read a review in a 300 pixel wide window surrounded by bouncing ducks and other annoying animations? I'm there to read the review, not suffer an epileptic fit! If I didn't have Adblock, I'd be off of that site as quick as I could press backspace.

I know I'm going to sound just like my father here (not that he knows how to use a mouse), but in the good old days you might have the occasional letterbox animated gif at the top or bottom of the screen, but since the spread of the flash infection and syndication style sheets, the whole standard advert size and placement has gone out of the window, now you have squares and rectangles of every size all over the page. You even get adverts that appear over the text you are trying to read and get in the way! Possibly the most annoying ones being those automatic text sensing ones, which initially look like they might show a dictionary definition of a word, but actually just send you off to a back alley version of froogle!

One day when you're really bored, load up a page with, and without the ads (don't forget to flush the cache). Have a look at the bandwidth you use for each. Ads are sometimes over 80% of the total page download size! With some of the cut price ISPs having a 2gig a month limit, blocking this kind of bandwidth abuse starts to become a necessity!

Joe...

I might be going out on a bit of a limb here, but should I put you on the "Hate it" list then?

@William

Yes William, the RIAA probably love this, and probably did come up with the idea, but if you remove you apple shaped iHead from your apple shaped iArse (iAss in the colonies), you'd know that Apple is in such a major commanding position when it comes to the sale of DRM music that they can pretty much dictate the deal they want. They have the biggest bar on the beach, the one everyone has heard of, and a zillion customers who think they only way to get drink into their iBelly is from their bar.

What this story illustrates is the continued erosion of fair use. Which is why I continue to refuse to be an iSheep. I own no Apple products, I'm perfectly happy with a Nokia N95 without finger prints all over the screen, and the Creative Zen Stone plus is a seriously dinky little mp3/radio player. Neither of these force me to use their weird/buggy software and will appear as a USB drive on any OS I choose to use, where I can copy mp3 files on and off as I like.

Ahhh...

"The European Commission will, in future, leave all decisions regarding weights and measures to the British Government"

Except the UK government is just about to sign a bit of paper which is the political equiv to dropping their trousers, bending over, and shouting "take me Jean-Paul and Fritz".

GPRS 900Mhz...

Okay, so that's O2 and Vodafone confirmed as murderers... What about the frequency used by Orange and T-Mobile?

Vodafone GSM 900: 890 - 894.6 MHz 935 - 939.6 MHz

O2 GSM 900: 894.8 - 902 MHz 939.8 - 947 MHz

Vodafone GSM 900: 902 - 910 MHz 947 - 955 MHz

O2 GSM 900: 910 - 915 MHz 955 - 960 MHz

Vodafone GSM 1800 &

O2 GSM 1800: 1710 - 1721.5 MHz 1805 - 1816.5 MHz

T Mobile GSM 1800: 1721.5 - 1751.5 MHz 1816.5 - 1846.5 MHz

Orange GSM 1800: 1751.5 - 1781.5 MHz 1846.5 - 1876.5 MHz

Not forgetting of course that a mobile phone doesn't sit there and blast out 2watts all the time... The battery would last only a few minutes if it did... It only shouts as loud as needed to get the local cell to hear it. Which given the previous comment of Hospitals with masts on the top, would only be a few milliwatts.

And how does this 3metres change when you put a wall in the way? I'd suspect you've have to be almost laying on Authur Patient before you'd cause his life support to go pop...

So nice survey, now go away and do it properly.

/me remembers fondly the days of driving down the local town highstreet and setting of bank alarms with a CB radio... Those were the days. 4 watts of 27Mhz... Lovely.

@Andrew Dodd

You don't seem to have got to gips with the $:£ exchange rate when it comes to techie toys.

$399=£399... If you're really lucky it might be £350.

And as for the price of a nice Nokia, an N95 on a £30 a month 18 month contract can be acquired for free with about 5 minutes worth of bartering with at least 2 of the Uk networks (personally got one from Orange, and a workmate did the same with O2).

A flaw in their plans...

We can all see the police want to solve crimes with an SQL query, the problem is DNA doesn't work for all crimes... Rapes, sure, usually lots of DNA, murder, maybe... The trouble is these are very rare crimes compared to the ones most of use are exposed to... Pick pockets, handbag snatches etc, no good for DNA. The guilty party can simply admit to being on the same crowded street as you, and that's how a few of their skin flakes must have got on your jacket.

Plus, if they do get DNA evidence, it will just make all the sucessful criminals identical twins. They can just point at each other and say "He did it". The police, having completely lost any ability to solve crimes without their beloved database will simply implode. Assuming "innocent until proven guilty" hadn't been thrown out with the bathwater too.

Good greif...

Doesn't have to be a rock star, take almost anyone, give them a huge wedge of cash and fame and then sit back and watch what happens...

1) Fast cars... Splat

2) Drugs & Alcohol... Insert huge list here

Then of course, if you manage to survive the drugs and fast cars, you will of course have collected a throng of groupies*, who, being the famous person that you are, you'll bonk left right and centre... And invariably you'll catch something, and given the amount of bonking you've done, it'll probably be a really nasty fatal one.

The fact that Cliff Richard avoids all the above, and it still alive at 762 really proves it all. QED, where's my degree?

* Personally I believe the collective noun for groupies should be a thong.

Ta for the info...

I heard about this last night on the BBC news... Unfortunately their coverage was

"Clearer pictures of space have been released, and they were taken from the ground, thanks to some technology invented by British scientists... An now the weather."

They did chuck up a couple of picture on screen over the voice over, but no before/after snaps, well if they were they didn't say!

Wayne Rooney stubs his foot and we'll have 5 minutes of x-rays of the nuckle draggers dented hairy toes... Some funky technology and images that have taken a zillion years to reach us, and you're lucky to get 10 seconds...

Oh no BBC, of course you're not dumbing down.

An inside source?

That would be the source inside the toilet cubicle next to the author who had no story and a deadline to meet.

misery and despair?

Surely you mean misery and repair?

Errrr...

What's that going on in his right ear? It's not an earpiece for a change!

Agreed!

They need to show the phone rejecting it before hand.

I see it's still displaying the number dialled in 'merkin format.. Well I guess it's 'merkin format... 1 (23)... Weird.

Essential tools

I've found the modern mobile phone camera is an essential tool when pulling new stuff apart... Far easier than trying to remember or document where things plug back in.

The PFY should try this in future, it would have saved his miss-aligned daughterboard.

I agree with all them above...

How am I supposed to know that I am using an open wifi point against the owners wishes? If it turns up a default SSID with no encryption, and hands me an IP address, how am I to know it's not a community access point?

If you don't put a door on your house, can you complain if people wander in? I doubt it, you'll get laughed out of court.

In the UK there has been a recent trend with the bigger ISP of supplying wifi routers pre-configured with a random wep key, which is printed out and stuck on the bottom of the router. This makes perfect sense. Most users don't even bother using the wireless, even though it's turned on by default, so at least anyone using it without their knowledge must have cracked the wep key, and can't claim to be a casual roamer.

@Dru Richman

Cost less than some?

Where does an iPhone cost less than anything that doesn't have wheels and an internal combustion engine?!

The N95 is free on most contracts, even if you're only paying £25-£30 a month you can get it free with only the mildest of bartering.

But yes, you're right, they'll sell a shed load of the overpriced, underspecced things, just cos they look swish, and the fanboyz and gurlz would buy a pile of doggy doo doo if it had this much hype and a glowing apple logo on it!

Nokia bypass the operator?

Really? How?! From what I've seen, the UK operators Orange and Vodafone pretty much dictate what they want supplied on the handsets.

My N95 turned up all sealed in an Orange box, with all the nice VOIP stack knobbled. If I do a firmware update on it from the Nokia site, the VOIP is still knobbled.

The only way to do it is to change the model number of my phone to that of a generic Nokia supplied N95, then do the firmware update.

I don't believe for a minute that Orange have a load of people modifying every phone supplied to them from Nokia.

The only pro-bypass move I've seen from Nokia is they haven't gone after all the sites telling you how to unbrand your N95 by throwing DMCA at them.

@James Dunmore

Play games old chap, that's what he can't do on his linux box.

And before you spit your dummy in my direction, I'm typing this on R52 my Thinkpad which is dual booted XP/Etch (debian 4). I confess to being in XP right now, but that's only because I saw there were a load of updates to get when I read El Reg in IceWeasel earlier.

I have to wonder

How does someone that thick, end up with that kind of money to blow?

I concider myself pretty on the ball, and far too sharp to be caught out by a tear jerking story from the deposed prince of Ooooga Doooga, yes I can't scrape together anywhere near that amount of cash even if I wanted to!

Surely the obvious solution...

If numerics are a problem, then just call him/her Forreal or Fourreal.

It doesn't really matter though, as the kid is bound change it at the first opportunity, and probably hate the parents for the years of torture he/she had to endure at school.

Thinking about it for a second, why mess about, why not just name the child Kidoftwats.

The problem is

At least in the UK, most laws like this are ignored... Why? Because the yellow metal box policemen (Gatso cameras) don't do anything except snap you if you speed.

If they would invent one that snaps people for not indicating at junctions and/or roundabouts, I'd be right behind them... BTW, that idea is (c) me, as of now, okay!

The trouble is, in the UK at least, the number of traffic police has reduced as the Gatso cash machines have increased. Meaning that as long as you drive below the speed limit, you're unlikely to get caught for anything... Unless you take your number plates off, then you can do whatever you like.

Only last Christmas I was nominated driver, and did a 20 miles round trip dropping various people off home after a night out at between midnight and 1am on the 26th December. Drunk people walking, dancing, falling over all over the roads etc... Didn't see a single cop.

S*d the Geckos

Time to make a Zeee Peeee Emmmm, then dig up a stargate!

Actually the idea of being able to remove this property from Gecko feet and then watch the little buggers trying to climb things amused me too.

@Andrew

The reasons for the different analogue picture formats are mainly technical.

You watch on a 625 line in the UK, because the original time base was kept in step by the AC signal, 50hz. The USA has a different frequency (60hz), which means the time base runs faster. There is a limit to the amount of picture information you can get across on the carrier signal, so as the USA time base runs faster, you can't send as much information, so less lines.

These days with accurate oscillators, you could pick any time base you like, but of course it has to be compatible with all the existing gear, unless you really bite the bullet and invent a new format like HD.

NTSC was the first colour encoding system the engineers came up with, but as anyone that has ever seen the results, it tends to drift about a bit (okay, these days it's better, but that's thanks to a hell of a lot of clever modern electronic fixing the inherent problems), NTSC was even nicknamed Never Twice Same Colour! The UK engineers stuck as the R&D, convinced there must be a better way, where the colours would be more stable. PAL was the result. Hence an NTSC signal on a PAL TV produces a picture, but the set cannot decode the colour information, and vice versa.

There was no anti-competitive reason for it at all.

SECAM, well that's just the French isn't it. They wanted to protect their TV manuafacturing industry, so invented their own format. Incidently a lot of eastern block countries used SECAM too, because that way the only "free" world country they would be able to sneak a look at would be France, they certainly didn't want Eastern German residents seeing life on the other side of the wall.

So now we just have to decide exactly which side of the wall the BBC are putting us on!

At this rate...

Inspector morse will soon be replaced by Inspector

select known_crims.name,known_crims.address from unsolved_crimes join known_crims on (unsolved_crimes.dna=known_crims.dna) where handshake<>dodgy and donation_to_gov<5000

Ah, the wonderful world of knee-jerk reactions...

I've seen cars sold on eBay that have then gone on to kill people, be used as get-away cars, and commit speeding/parking offences.

Oh, and some eBay supplied PCs have been used for hacking, storing kiddy porn etc.

BAN THEM ALL.

I'll be interested to see how this works, as I'm continually finding things with rule breaking entries (you know the type "Honda not suzuki yamaha kawasaki"), and even after reporting them, they still persist.

For sale:

Black and white male cat.

One terrified previous owner

Free to good home.

At last

A way to beat all the wrinklies who seem to have my local surgery booked solid for months at a time!

And even better, it's a way they would never be able to understand, or use themselves!

Muwahahahahahaha!

What are these people on...

Too many celebs call their dogs Tinkerbell?

Pah... That's nothing to the number that call them Princess!

Oh well, at least they can afford the shrink bills the poor child is gonna need!

@Adrian Jones

Given the context, I believe they should now be called ICKY STICK!

How about

Dumping all brain dead question "lottery" competitions. There is absolutely no skill involved, they are purely luck of the draw, so how they get away with it when only Camelot have the licence for running public lotteries in the UK, I don't know. I'm sure a quick check of their entries would reveal 99.9% of people picking one option, therefore proving my point.

This goes even more so for the commercial channels. I'd rather watch a test card than those moronic hosts who would do better as adverts for plastic surgery and teeth whitening than entertainers.

Would SA be any use

Okay, let's assume Terry Wrist manages to build an ICBM (well he can turn bottled water into a binary explosive, I trick even Jesus might fail to better)... Terry then uses GPS to guide his ICBM across the globe towards the US.

Now exactly how much error does SA introduce? Let's face it, it's gonna have to be several thousand miles for Terry's ICBM to miss the USA, it's kinda big! And I bet Canada would be dead chuffed to end up on the receiving end instead!

Given the recent demonstration of Terry's bomb making abilities over here in blighty, I imagine more death and and destruction would be caused by Randy turning right when his confused GPS tells him, and ploughing down the isle at Walmart.

What wait for the iDiot?

Hey, anon, you missed him... First post was from one of the cowardly fanboyz.

Recycled numbers

IIRC, when a phone number was ceased, it used to be left unallocated for a few months to avoid exactly this kind of thing.

I don't know if this was the case in this instance, of if the premium rate redirect which seem to be happening is just badly maintained with nobody noticing the few months of "failed to connect" in the logs.

Ways of preventing people streamripping...

That sounds worryingly like a custom player and DRM infection to me... Just the kind of thing we thought the music industry had realised wasn't making it any friends.

Here's a little tip for you music industry. People like to be able to move their music between devices, so DRM won't make you friends. Plus whenever you use it, you never provide the tools so it can be played on Linux. Unfortunately for you, the Linux world is populated but the techie savvy crowd, who quickly make your protection look stupid. This knowledge soon "leaks" across to the other platforms, and soon we're all happily ripping/unlocking movies, tracks etc, just like we had been for years before.

Will they ever learn... Doubtful.

I'm curious...

...to know how many of those domains are being squatted by sites that pretend to be search engines/content portals.

I can't remember the last time I followed a link on a page to find it now returned a 404... All I seem to find these days is some lame squatter.

How about an e-petition...

... to have details of the number, and titles of any e-petitions that have had any impact on government policy published, and details of the impact they had?

A voice of sanity

At last, a calm voice of sanity, who actually knows what he's talking about.

I have to wonder why there have not been any interviews with any real bomb disposal men during the recent events.

Oh well, guess we'll just have to sit back and see what freedoms Mr Brown will remove from us next.