* Posts by EdwardP

160 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2008

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Brown creates one UK.gov website to rule them all

EdwardP
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FFS

Can you fix the economy please first?

Stop fucking spening money....

Lib Dem candidate admits to unnatural vice

EdwardP
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No...

...it shows that she's human and can be swayed by facts/reasoned argument.

Fuck me it'd be a disaster for our political system of more of these humanoids got involved.

Hull Daily Mail exposes depraved local porncoder

EdwardP
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Lawsuits...

Am I the only one who smells litigation in the air?

Global warming may be normal at this point in glacial cycle

EdwardP
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NO...

...SHIT.

Tories: We will set up a permanent 'War Cabinet'

EdwardP
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We have...

...always been at war with Eurasia.

McKinnon’s mum 'snubbed' by Home Secretary

EdwardP
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Hang on...

"McKinnon's mum earlier told a committee of MPs that her self-confessed hacker and autism sufferer son would rather die than face extradition and trial to the US for breaking into government computer networks."

I'm sorry...could you repeat that?

The USA: A fate worse than death (apparently).

Brazilian uni readmits miniskirted student

EdwardP
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Quite Right.

"and may pursue legal action against the seat of learning for her ordeal."

Take them for every penny they've got, where were the teachers/staff in that video? What were they doing instead of crowd control?

US sees 'hot-tub related injuries' increase triplefold

EdwardP
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Ban it...

...along with horseriding.

Westminster readies 'wave and pay' parking meters

EdwardP

Well this isn't ripe for abuse...

Do these things have a constant GSM connection back to head office? Do they charge the cards immediatly and then delete all the info?

Seems ripe for abuse imo.

YouTube to broadcast Channel 4 shows

EdwardP
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Roughly translates:

"4od is costing us rather a lot just to keep in step with the Beeb, can't we get YouTube or somebody to pay for the bandwidth instead?"

CCTV website recruits video vigilantes

EdwardP
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No...

...potential for abuse here then...

Apple admits third of iPhone calls in New York are dropped

EdwardP

@Charlie Clark

O2 were happy to give me an iPhone without any changes to my tariff.

They did however, throw in insurance, unlimited data, more free minutes than I had before, a dedicated iPhone support number.

It's yet to drop a single call with me, and while the 3G can be a little patchy, I consider it a seriously good deal.

Don't trust Tories on surveillance, say LibDems

EdwardP
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Sod it.

I'll vote for them.

Pity they haven't got a snowball's chance in hell.

Rich people cannot feel pain, don't care if they're liked

EdwardP
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@Sir Runcible Spoon

Nocebo effect? I think we may have been reading the same books :-)

They're not sure but it's a fascinating topic, precursor chemicals detected in the brain have been isolated and attributed to the placebo and the nocebo effect, it isn't all fluff and bunnies, there's some real science in there.

Half the anti-depressants on the market would NOT pass placebo testing today.

You can take patients on courses high morphine and slowly lower them to a saline solution and if the patient is told he is still on morphine they will feel no pain, this seems to work on about 2/3 of people. Then, without telling them, you can push a dose of Naloxone (an opiate blocker) into that saline solution and they WILL FEEL PAIN once again.

The jury is out on the placebo/nocebo effect, but it's fascinating stuff.

EdwardP
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Isn't this a standard pavlovian reward response?

99% of us have a pavlovian reward response to money: a dopamine release. Some of us have the same response to chocolate, some to other drugs. It's not even that surprising, given that the vast majority of us spend a lot of our time working toward a paycheck, if thats not Pavlovian then I don't know what is.

Dopamine is a natural painkiller. I don't see anything groundbreaking about this research, the most interesting conclusion you could draw is that most people are "addicted" to money.

CSI boffins: You can't ID crims from bitemarks on victims

EdwardP
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Lol

"Bitemark identification is not as reliable as DNA identification," explains the study's lead author, Prof Raymond G Miller of the University of Buffalo.

STOP THE PRESS.

Come on, is this news?

Cobain band mates denounce dead rocker's Guitar Hero gig

EdwardP
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While...

...I loved Nirvana's albums and was of course devastated when he topped himself, isn't this a bit much?

Should we remove all of Lynard Skynard as well? Jimi Hendrix? John Lennon?

People die, it shouldn't mean we have to walk on eggshells out of respect for them.

Brown apologises for 'appalling' treatment of Turing

EdwardP
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Nah...

Stick his face on a note and let just call it quits.

Pesticides fingered in UK honeybee wipeout

EdwardP
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So...

"Germany, Italy and Slovenia last year similarly banned all neonicotinoids in response to the honeybee crisis, while French farmers have not been able to deploy imidacloprid as a sunflower seed-dressing for ten years."

...a swift response to groundbreaking research or less money for Monsanto's lobbiests this year?

Scientology seeks to squash anonymity

EdwardP
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"They cite"

"As evidence, it cites "bomb threats, arson threats..."

Wow this shit never gets old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout

Beer drinking model to get caned in Malaysia

EdwardP
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@Steve Swann

BAM! Godwin's law strikes again.

So, Steve, you're saying that YOUR moral framework is the correct one, and that if others don't adhere to it, they should be made to, by force if necessary? Perhaps you're not so unlike those you wish to change.

Ah the dichotomy of Good and Evil. I wonder how many lives have been lost in the name of the Good? Because after all, Steve, nobody fights for Evil.

EdwardP
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@We never learn

Opiates are hard to kick.

EdwardP
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@dunncha

Let's not confuse one issue with another hey boss? That said, I'll bite...

First, at your school, I'll bet it was the same people every week who got lashed. If physical pain was an effective deterrent then Thailand would be drug free right now.

You can't just introduce corporal punishment into a liberal country whose penal system is designed around rehabilitation (yes, I know it does a piss poor job, another discussion for another day), it is the polar opposite of the current approach and the practical implications beggar belief (There are books written on this topic).

Lets just say we did decide to bring back the whip. Who would administer it? What crimes would be cause for a thrashing? Would children be exempt? Women? Old people? Ill people? Wouldn't some prefer a quick beating to years behind bars?

What form of man does institutionalized violence breed? What effect would the casm between what we teach to be moral and what the government teaches to be right have on the children? If Pavlov told us anything, it's that the message must be clear.

I've been as reserved as I can, but I dispair at your sort. You are reactionary and dangerous. Think about the implications of what you suggest.

When is an operating system not an operating system?

EdwardP
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When...

...Microsoft's involved and Apple's the plaintiff.

Ditching ID cards would save £3bn

EdwardP
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@Not about saving the money

"Government spending is just re-cycling our own money - if they don't spend it on this, they'll spend it on something else, probably equally daft like jet fighters or battleships."

You think so wouldn't you. The problem is we seem determined to hand out the contracts to non-UK companies, so the money actually leaves the economy.

Thales (French) I believe are heading up the ID Card effort...

Docs wire up world's first internet-connected pacemaker

EdwardP
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What...

...could possibly go wrong?

Open-source .NET seeks touchy iPhone developers

EdwardP
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Note to self: RTFA.

Disregard that! You do need to buy the Apple SDK.

Go download Winchain instead.

Brit diplomats' mission to expose Scientology's 'diploma mill'

EdwardP
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Oh...

...these guys aren't dead yet?

Back to it lads...

Government ready to round up opinions on DNA database

EdwardP
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Waste of time and energy.

Don't bother.

The negative responses will be filtered out, and the positive ones will be used as proof that Labour listens.

Fuck 'em. Election please.

Ofcom to start new number mobility consultation

EdwardP
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@John Dee

So it's tap water. Yet they spend money on buying in customized bottles? And you're telling me this is a cost saving exercise?

Meanwhile, in the real world, where people must shoulder the burden of paying for their luxury items, we use a sodding glass.

EdwardP
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Too little too late.

This just shows what kind of an organisation Ofcom is, they've sat still and done little or nothing to protect the consumer over the past ten years, and only when they face the Tory axe do they decide to pull their finger out and do some fucking work.

Kill them, kill them now.

How many other quangos have been and continue doing nothing? Obviously the current government has no problem with these organisations doing fuck all, hell, Ofcom would still be doing jack if not for the recent publicity...

The "public interest" is just an excuse to funnel money into trophy jobs for fat, incumbent civil servants who chose the right allegiances.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smagdali/184117319/

Hain breaks ranks with Cabinet over McKinnon extradition

EdwardP
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@Torture

Very difficult to make it stick when you were crucially involved in that particular bout of torture.

Johnson signs off ID card for UK citizenry

EdwardP
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When I get mine...

I'm just going to use the RFID chip for all the fun things you can do with RFID.

Ride the train for fee, with my jailbroken NID Oyster card.

Let myself into important government buildings with my jailbroken NID skellington key.

Create the "Anti-ID" card. All you need to do is find out the standard card reader/software to be dsitributed to officals, get one, do a little testing and find a DoS/Buffer overrun. Then, think of a fun payload, put it on the card, and now every time an official tries to read the card you're either crashing or executing your payload on their machines.

If they do force us, the last thing I'm going to use my ID for is ID.

German boffins create 'flight simulator for flies'

EdwardP
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THANK GOD.

FINALLY.

McKinnon loses judicial review

EdwardP
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Prediction...

He'll go to America.

They'll put him in an open prison, with access to his laywers, family and friends. They'll feed him well, they'll keep him safe, they'll try him fast.

He'll be convicted and probably won't see a custodial sentence. If he does, he'll probably be repatriated in under a week.

We may cuss and complain, but the US probably isn't quite the ogre we make it out to be. In the past five years, we've gone beyond them in how nasty we're willing to be to our own.

Hey, I may be wrong, but thats my gut feeling.

CIOs get £170k but helpdesk staffers settle for £6/hr

EdwardP
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And...

...what about Senior/Junior Application/Web Developers?

Left out some key demographics there El Reg...

Privacy watchdog bashes UK.gov net snoop plan

EdwardP
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Great, but UK.gov...

...don't give a flying fuck.

All the independant organizations that had the power to stop this sort of thing were neutered and thrown out the window back in 1997, along with personal responsibility and assumed innocence.

We're now in a situation where every privacy group, every newspaper and every watchdog could cry foul, and the gov would just ignore them, or at best regurgitate the same weasel words and rename the project.

Nanny states produce babies. We're too disconnected, too used to being lied to and too used to accepting it. At this stage, we have no power left with which to fight offensive and illegal legislation. Whats worse aparently the majority don't care or know enough to want to.

If we couldn't prosecute or depose when we had admissable evidence of them: lying, stealing, dodging taxes, condoning torture and knowingly violating EU human rights bills; what on Earth makes you think a few jumped up watchdogs are going to have the slightest impact? As we've seen, for these people it's not about what's right, it's about manipulating the system (breaking it if needs be) to get what you want. Morality doesn't get a look in.

We let them get away with murder, and then we did it again...and again. It's not just Labour either, it's all of them. For them this is now the norm. What comes next is all our own fault.

Cameron condemns Tweeters as tw*ts

EdwardP
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Meh.

He's still an utter utter wanker, but well played.

Firefox 4.0 flashes lusty leg at Windows lovers

EdwardP
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More...

...pointless UI "improvements" at the expense of speed and stability.

Watch the market share dissolve.

Spotify: iPhone sideloads for £120 a year, unlimited

EdwardP
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@Monopoly questions.

No it certainly wouldn't.

Take this to the monopoly commission and they'll tell you to buy a different mobile. iPhone doesn't have the marjority market share, it doesn't even come in second.

EdwardP
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Get out of jail free...

I jailbroke my iPhone 3GS. They're a fantastic bit of kit, but to get to anything like the full potential out of it, you need to jailbreak it.

Anyway, I use Spot (In Cydia) for Spotify on the iPhone and I bloody love it.

Average UK broadband just over half advertised speed

EdwardP
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FUCKING FINALLY.

This is exactly what Ofcom is for. They know they're for the chop and have decided start doing the job they were originally created to do.

Regulators need to be aggressive, they cannot take the "working with" the company stance, they can't consider the companies in market they regulate "clients" or "customers". They are there to weild the big stick and protect the consumer, not to work with marketing deptartments to make sure their lies have the small print required to make them legal.

There can be no more accepting money from the companies they're supposed to be overseeing, because in the private sector it's called bribery.

Also somebody explain exactly what the fuck they need branded water/mousemats etc for...

Fuck em, get rid of the useless bastards. Too little too late.

Labour MP quits over McKinnon extradition vote

EdwardP
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Grrr.

He isn't fucking quitting though is he? This wasn't an incensed walkout, it was a shoddy attempt at making his run-of-the-mill retirement hit the front pages. Is he giving up his resettlement bonus of nigh on 50 grand? Fuck no he isn't, man's gotta eat...

This whole affair illustrates the complete betrayal of the parliamentary pricipal that has taken hold of this system. I don't give a flying fuck about Gary McKinnon (although he should be tried here), he's a bloody idiot who broke the law and can't face the consequences, that we know. But the idea that 74 "honerable" members could change their "opinions" on such a fundemental issue shows that at best we're ruled by mindless automatons, or at worst scheming, crooked individuals whose personal beliefs (or those of their constituency) don't even begin affect their decision making.

I would hope for mindless automatons, but their masterfully adept manipulation of the expenses and tax system, coupled with the fact that no other parliament in living memory has sat for this little time, seems to suggest they're nothing more than a bunch corrupt, workshy charlatans who lack even the basic moral fibre required to put the country they represent before a country who refuses point blank to ratify the very treaty under discussion.

The implication is that one US citizen, is worth more than one UK citizen. With this decision, our rulers have now made it policy. Policy, that because of their previous cowardly behaviour, is backed up with the highest level judicial precedent.

We threw one of our men to the wolves. A blood sacrifice in the name of our special (read: non reciprocal) arrangement.

A bunch of spineless, self righteous, lying scumbags. The fucking lot of them. To. a. man.

And don't get me started on Tony fucking Blair's thoroughly demeaning appearance on the Catherine Tate show (wank). Is there where we are now? Ex-Prime Ministers trotting out painfully overused catch phrases on formulaic BBC3 comedies? Is this how you're going to restore confidence in our obviously broken political system?

And somebody had the nerve to mention morality. Fucking hell.

AT&T blocks 4chan, home of weird smut

EdwardP
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No...

4chan is currently under attack by a ACK DDoS attack.

The general principal: The attacker sends a SYN packet to Target A. This packet has a spoofed source address, pointing to Target B. Target A picks up the SYN request, and responds it it with an ACK packet. The ACK is sent to the spoofed source: Target B. Of course Target B didn't send the inital SYN, so it returns a RST to Target A (who is expecting a SYN-ACK). Inronically, some classic DDoS protection rules will filter out RST packets, causing Target A to send multiple ACK packets, making the DDoS more effective.

So you're getting two DDoS attacks for the price of one, and Target B has no idea who the REAL attacker is.

AT&T (and others) didn't shut down 4chan to censor it, they did it to protect 4chan itself and, more importantly the unknown Target B.

PC repair shop caught trying bank fraud

EdwardP
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What?

"He called over a colleague to view the images. "

How do they know this? Was their software recording audio/video as well? If so then it's verging on an invasion of privicy and is almost certainly illegal.

Firefox 3.7 swivels glassy eye

EdwardP
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@Anonymous Coward

I'm glad you choose to pick up on that, and I also like how you backed up your assertion with reasoned argument...oh, wait...

Ever used ASP.NET? Or did you just Google it and then execute a perfect kneejerk reaction to the word "Microsoft"?

EdwardP
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Grrrr.

Fix the fucking bugs you introduced in 3.5 and then we'll talk.

Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but most people don't want glossy bloody buttons. They want a simple, stable, low footprint browser that can be trusted not to eat more RAM than most video games.

At the moment my Firefox is using 340mb of RAM.

Visual Studio 2008 with a BIG ASP.NET project and a class diagram open is using 185mb.

This should be totally unacceptable. 5 years ago we had browsers that operated better than this, and before you say it, no, it's not because the Web has evolved; Geko itself is an compliant and lightweight rendering engine, all the problems are with the UI.

In my opinion Firefox needs shooting. It should be totally rewritten, this time with performance in mind.

It is no coincidence that large chunks of the laptop/netbook market are now moving toward cheaper, lower spec machines.

With Moore's law in trouble, people know it's not about raw power anymore, it's about targetted performance (as in, buy what you need, not want), portability and ease of use.

I'm not going to get into a rant (today) about the general sloppyness that has crept into software development, but it's a trend that WILL reverse, and if the key players don't fill the opening gaps, others will.

Bank fined £3m for data loss

EdwardP
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Interesting...

I wonder how innuendo could possibly affect the kind of innocent children this was designed to save.

The whole point of innuendo is you're not explicitly saying anything naughty, you're tricking the listener into making the connections themselves, connections that your cotton-wool encased kids couldn't possibly make with their tiny uncorrupted minds.

EdwardP
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AHHH: MODS

Wrong article :(

Please delete last message, I'll put it on the correct story.

Watchdog bites Mattesons saucy sausage ad

EdwardP
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Interesting...

I wonder how innuendo could possibly affect the kind of innocent children this was designed to save.

The whole point of innuendo is you're not explicitly saying anything naughty, you're tricking the listener into making the connections themselves, connections that your cotton-wool encased kids couldn't possibly make with their tiny uncorrupted minds.

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