Enough is enough

Your yellow journalism hacks have insulted the Free Open Source Software movement one too many times.

I will be adding theregister.co.uk to our corporate firewall as soon as this is posted.

You can ram the "freetard" insult up your ass, if there's room in there next to your swollen head.

@ Richard Bennett

"Richard Bennett has argued that BitTorrent puts an unreasonable strain on Comcast's network - and that the company's best option is to clip the app's wings."

Comcast's wide-open outbound port 25 puts an unreasonable strain on my MX server's spam identification systems. My best option is to file a class action lawsuit against Comcast for knowingly aiding and abetting spam senders, and acting in collusion with them to violate the CAN-SPAM Act.

Of course, that could be avoided if Comcast would intercept all port 25 traffic leaving customer machines, and prevent them being used as "zombie" spam-relays.

And as for clipping BitTorrent's wings - since Comcast caps *all* customers at 256kbps outbound, perhaps the fact is that Comcast has oversold their capacity. A lower cap seems necessary - for *all* Comcast customers. Or an investment in infrastructure upgrades.

How much is Comcast paying you to pretend that their "best" option is to discriminate against and defraud customers who are attempting to use that which has been sold to them by Comcast?

@ Andrew Orlowskii

"Neutrality is a proxy war for liberal activists: it's a hyper-real simulation of "activism" - with its own "heroes" and "villains". So instead of taking on a big issue like healthcare, which has powerful opponents and which might mean a messy (to nerds) compromise, it's far easier for armchair warriors to "Save The Internet", sign a petition, wear a badge, etc."

Don't be an ass. Oh, I apologize, it's apparently in your nature, and in your fiscal interests, you can't help it.

What makes you think we "armchair warriors" aren't *both* working for universal healthcare, *and* attempting to preserve an open Internet?

Ah, but you're a yellow-press hack, aren't you? Fairness and reasonableness are counter-productive to that sort of ass.

Is this official Reg policy?

If it is now officially the policy of The Register to insult people who prefer to *legitimately* get things for free rather than paying for bloatware, I shall take my custom elsewhere. It's not as if you are the only Web site with nasty-minded drunken oiks writing tech news, you know.

No Sony products here, ever!

"Will you be one of the 18.8m people buying into BD this year?"

No.

Sony is the only major corporation ever to have been caught distributing consumer products which were *meant* to install rootkit viruses on PCs, and they did it not once, but twice.

No way in Hell will I ever buy another Sony product. Not now. Not ever. Never!

And my plain old DVD is good enough.

@ Edward Rose

"Come on man, we just want cheap shots at the Yanks, they voted in GWB after all."

Not all of us. And frankly, I doubt it was a majority of us. The first time round, I am morally certain it was his campaign manager in Florida, who was also the Florida Secretary of State - the person who was charged with certifying the election as having been conducted lawfully, and also the only person who could have opened ballot boxes and resealed them with the official seals before the ballots were counted; and a number of ballot boxes went missing for several hours. Makes you wonder.

So will there be a new sign at Heathrow?

"Welcome to the United Kingdom (A wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft)"

Where's Guy Fawkes when you need him?

There's a better solution

Forget about IE6, IE7, IE8, or whatever.

Use a *standards-compliant* Web browser, and prominently post on your site "This Web site was designed to comply with the W3C standards. If it does not appear properly in your Web browser, then your browser does not comply with existing International standards. Please ask your browser vendor to fix it."

Problem solved.

Re: They could, but

It's marginally impractical today. In 1975, a personal computer that could display real-time 3D animations (ala World of Warcraft, for instance (pun intended)) would have been impractical. Now, 30+ years later, US$300 will get you more computing power than most small nations owned back then.

Technology changes. It gets cheaper, more powerful, and more practical as development proceeds.

And a laser is the only weapon that can move fast enough to catch an ICBM during boost pahse, when it is most vulnerable. 300,000 km/second is the speed of light (or speed of laser, if you like). A physical object going into orbit is only moving at about 29,000 km/hour. It's the difference between the Post and radio, essentially.

And we didn't have invisible anti-gravity-powered black helicopters then, either. ;-)

@ jeremy

"since you have not legally obtained that copy"

That's a serious charge, jeremy. I presume you an make it stick in a court of law. Otherwise, you are guilty of libel.

Fact: According to the license, an OEM copy of Windows may be sold with the purchase of a motherboard, CPU, or hard drive (at least as recently as Windows XP - I wouldn't touch Vista again if you paid me to do so). Ergo, anyone who has purchased one of those items at the same time as the OEM Windows package has obtained it "legally." Until it became unprofitable to do so, I built and sold custom PCs, which makes me an "OEM" per Microsoft's license agreement.

Furthermore, violating the license agreement is not illegal. It is a matter of civil contract law, not criminal law, and is, at worst, a tort.

So either you are knowingly libelous, or a loud-mouthed ignorant git. Which is it.?

Apple, Microsoft... I'm the guy with the gun.

When I found I could no longer install Quicktime without iTunes, I stopped using Quicktime.

I located a site (no, I won't name it, do your own research) that lets me install all the Windows XP updates since SP2, up to August 2007 (when Microsoft forced them offline) from a CD, and the PC never needs to "phone home" for WGA.

Funny how I never have installations forced on me as fake "updates" on my Ubuntu laptop.

It's arrogance like that displayed by Microsoft and Apple that encourages young people to use pirated software; at least the pirates let you *choose* what you want to install.

It's called "karma"

AT&T refuses to act on spam reports, so seeing their customers - the people who make it possible for them to stay in the ISP business - suffering due to yet another "management" disaster at AT&T cause a bit of schadenfreude.

Paris, because she's as smart as AT&T's management, and somewhat more decorative.

Where are the actual benchmarks?

"Better overall performance" than regualr old 5400 or 7200 rpm disks is lovely, but are we talking orders of magnitude better, or a few percent better?

My money's staying in my wallet until the performance per dollar is at least equal.

Paris, because she understands performance but doesn't know where the charts are, either.

*chortle*

*snicker*

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

A suggestion

The State Attorney General of New Jersey should file suit against Sequoia on behalf of the citizenry for knowing, willful, and deliberate suborning of the electoral process, and submit the paper-tape and cartridge records as evidence.

The only way Sequoia can prove that charge to be false (if it is, which I doubt) will be to open their machines to truly independent inspection.

@ tim chubb

"cant say i can recomend linux unless you enjoy spending 8 hours trying to get the back and fwd buttons on your mouse to work"

Frankly, tim if it's taken you that long to get something that works by default in modern Linux distros, you ought to be using an Etch-A-Sketch(tm).

The Dell Optiplex 745 on my desk here came with Vista Ultimate. I successfully downloaded SP1, but having read this artivle and checked my device manager, I think I'll wait to install it. Looks like practically every chip in it is Intel, and I *need* my USB and LAN to work.

Re: Re: Naval Ranks

Minor correction (or additon if you like).

In sailing-ship naval warfare, the admiral commanding the fleet would be onboard the lead ship in the engagement, with the fleet strung out in line behind him. As the two hostile fleets pass one another, they fire off their cannon, of course. When the two fleets have passed beyond engagement range, each individual ship comes about, reversing the order of the ships in line, and the rear admiral (formerly on the rearmost ship, which has now become the lead ship) commands the fleet during this pass.

So a Rear Admiral is the fleet's second-in-command when they're sailing "forward," and the fleet's battle commander when they're sailing back the other way.

Mine's the one with "pedant" emblazoned across the back...

Davies admits that Phorm collects personal data

"in my view the company has gone above and beyond the norm to expunge personal data from its system."

In other words, Phorm's spyware *does* collect personal data, but then very kindly deletes it. You can't expunge data unless you collect it first.

And there's no guarantee that they will continue to delete it in future; particularly if it becomes of "commercial value" to them.

Greenpeace? Don't make me laugh

Greenpeace is run by a bunch of power-tripping failed politicians and lawyers. If they gave a flying rat's ass about the environment, they'd be working on an eco-friendly way to get industry into orbit, where there's no environment to pollute and no ecology to destroy.

My engineer buddy tells me we have the ability *right now* to build a mag-lev launch system that could put a reusable 100-ton manned craft into orbit. It isn't being done because it needs to be built in Tibet or South America to take advantage of the combination of tall mountains and Earth's rotational speed.

What's Greenpeace doing about that? Not Jack shit, that's what.

Useless tossers.

@ Brett Brennan

Half of your idea is good.

Charging a setup fee for a "free" email account would practically eliminate their use by spammers, because any form of payment whatsoever that works over the Internet can be traced.

Charging per email doesn't work for a rather large number of reasons (do you charge per addressee, per byte, per destination domain? How do you calculate the actual costs, so as to ensure you profit from the charges? How do you keep your customers when they can get a free "unlimited email" account from me after paying the nominal setup fee? and so on.)

But $3/day serfs aren't going to plunk down $5 or $10 per account, even if their masters are willing to pay it. Assume they each open 100 accounts per day. After all, they can pocket the $500 or $1000 for one day's "work" and quit immediately; why work the rest of the year for that amount of money?

@ Sceptical Bastard

"will I get my 72 virgins before glorious martyrdom or afterwards?"

Actually, that's a typographical error, a few letter were dropped by the copyist.

It's 72 Virginians.

Do not look directly into laser with remaining eye.

@ Giles Jones

"The rule should be if you have a patent and wish to sue someone who infringes it then you need to have a product of your own out there."

Not at all.

However, since software is already covered by copyright, allowing a bit of software to be patented is a boneheaded idea worthy of Bloody Stupid Johnson.

The purpose of patents is to *encourage* innovation. Software patents, however, *stifle* innovation, since even if a programmer discovers a completely novel way to achieve the same result, the *result* of the software is essentially what is patented, and therefor a new and innovative method of reaching that end is *still* subject to patent trolling.

@ Paul

"I'm sure most potential buyers have figured out that a business plan depending largely on consumers remaining stupid and clueless doesn't add up as well as you'd expect it to."

It works for Microsoft. Of course, AOL's software is nowhere near as good as Microsoft's...

Re: OI! leave it . . .

"bring joy to millions and die prematurely - this proves there is no god."

Or that whatever god is in charge of setting appointments with Death is an illiterate, humourless, capricious and malicious son of a bitch.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster would never have done this to us.

Hang in there, Pterry, if anyone can beat Alzheimer's by sheer determination, I'd lay my bet on you.

And to do my own selfish bit: PLEASE spend whatever time you have left expanding the Diskworld series. Even if you outlive me (not unlikely), I'll continue buying your books as long as I possibly can (I have a habit of trading them in, then buying them back every 6 months or so anyway).

Oh, and for those of you slagging off Pterry because his donation was "selfish:" You're all going to die sooner or later. I hope quite sincerely that whatever kills you does it soon, without you knowing what you've got until it's too late, and the cure is announced right after your autopsy. Bastards.

A Modest Proposal

OK, *another* Modest Proposal:

Both US and UK Special Operations teams need lots of training in order to stay sharp for real warfare.

I suggest those teams be assigned to identify all members of the RBN, hunt them down, and capture, or if capture is not practical, kill them.

And I really am serious. Wipe out the RBN and you'll eliminate a huge volume of spam, and make it possible for Joe Sixpack to pay his mortgage (because he didn't stupidly get fleeced by an RBN spammer).

Once the RBN is down, move on to the next-largest spam/malware gang. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The heart icon, because that's what I want: The warm, still-beating hearts of the RBN members ripped from their chests on live Webcam.