Posts by RW

Isn't 9/11 getting a little threadbare as an excuse for this crap?

After all it's been seven years now.

And contrary to what the fascisti in the DHS would like you to believe, the world today is pretty much the same world it was on 9/10, barring serious erosion of civil liberty in the so-called free world.

The question to ask about all these liberty-destorying measures is, had this measure been in effect on 9/11, would it have prevented the destruction of the World Trade Center? The answer in almost all cases is no.

Sickening.

tHe eNd oF eBay aS wE kNew iT

Prediction: eBay will stop auctions by the end of the year.

Clearly the bean counters in charge have forgotten what line of business eBay is (or was!) in: the #1 online auction site.

Somebody with gumption and money to pay development costs could drive an economic Mack truck through the economic void they're creating.

Unfortunately, the US government is such a spineless lap dog for corporate interests that no one will raise a finger to stop this illegal tied marketing. There are laws against such things in the US (vide the long running lawsuit against IBM for bundling decades ago) but mysteriously they never seem to get enforced in any meaningful-to-Joe-Average way.

So long, eBay: it was good while it lasted.

Upstate Manhattan?

Eh? ITYM Uptown.

FOI

Since the esteemed DS whats-his-face says, in effect, no crime has been committed, I presume his notes are fair game for an FOI request. A very broadly phrased FOI request at that, including telephone logs and all else.

I hope Alexander Hanff proceeds to tie the cops, Phorm, and BT into little knots. Those of you directly affected by this would do well to send him money, as legal proceedings are never cheap. The more money he has, the more of a pain in the ass he can make of himself in respect of this travesty of a police report and who knows? maybe someone somewhere will wake up to the fact that this kind of nonsense on the part of the cops "brings the adminstration of justice into disrepute."

I suspect some members of the judiciary will be most displeased to find that the cops are now deciding if a crime has been committed.

Frankly, this decision is disgusting.

PS: And Gordon Brown wonders why NuLabour is so unloved? Is the man a dimwit, or is he merely stupid?

Re: Total Twaddle

So far, however, the IEEE misses perhaps the most important point: that the paper is meaningless gibberish. Even if it was 100% original, it would remain gibberish.

I shudder to think that within IEEE circles there is a sub-circle that engages in mutual mental masturbation, to the members' great pleasure but to no one else's benefit. Like (cough) business management, investment, psychology, philosophy, and economics, all fields in which objective, provable facts are very scarce.

Heretofore the engineers (incl. IEEE) and the scientists have largely stuck to practicalities and observables, but now? One has to wonder.

System merger dangers

They might be better off hiring rather than firing. A lot of corporate mergers have come to grief after the fact when it turned out that their IT systems were deeply incompatible.

No reason to expect these banks to be any different.

Nothing like kicking a man in the head when he's down

The administrators will discover they need former Lehmann IT folks with specialized knowledge of the Lehmann systems to "do things" to the computers. I hope the formerly-employed they call in will charge a very stiff tariff. To be paid in cash, in advance, before a finger is lifted.

Paris because she knows how to get paid a great deal for very, very little.

The failure of spin

All the marketing droids amd spin doctors may as well go join the homeless bankers under their bridges. Don't they realize that this kind of fluffy-bunny, empty, hand waving, devoid-of-meaning prose merely arouses suspicion? If, that is, it doesn't confirm previously held suspicion?

Your very failure to address the core issues says your employer (HM Gov) are hiding something they're ashamed of.

They used to say there were lies, damned lies, and statistics. Now we can say there are lies, damned lies, statistics, and spin.

Didn't work guys!

"keep pace with the latest technology"

And who says there is any new traffic sign technology?

And who says it's an improvement on existing methods?

And who says it's even as good as existing methods?

Reading other comments, I conclude that it's commonsense that's in short supply, not technology.

Condom

As we used to say it in the programming bull pen I worked in for many years, "put your brain condoms on, everyone." Use for "here's something that is hardly believable, but I'm sure it's true."

@ Robbie Pence

"Evolution however, has plenty of nonsense. Evolving from animals, all on the basis that Darwin saw a species of birds that varied for their environment."

And there, my friends, is the voice of someone who has never read "Origin of Species".

Darwin's immortal book is not the easiest read in the world, if only because it's long, the type is small, and the Darwinian style deploys quite lengthy paragraphs, not the every-sentence-its-own-paragraph fostered by lousy pixelated text on monitors.

There is no nonsense in Darwin.

But Darwin took great pains in marshaling his evidence and his interpretation thereof. Anyone with a modicum of patience can read the book and understand the arguments in it. I would go so far as to say that anyone with even a fleeting interest in evolution should buy a copy of the book and read the damned thing so you know what Darwin said and what he didn't say. It may take a couple of years, but it's time well-spent

The Galapagos finches to which M. Pence refers are only a small part of Darwin's evidence, though it's believed that observing them triggered Darwin's "eureka!"

Darwin in fact starts off (iirc) observing that species are unquestionably mutable, pointing to domestic animals as evidence. (Again iirc) he tells us how long it takes to develop a new breed of cattle or sheep: not very many generations at all if there's a determined, knowledgable farmer in charge.

His argument proceeds from there, but it's not really a very tortuous argument: in essence Darwin points to mountains of facts and asks "what non-supernatural explanation can there be for these many facts?" He does an amazing job of bringing together evidence from many fields in the process.

Darwin was wise enough to know that his then-theory had its troubles, and does not hesitate to express his misgivings on some points—points which have largely been resolved in the ensuing 150 years.

Today, evolution is taken as a scientific fact: Darwin's theory has been so productive of understanding, it is no longer considered mere "theory" or "hypothesis". The arguments now center on the mechanisms of evolution, and there are significant schools of thought that reject Darwin's own proposal of gradual change in favor of such alternatives as "punctuated equilibrium." But no scientist worthy of the name doubts the fact of evolution of species.

Works in Netscape 7.2

Just thought you'd like to know.

What's wrong with Safari?

"The Elements of Style"

The referees who passed this gaseous horror of a paper should be publicly mocked for laziness. They should have returned the manuscript to the journal editor with a copy of Strunk and White's immortal "Elements of Style" for forwarding to the paper's "authors", along with a note suggesting that the writing style alone disqualifies it for publication.

The referees may have been unable to spot the plagiarism, but on mere stylistic grounds alone, the paper makes a mockery of the concept of clarity.

One suspects the referees of saying "well, I can't figure out what they're saying, so I'll assume it's all good." Shame on them.

When I wrote my PhD thesis, my research supervisor and I spent hours every day polishing the language. At the time, I was in despair at his nit-picking ways, but in retrospect I see that he was working hard to attain a kind of lapidary prose where not one word was redundant and not one logical connection was obscured. Good to him, and hail to his memory.

PS: I realized that this paper came from the Indian Institute of Management. Aha, now all is clear: management! Betcha they have MBA's or some similar qualification, the attainment of which does not require development of an understanding of the concepts "mine" and "thine" and their differences.

@ Colin Guthrie

Firefox profile support is largely redundant on Linux if each person using the machine has his/her own userid.

The profiles are stored in users' home directories, hence to some extent inaccessible to others.

Cowboys pulling cable

Okay, color (colour in UK-speak) me dumb, but wothehell is it about data cabling that makes it so hard to Get It Right?

Friends bought a new townhouse, price closely approaching $CDN10^6, and on moving in discovered that all the in-wall data, telephone, and video cabling had been installed by a cowboy, none of the terminations were labelled, and a good fraction of it simply didn't work.

At that price they should have gotten cabling installed by Vestal Virgins during the dark of the moon to the sound of flutes and cymbals.

Is it really that tricky?

As for cowboys, while reading this installment of BOFH I had an epiphany: that's why there are endless security problems, such as the CookieMonster just lately reported. Too many people involved in the programming & systems field are themselves cyber-cowboys for whom any old kludge will do the trick.

Yee-haw!

Can we have a new Paris icon please, mit Stetson hat?

je s'amuse

It has endlessly amused me the last few years to witness El Reg readers swallowing the Paris party line, viz. that she's a dimwit and an airhead of the first water with nothing more on her mind than spreading her legs.

She's very successfully created an airhead persona for public view, and she's making a lot of money out of that myth. In fact, she's a lot smarter and a lot cannier businesswoman than she ever lets on.

Good for her!

No. 10 Downing just called

Cabinet has decided that the Higgs boson exists.

Years ago there used to be a very funny screensaver for Win95 that allowed you to specify different types of "elementary particles"": bosons, tachyons, morons, onions, etc. I wonder what ever became of it?

How is it with older lens series?

There's an enormous amount of older Pentax glass out there (after all, Pentax is fundmentally an optical company that builds cameras in order to sell lenses), so anyone with Pentax film equipment (like me) is acutely curious just how convenient it is to use those classic older lenses.

For example, if I use an old SMC or SMC-M lens, will the camera still offer aperture priority, automatically setting the exposure?

http://www.mosphotos.com/PentaxLensesExplained.html

lists the various lens series Pentax has produced with bayonet mounts.

The Origin of Geeks

Naked, exposed to hard UV in space, dehydrated, suffered genetic damage, but lived and laid eggs. Their parents, that is.

Is a mutated tardigrade a tradigarde?

I amuse myself far too easily.

Next week: The Origin of BOFH's.

Speaking of 42

That's why the PostScript encapsulation of a TrueType font file is called a Type 42 font: it's the solution to everything.

Really. Don't believe me? Phone Adobe.

Some things you just can't make up.

@ John H Woods re the Kama Sutra

That boring old thing?

I made the mistake of buying a copy of a complete translation of the whole shebang, a modern translation, not the Richard Burton one from 100+ years ago that chastely pulls its punches and is mistranslated to boot, and...well...well...it's boring as hell.

Buy a pop-up Kama Sutra and put the baby to sleep!

Paris, just to annoy the anti-Paris brigade.

Something's very, very wrong

When a stupid municipal council, tasked with mundane things like pumping sewage and collecting garbage, is allowed to utilize a law (supposedly) intended for investigation of extremely serious crimes.

Where's your separation of powers when you need it?

Another bravo

But why is it that the only news outlet I trust to get these things straight is El Reg? Has mainstream journalism fallen so low you simply cannot trust it any more? [Answer: yes, it has indeed.]

Somewhat analogous to the wisdom of the jury in this case, I often wonder what the state of the world today would be had that idiot Bush and his handlers, instead of pouncing on 9/11 as an excuse to institute a fascist police state, announced "The three thousand deaths at the World Trade Center are martyrs to the cause of civil liberty. That terrorists have abused these liberties does not justify destroying them."

One can only dream. And cry.

Highly un-PC sexist bewonderment

Why is it that the biggest asses, the most vindictive petty dictators, the most awful administrators that NuLabour has foisted on the hapless, suffering British body politic always seem to be women?

My guess: because these ladies have reached positions of importance solely because of their sex, not their qualifications. They are unqualified for the responsibilities they have, they are in over their heads, they know it, and they fight back tooth and nail against anyone so bold as to point out their incurable shortcomings.

Yes, I'm a horrible wicked unrepentant sexist, but I'm going to buy Sarah Bee a bustier made of purple emu skin, so I'm immune to retribution.

Now where's my emu skin overcoat?

Parkinson's Law and the rising tide

Parkinson's Law said that you rise to the level of your incompetence, hence most managers are incompetent to handle the work their position entails.

But what Parkinson didn't foresee was the effect of technological change. People not yet at their level of incompetence in the classical Parkinsonian sense have been overwhelmed by this rising tide. Thus, in addition to the normal Parkinsonian incompetents, you have a secondary class of incompetents, generally at lower levels in the management hierarchy.

I saw a small example of this when working: a woman whose background was "office supervisor" and who had risen very close to her level of incompetence via normal promotions. The legal underpinnings of her public sector job became more complex: they demanded the calculation of an average and as she had at best a not-very-good high school education, she was now at sea, unable to perform that simplest of statistical calculations.

She hadn't changed but her job had; instead of being just below her level of incompetence, she was now well beyond it.

I can't help but suspect that this is what's happening in UK government: functionaries whose performance just 15 years ago (pre-web days) was fully competent have become utterly incompetent. You say "full disk encryption" and they drool in bepuzzlement. Indeed, this seems to have happened to politicians as a class: they are now responsible for issues they haven't a clue about except what they read in the Daily Mail. The situation is exacerbated by NuLabour's dismissal of experience, education, etc as "elitist nonsense, my opinion is as good as that of someone who's studied these problems for decades."

Maybe.

Words belie pictographic efficacy

The whole point of iconographic signage is that it's language neutral. In theory, even a Bosnian trucker will understand it.

But when an icon can't be reliably understood without wordage, it's a useless icon. That the winners had to be text-enhanced with "Elderly people" is de facto evidence that the iconographic version Will Not Work.

As someone approaching git-dom, I'd personally favor "Old Gits" with no icon. Two syllables is much more quickly understood than the five in "Elderly persons", "old" in particular being much, much more quickly understood than "elderly." Never mind that this increases my risk of martyrdom at the hands (wheels?) of a Bosnian truck driver who understandeth not the Mother Tongue.

I'm faintly surprised no one proposed the prototypical fossil, a trilobite, as an appropriate icon.

Cynicism

"Web developers turn to Flash, or some alternative such as Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in, for several reasons, including rich graphical effects..."

ITYM "irrelevant graphical effects"

How'd this happen?

Cause A: [assuming anyone in govt actually cares about the loss of the domain name] These days, the task "renew domain name registrations" is an important one that can't be allowed to fall through the cracks. At the same time, senior managers are generally technological idiots and even if they are aware such a task exists, think it's small enough potatoes to palm off on their secretary, the secretary's dog, a consultant involved in setting up the domain in the first place, or some similarly unsuitable position. Said person (or dog) leaves, dies, is transfigured, or attains a hypostatic union with Christ and suddenly this important task is an orphan.

Solution for directors of all organizations: pose a single question to your CTO or CIO: "who is responsible for renewing domain registrations?" If they can't answer it on their feet at a meeting, fire them on the spot. A few well-publicized firings for cause and the rest of the universe of CIO's and CTO's will quickly fall into line.

Cause B: the renewal process itself. Is there no grace period for reclaiming an expired domain name? Seems to me that when a domain expires, after, say, 3 days, an email goes out (and the price goes up €20). After another 10 days, a phone call goes out (and the price goes up another €100). After yet another 10 days, a snailmail letter goes out (and the price goes up yet another €200). And only after three notifications "your domain has expired, better renew it soon, it goes on the public market after 33 days!" and 33 days total grace period does the domain get released. Key thing being that once it expires, it stops working even with warnings going out, but it's reserved for its original owner.

Would this be so difficult? Just like parking meters that give a 10-minute grace period during which you only get warned, not ticketed.

Or am I merely demonstrating my total ignorance of how things already happen?

I wonder if Paris gives grace periods if "renewal" doesn't take place immediately after "expiry"?

@ Charles

"the materials needed to build the actual instrument (in this case, ancient Greek wood) are no longer available"

Oh, come now. I'm willing to bet a jelly-filled donut that every material used in ancient Greek epigonions is still with us. I doubt any of the tree species used have gone extinct, though thanks to goats and bad agricultural practices, they may be much less numerous now than then.

The devil is in the details: what wood was used for what part? A well-made violin of today will be made from a number of different woods, each one chosen for its suitability for certain purposes. There is no reason to think ancient Greek luthiers were one iota stupider than modern ones, but I'd be surprised if there is a surviving description that goes into such detail *and* can be understood fully.

And what about the strings? What were they made of? Their manufacture was probably a specialty of a few people, or perhaps a few villages or certain quarters of a few cities, and there may have been trade secrets now long lost when verbal transmission was interrupted (or the market for the strings dried up).

And so it goes. Though we have a few images of epigonions, none will reveal how thick the walls were or any internal detail. Thus, in spite of the availability of materials, the design itself is lost. Any purported reconstruction is really just a stab in the dark.

These researchers would have done better to have commissioned a luthier or harp builder to build an instrument that looked like the extant images, and to fiddle with it until it gave reasonably good sound, and let that be called "the sound of the epigonion", not some stupid computer synthesis.

Tux, because for all we know, epigonions used strings of twisted penguin gut. Or perhaps they were stuffed with penguin feathers.

Why does this not surprise me?

Corporations are evil.

When they head off to work, the people running corporations leave behind ethics, morals, and the distinctions between right and wrong and good and bad.

Why do corporations act in ways that no one except a truly evil person would act vis a vis their meat-friends? Why do men and women who help old ladies across the street, give candy to children, and pet dogs turn into totally amoral jerks in the office?

It may sound like another silly RW fantasy, but I begin to think that the law should stipulate that corporate directors and senior managers, lawyers, bean counters, and marketing people are psycho- and sociopaths whose guilt may be presumed. Appropriate warning symbols tattooed on their foreheads wouldn't be amiss.

Google makes a big deal about doing no evil, but then pulls a stunt like this. ¿Didn't *anybody* in charge point to that clause, kick the lawyer responsible in the nuts, and say "that's WRONG"? Doesn't anybody at Google care that this happened?

I don't like Google one bit. When they took over blogger.com, it didn't take me long to decide that I didn't care to be a appendage of the googleplex and delete my blogs and my account, as well as blocking google cookies. For all their protestations of innocence, they're nothing more that what Phorm would like to be and do nothing more (or less) than what Phorm would like to do.

"Name, address, gender"

It amuses me to see "gender" used as a euphemism for "sex" once again. I wait with bated breath for someone whose first language uses a non-sexual gender system to reply on an official snoop-o-form "sentient organism."

Homework essay questions: how thin is the line between PC and sheer prudery? Is there a line at all? Does Jacqui Smith wear crotchless knickers? Who in the current government is the resident Mrs. Grundy?

Comment intelligently on these questions and point out any connections between the situations they address.

@ Stephane Mabille

Weren't the Vikings Norse forced to leave home because Norway has so little arable land?

What with the plains of northern Europe close at hand, the Danes didn't experience the same land pressures.

Re: Support its own weight...

There's a technique for building arches, domes, etc that requires no centering. Two famous examples of this are the enormous adobe banqueting hall (ruins thereof) at Ctesiphon, a relic of the Sassanian empire iirc, and a huge immigrant reception hall on Ellis Island in New York with quite shallowly arched ceilings.

Scientific American had an article on this 10 or 20 years ago that's worth looking up if you adore novel construction techniques. I can't say just *how* this technique could be used the the HP HouseJet, but it demonstrates that "centering is necessary" is a falsehood.

The dome of the Duomo in Florence, erected under the supervision of Brunelleschi, exemplifies another method of erecting domes without centering.

Re: No, ebay is FAR FAR worse.

Glad to know that I'm not the only one whose carefully crafted Ebay search string now returns incredible quantities of crap I Do Not Want.

I wonder if there's a natural corporate life cycle to online enterprises. Someone with brains gets a good idea and implements it. Eventually, it becomes so successful that the bean counters and marketing flacks horn in on it and start to make changes that no user ever asked for, actively thrusting such changes down hapless throats, whereupon the original user base leaves and the cycle begins somewhere else.

@ A J Stiles

Criminal case against publisher of games that fuck over optical drives: won't work because criminal law requires an element of intent and the manufacturer didn't *intend* to destroy your drive.Remember the old adage "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

Civil claim would work better, but judging from what's said about British law you might be able to go after the retailer rather than the manufacturer.

Chalk River

The mess about the shutdown of the Chalk River reactors included elements of the conservative government trying to assert control over government functionaries who do not demonstrably adhere to the principles of "straight-think."

However, from where I sit, it looks like the woman in charge of the Chalk River shutdown had fallen prey to the nanny-state health&safety meme "no risk at all, absolutely no risk, not now, not ever, and damn the consequences."

Something to criticize on both sides of the squabble.

(Canada's current government is Stephen Harper's dimwit Conservative party, who are probably surreptitiously funded by American Republican interests. The Republicans detest Canada because the great white north demonstrates that socialized medicine works about as well as the capitalist system and, what's worse, gives the lie to the idea that same-sex marriage signals the end of Civilization As We Know It.)

Paris because she, dear girl that she is, is clearly focussed on having fun while making money and doesn't let these heavy ideas distract her. Would that more people took the Paris approach!

Is "fascism" really the right word?

If you go on a trawling expedition through dictionaries for "fascism", the definition turns out to have two faces: a political one and an economic one.

The political one is common or garden variety totalitarianism, and there's little in that respect to distinguish fascism from any other totalitarian system. The economic aspecty is the distinguishing feature of fascism: the affairs of the state and of business & industry are integrated into a nearly seamless whole. A reminder that Latin "fasces" refers to a bundle of rods bound together, as carried by Roman lictors before important personages -- and used to this day in the US to symbolize the joining together of individual states into a single country.

Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the current influence of the corporate sector on governmental affairs world-wide is a form of fascism, though admittedly driven more by business interests than by politicians.

When we look at neo-nazi movements, we find that they're focussed not on economic integration of the body politic, but on a fairly childish obsession with Nazi ritual and regalia combined with Jew-bashing and other forms of "racial" hatred. They are generally movements among the politically impotent and are mere irritants, not serious political movements.

Ergo, therefore, and consequently I suggest to all El Reg readers to stop calling the neo-nazi punks and skinheads "fascists." If you asked them to define fascism, you'd just be given a stare of incomprehension or, at best, a question about the brand of styling gel you use to keep your Mohawk up and whether it's made by Jews.

In fact, pseudo-Nazis might be an even word.

@ Andrew Thomas, plus comments

AT: I thought "extreme porn" was fairly specific:

AT: (b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,

Okay, since nobody else will stick their head in this particular lion's mouth, let me ask: is fisting "likely to result in serious injury to a person's anus"?

To answer my own question, no it isn't Fisting sometimes results in very serious injuries but these are to the colon, not the anus proper, and are alarmingly often linked with the use of crystal meth. Ergo, fisting porn is not extreme porn.

But I have full faith that Ms. Smith, prudish control-freak bitch that she is, would say "yes it is, yes it is, yes it is, because I say so, oooooh, how awful, how obscene, one pervert inserting his/her hand inside another pervert's bum!"

[I am reminded of the nonsense the Andrea Dworkin crowd ("all intercourse is rape") spewed when asked about boy-boy porn and why it objectified women.]

A more general comment: isn't there some kind of legal principle that you're innocent if the law under which you are charged is so vague an average citizen couldn't tell if he was violating it or not? I'm waiting for lots of people to challenge the validity of these police state laws on the grounds that they are unconstitutionally vague, Ms. Smith's twisted knickers notwithstanding.

Cripey, here I live in distant Canada, and even I despise that woman. <vomit> Where does she get her power from? Does she have a safe full of incriminating pictures of Brown, perhaps? Or did she and the late and not so great Tony have an Interesting Connection? If so, did Dear Cherie take a part too? Now *that* would be obscene!

Anyone else think Sarah Bee might make a much better Home Sec?

Additional legal principle: English law is founded on the principle that statutory law merely spells out what everyone already knows in their hearts to be The Law. Statutory law is a mere dotting the i's, crossing the t's, and filling in the details.

Extensions

Proprietary extensions to standardized software have been a problem for decades. Just read the history of Fortran and Cobol. In the days of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs[*], every company's compiler had features unique unto itself.

The only solution is for those who hold the rights to a standard to stipulate that if there are *any* extensions available, even at the user's option, then the extended version cannot use even the name of the standard. It helps if as many as possible of the details of the standard are themselves copyright or trademarked.

I believe this issue was the crux of Sun's lawsuit against MS for MS's "extensions" to Java.

So the question arises: are the terms "html", "world-wide web", "web browser" and such copyrighted or trademarked? Probably not; too bad.

Note that another issue is a standard that is ambiguous. This can be dealt with by the creation of test suites, as exist now for various features of html & JS. I'm waiting for someone to create test suites vis a vis the OOXML standard that are (a) reasonable interpretations of said standard and (b) break Word. ha ha

[*] IBM and its seven competitors in the big iron business: NCR, CDC, Burroughs, Univac, RCA, GE, and Honeywell, iirc. Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. I remember as a boy having to chase a pterodactyl down the street if I want protein for lunch.

Internet? Or World Wide Web?

Bet it doesn't do FTP either or, to haul up a real oldie moldie, Gopher. Nor NNTP.

Software

I needed to download a Win98 DLL the other day that was causing Firefox to piss itself, and discovered that the MS site no longer offered it for download. At a guess, MS has axed all the Win98 updates and such, never mind that there are still millions of machines out there running it, and that more than a few people have hardware and software that won't run under any later version of Windows.

(Fortunately, it turned out I already had a copy of the relevant version of MSVCRT.DLL.)

I'm perfectly happy with copyrights on software lasting forever -- as long as the copyright holder is under an onus to fix bugs and security holes and maintain update facilities.

No bug fix, no copyright.

And attach the copyright to the source code, so that mantra actually reads "if no bug fix, then you have to release the source code."

Would this make Ballmer throw another chair?

Pedanticism? Or stupidity at the NYT? Take your pick.

Quoting an NYT honcho: " . . . a "small amount" of subscriptions . . . "

I'm speechless.

Yeah, yeah, I know, using "amount" instead of "number" for countable plurals is accepted these days, but it destroys a useful distinction. [I trust that the staff of El Reg is alert for such violations of good English syntax.]

The NYT: "All the news that fits, we print." A bloated, self-important newspaper in a bloated, self-important city whose time has passed.

@ Greg & Chris

Greg quoting some council flunky: "what we are seeking to do is to be more sensitive and responsive to the needs of others in our society."

These are strictly imaginary needs. The thought process is closely akin to the insane health & safety regulations that forbid all interesting activities on the grounds that someone *might* get hurt, instead of accepting that, yes, people do get hurt on occasion and H&S regulations should be limited to the relatively few activities that have a proven track record for causing serious injury. A skinned knee or a wounded ego is not a serious injury. Likewise, calling someone a spokesman does not deny anyone any needed ego stroking -- except for a few insane feminists with no sense of perspective.

Chris: "The manual runs to seven pages because it has been printed in 21 different languages inlcuding braille and esperanto."

Reminds me of when I was working in a public body that annually issued property assessment notices to all property owners in British Columbia and prided itself on having had the information leaflet translated into a large number of languages, including some indigenous tongues with under a dozen speakers left. I laughed myself silly when a gentleman whose name implied he was a Sikh wrote an indignant letter about the paternalistic attitude implied in the translation. To paraphrase, he bitched "you are telling me that someone capable of buying real property is incapable of reading English."

Good point. The PR types and spin doctors were puzzled and could not formulate a coherent response.

Dear Sarah Bee

Get those teeth sharpened to points instead of grinding them.

BTW, I know a rogue dentist who can install hollow canines with poison sacs so you can bite people and poison them. A variety of venoms are available including one which causes the bones and cartilage to dissolve, but the one I like is the one that makes the bitee turn purple and swell up like a balloon.