Posts by Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face
222 posts • joined Wednesday 10th June 2009 16:46 GMT
Meh.
I was asked in the pub last night how I lived without Facebook.
Bit of an odd question.
I had to confess that there really wasn't that much of a skill to it. You just have to develop a healthy disinterest in pictures of kittens, and what your virtual friends had for tea.
"..going through a speeding camera in Watford and Hull within 15 minutes of each other."
You are Chris Huhne and I claim my £100
Paying vast amounts of tax only equates to a moral virtue if you accept the premise that the State is an inherently virtuous institution.
Re: I wonder how much of the opposition matches mine?
Yup. Single point of failure. It even fails on the utilitarian argument.
@I ain't Spartacus
Blunkett tried to make the argument for mandatory ID card carrying in the early days. There was some serious pushing in that direction, but in the end there was so much opposition.
The ID card and national database was a role reversal of accountability which would have been a significant step down the road to tyranny. It is not the place of politicians to license the existence of the public. It is the place of the public to license the existence of their politicians.
Posted in British bookworms deem Amazon 'evil'
I'm really happy with my Kindle. Agree about the lock-in issues, which is why I haven't bothered registering it. Just buy the stuff from Amazon (or wherever), download it to the PC version of kindle, convert it, copy it onto the Kindle.
Posted in Movie review: Oblivion
As Rich Hall might say...
"He was a drone repair man...
Pretty good drone repair man too..
But then he had a crisis of confidence and wasn't a very good drone repair man anymore...
Then he met a beautiful woman who convinced him he could be a good drone repair man again..."
Re: Can Linus swear in Chinese?
Swearing in Chinese is definitely the future...
Re: Revisionist B*llocks
Well, in the 50s my gran was married with her own income from working as a full-time nurse. The manager of the electric board refused to allow her to buy electric blankets on HP because her husband needed to sign the forms.
Re: Storage for long term conservation?
That's good to know - I've a pair of WD external USB hard disks for that very purpose.
Posted in 3 Brits banged up for £300k VAT scam
They can work out the difference between exports and VAT receipts on a macro level, they're just not sure who's comitting the fraud.
Reminds me of a craze that went around where people were picking up Tony Blair's autobiography and moving it to the "Dark Fiction" section of the bookshop.
Posted in Linksys vuln: Cisco responds
Re: oldie but goodie
Same here. My WRT54GL runs Tomato, does loads of fun things from web usage logging, per-client time restrictions (no midnight Skype for my kids' smartphones) secondary WiFi network for guests, openVPN client/server, variable broadcast power... It might not be the fastest router around, but I'd be hard pressed to part with it.
.. and trust me on the sunscreen
Re: EastEnders
Beat me to it. Zero is the correct answer.
@david 12
The Irish problem is solved?
Re: Bitch
Unpleasant and misogynistic comments add nothing to the debate.
He has been looking a little pasty recently. Maybe at Christmas he could come out and have a game of football with the policemen guarding the Embassy. You know, just like in the trenches.
Not that I don't like to see the terminally annoying Ms Bercow getting into hot water or anything, but I'm struggling with the idea that you can't mention on Twitter the name of someone who's name and photo was the subject of headlines and news articles for about ten days solid.
Posted in Judge denies move to ban ad-skipping DVR
Re: Didn't TiVo get into problems for this
I've had my Sony Freeview HDD/DVD recorder for about 5 years now. It records things in chapters, and usually you can just skip to the next chapter, which co-incidentally happens to be the end of the ad break.
Re: Virgin Media Let Down By Tardy Staff
Yup, me too. I'm currently looking for a new place - I'm interested in keeping cable broadband and off street parking, she wants a garden, the kids are after more bedroom space.
Best way to tell is to look for the little 2.5" circular access points in the pavement outside the house.
Re: Why cull ?
Changes in farming practices:
The 1973 Badger Act.
The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.
The Protection of Badgers Act 1992.
If badger numbers were getting out of control in the old days the farmer would core an apple, fill it with aspirin and roll it down a badger set. Poor old Broc would eat, go to sleep and not wake up. Happens less these days, for obvious reasons.
Re: because, experts claim, the animals spread tuberculosis among cattle.
No you don't. The data is not in dispute amongst anybody who knows the first thing about TB or large animal population data models. What is in dispute is whether a badger cull will help, the problem that badgers are territorial and will migrate to neighboring areas that have been cleared.
The objective of this cull is to widen the scope to make use of natural boundaries such as rivers and motorways in order to mitigate the migration factor.
Re: That's mighty generous of them
I read that as "Give money to Thailand, so we can stop shopping at Costco." Probably a bit unfair.
Very kind of this unelected Spaniard to give our government permission to act according to its democratic mandate.
Posted in Adele's Skyfall poised to fall from sky
I was beginning to worry when it got to the end of Monday and there hadn't been a Skyfall "leak" for the week.
Very Poor Service
I did go into a McDonalds once, but after finding a table and waiting for 10 minutes for somebody to come and take my order, I gave up and went elsewhere.
It's easy to be cynical, but if this tax doesn't go ahead, who will pay for the upkeep on Polly's Tuscany villa?
Re: Oh dear
We took a trip to the black mountain, where someone had thoughtfully painted "English Out" in both Welsh and English across a lovely stone bridge in 4 foot high letters.
It's like anywhere - you get a few people with a chip on their shoulder, most people are fairly sensible.
bloody hell
Someone has got far too much time on their hands
Re: 1 or 2
5. March into your local Blockbusters and give them a couple of quid - they'll quite happily repair your scratched disk.
Re: Apple Schmapple
Mostly application development, business and systems analysis, and a bit of server administration.
And yes, it is possible to install iTunes and point it at a large existing music collection located on a samba share mapped to an external hard disk on a home server. It does (eventually) sync. You can remap things after it loses setting at the drop of a packet. You might even get used to thinking about, and interacting with, files and folders in a way that Apple has decided is best for you.
I just don't know why you'd want to do that to yourself.
In my case, I found the whole experience totally frustrating and ended up installing one of the third party apps available from cnet or similar.
Apple Schmapple
Somebody gave me an iPod touch a couple of weeks ago. Fancy thing with a big touch-screen, I was pretty chuffed.
I have a large music library on an external hard drive, I've been working in IT for twelve or so years, so didn't feel intimidated by the idea of copying some mp3 files to it.
After three days of farting about with iTunes I was about ready to throw the thing against the wall.
Re: Probably just me but...
Round here the cops do use the alerts they generate in real time to catch uninsured drivers.
Re: all this and...
It's not so much the uninsured drivers as the ambulance chasing lawyers, referral fees, and ridiculous hire car arrangements that put up the price of insurance.
Re: @Ken Hagen - Nevermind the gaps.
Fair point, and one with which I hold a degree of sympathy, but it does cut both ways. I know of one person, accused of a crime, and the police used this information to verify that he was NOT the culprit.
@kellerr13
Sadly, not true. The worst of it did not get reported.
Re: Face Book?
If only the Queen knew what was happening to her English...
CA added that RBS's technical issues were "highly unique to their environment".
Can I put my pedant's hat on here and declare that "unique" is a binary term.
I don't know about the situation in this particular area, but the contracting out of school meals has had much the same effect as the contracting out of school and hospital cleaning staff. The whole thing gets done to the lowest possible legal standard so the most profit can be extracted for the company with the contract. Clueless power hungry middle managers work everything out on a spreadsheet and micro-manage the skilled and qualified staff on the front line.
You could fix the whole thing by employing a decent head cook, giving them a budget, encouraging them to shop locally, and sacking off all the professional leeches surrounding the whole process.
Public Servants
The clue is in the title. I believe the wee lassie's father still pays their wages.
Re: "Later today, the Home Office will unveil its plans"
I always think he's got the look of a cabbage patch doll about him.
Lots of reasons to hate TalkTalk
... this isn't one of them.
Eh?
Did I read this right?
Users provide stacks of personal information to an advertising business then complain about the targeted ads.
Weird.
111?
Might be having a blonde moment, but do you mean 111 is the number to dial?
Always thought this was a no-no because in the old days of pulse dialling, the wires would click together when blown in the wind and cause fake 1's to be dialled. (Hence 911 / 999 for emergency numbers).
Posted in Vauxhall Ampera hybrid e-car
Re: Electricity is free now?
Depends what figures you feed it, but I reckon you'd be about a thousand pounds a year better off with a new diesel clio.
(fuel cost per week * weeks per year * years ownership) + price of car
Posted in Vauxhall Ampera hybrid e-car
Re: Not impressed
If you do drive less than 35 miles each day, there's not a lot of point spending an extra £17,000 ish to gain a bit of extra fuel economy.
