I had to say it.....

At least this guy knows where his towel is.

Fascinated By The Domestic Lives Of Others

Nigel, Is that some kind of home made breakout strip, just above the skirting board in the bedroom? (I hope it's not a home made mains splice.)

Whitewash Job, Big one

"..secretly captured more than 58,000 images of students .."

"..50,000 of those images were taken after the computers had been recovered,.."

"..More than 400 images were secretly snapped of Blake Robbins,.."

That is bad enough...... then..

"..report found no proof that anyone deliberately set out to spy on students,.."

"..or that once captured, the images were downloaded..."

"..although the report said none of the images included nudity..." Oh, how do they know that unless the report authors checked by looking at downloaded images???

I'm not sure who is the most freaky here, the school IT people or the report writers.

This is a whitewash job with a big, thick brush.

A 'Community' Solution?

After many years, the Linux 'community' seems to be a well established and nicely working 'machine' that can turn out very good operating systems, and much more.

Why can't they put their enormous combined brain power into developing an audio and video encoding/decoding/storage system that is truly FOSS? Is it harder than writing an entire operating system?

Yes, I know there is Theora, etc; but it seem that Theora is treading on someone's patent toes. Are FOSS supportive lawyers checking patent texts and seeing if there really is a breach of IP with all this?

Why not get together in an organised way and develop the ultimate, free, working codec and give it as a gift to the world. Instead of arguing and worrying and messing about, just say 'sod it, we're starting from scratch and we're going for gold'. Or would that result in 'splitism' and sectarian arguments about what colour scheme the installer should present to the user?

ten years ago

I picked up a love-bug type of infection ten years ago. It's not something I'm proud of or want to remember though.

Just a minute....

"...on the grounds that he had failed to notify it when took his vehicle off the road (SORN)"

Why should it matter if you take your vehicle off the road??

If I take my vehicle off the road (e.g. park it up in my garage for months, for whatever reason), then what harm does that do to anyone if I don't formally tell them? The only situation in which you should need to inform the DVLA or 'prove' anything is if you are using the SORN procedures to claim refund of vehicle tax or exemption from it.

Have I misunderstood the situation in this case, or is there an aspect that I've missed?

Legal Beagles

"Smith wants to see mandatory notification in cases where personal data might have been exposed but not in situations where an encrypted laptop was lost, for example. He also wants to see private investigators who used trickery to obtain confidential records jailed. "

"MIGHT have been exposed" who will decide if it 'might have'?

"ENCRYPTED laptop" what is the definition of 'encrypted'? (I use ROT-13 so it's ok to lose the laptop and not report it)

"used TRICKERY to obtain.." what is 'trickery'? how is it legally defined?

If you thought he situation was bad right now, wait until these ideas get written up as law.

Wireless Mouse and Keyboard

I laughed in disbelief at £70 for the Logitek wireless optical mouse.

Go to PC World and spend £18 on the PC-Line wireless keyboard and wireless optical mouse kit.

It may not be stylish and the keyboard action is clunky (it's slim and small and neat though); but it does the job very well and it's only £18 for keyboard and mouse !!

I often use this arrangement at home with my netbook connected up to a 19" LCD monitor. Apart from the speed of the netbook, it's just like using a real computer :)

scalability is good

"One of the main reasons that we adopted an open source solution is that it gives us scalability,.."

Is this true? If you want scalability then you should not choose proprietary (closed source) software?

Extreme spelling skills- not needed

I don't know how to spell Eyjafjallajökull either, I just copied and pasted from your article into my scareware mail-shots.

The way I see it, I have few competitors on this one so it's a good opportunity.

(I know, I'm assuming that El Reg has got it right, but who would check it anyway?)

Small Beginnings

"...be able to pass power to one another ..."

After the feeding cycle, comes the breeding cycle. This is all a big mistake.

Ahhhh, long term operational considerations

Our automated lethality delivery system has passed all functional requirements and environmental specification testing. Now we are confident that nothing can go wrong.

Pictures, or it didn't happen

ok, ok, I'm leaving.

A Simple Question

I was impressed by the simple question just under the online masthead: "Where Am I?"

It seems so appropriate.

Analyse This

"...the software shall not contain any code that does not support a software requirement AND weakens the security of the application..."

I think the 'AND' should be 'OR'. As originally written, a 'coder' could put an easter egg in the application as long as it didn't weaken the security.

The sentence would also benefit from a few brackets to make things clearer. If they can't get the basic requirement written properly then what hope is there?

British Board of Foolish Censors

"...the BBFC, who both claimed that there was no such thing as female ejaculation (they say its really urination) and that if it exists it's obscene anyway."

(Makes harumphing noises....) I don't know much about sex but I know what I don't like !

"...Funding needed, & soon,"

I misread that :)

Let the predictable jokes begin.......

...oh, .....they already have.

Let the nightmare begin.

"Code licensed under the current MPL can be copied and modified as long as it's then redistributed under the MPL, .."

I believe that this statement is not correct. Please bear with me as I rewrite it........

'Code licensed under the current MPL can be copied and modified and then, _IF_ it is redistributed, must be redistributed under the MPL'.

Lawyers jump onto subtle things like that and sink their teeth in deep and hard.

(I'm sure that Cade does know this and that internally he had a conditional assumption in his mind when he wrote that. However, he didn't write the condition down......lawyer food! )

A question for you all :- What does the word 'redistributed' mean? You know what it means and I know what it means, but how do we know that we both mean exactly the same thing by that word?

I can think of many graded examples which open up arguments about the word 'redistributed' but I won't set them out here.

I think that many large (and small) companies avoid 'Open Source' because of the potential legal minefield caused by interpretation of wording of the various licenses. It's easier to sup with the devil.