@M Gale
I'd like to nominate "intellectual property" as the biggest c*nt of a term I have ever witnessed. A label to classify the most insignificant of brain-farts as if it were Nobel winning material.
3439 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Given they almost exclusively review expensive sports cars I'd say the seemingly meaningless to everyday driving metrics that they cycle through are likely highly relevant to the cars under review and their potential future owners. I'd venture to add that "The Stig" knows a touch more about driving than you so anything relayed of their experience in the cars about handling and performance are also highly relevant.
Truecrypt for cross platform but with the complication that it requires admin rights on Windows to mount the volume. However, for most users, Windows 7's bitlocker should suffice. No admin needed and most people are, unfortunately or fortunately depending upon your allegiances, Windows users at work and likely at home.
Competition policy is about the one area of EU bureaucracy that I'm glad to have in the World seeing how national Governments are piss-weak on it and couldn't give a fuck for their electorate until election time. In the meantime they just cosy up to their big-business buddies and schmooze. It's not anti-democratic (they save that for countries that can't service their debts) by any stretch of the imagination and, if anything, is precisely the opposite.
"We never see a teenager in our shop now, unless it's to rent a game and when they come in you hear them stating, seen that, seen that, seen that and this is with the weeks new releases that have just hit the shops that day."
They could have been to the cinema - old school, I know. Another issue with DVD rental outlets is often the combination of price and time since cinema release and the experience is not heightened by scratched and generally fucked discs. You'd have though you'd just be able to go into a place and get a DVD quality file dumped on a flash drive by now. If you think that'd aid piracy I can tell you that DVD quality USB file vs DVD ripping really is no issue at all. Also, have you ever considered that your business has been eaten by iTunes? I hear the youth use it and others like it.
A normal domestic freezer (think fridge-freezer combo) will easily freeze "heavies" (5% abv) solid in the space of a few hours. These normally run at around -20C. It states it was -25C outside and like not a great deal warmer inside the vehicle especially if he was conserving fuel - seems he didn't really have enough in the first place as idling doesn't use much.
Not everything is as much an issue as first made out.
"Speaking on the panel, Pratap Chatterjee of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (which works out of City University, but is an independent organisation) said that your phone could be used to record and send information about you even when it is in stand-by mode."
Blackberry devices still have removable batteries - the only way to ensure something is off rather than in low power mode and it's a bit difficult to do with no power. iPhone users are definitely fucked.
I've used the high-end Dell monitors before and whilst the picture was very good the build quality was suspect, which is how I imagine they price much lower. Had multiple failures on the different input ports, flickering, sometimes working sometimes not, returned 3 times for replacements and then it failed outside of warranty. Fortunately the only working input was the DVI. It may be anecdotal and "statistically insignificant" but after multiple returns with screen issues on a Dell laptop as well I've concluded that I cannot be arsed with their sketchy manufacturing quality. It's also worth noting that Dell will often replace under warranty with reconditioned items and not new ones which I feel is taking the piss.
I wouldn't be so quick to castigate the investment banks and praise the retail banks as necessary and important in the functioning economy. Investment banks provide the means to have fixed or floating rate mortgages etc. They are the middle men. Their cut may be too big, they may well be utter shitbags, but they are also necessary for the modern banking system to work. It was the retail banks that lent money that could not be repaid on properties that were not worth it. Sure, the investment banks aggregated it, the ratings agencies blessed it like holy wine, and everyone went on a gambling spree. But don't forget who it was that decided (encouraged by "well meaning" Governments) to lend shitloads of money to people with no real means of repaying it in order to embrace the concept of home ownership for all - those gatekeepers at the retail end. RBS, Lloyds, HBOS, Northern Rock etc. If they wanted home ownership for all then perhaps they should start by making housing less attractive as an asset class with associated tax breaks. Or perhaps prevent foreign investment in housing. I suspect that these were encouraged in the past to prop up the market at that point and are now difficult to remove.
Bizarre approval from El Reg, especially after the article contains...
"But except in rare circumstances, that data is dumped out of a phone's internal memory almost as quickly as it goes in. Only in cases of a phone crash or a dropped call is information transferred to servers under the control of the cellular carrier so engineers can troubleshoot bottlenecks and other glitches on their networks."
So it's just fine and dandy-o to dump out all those nice key taps and websites (like banking) as long as a fault occurs? Really?
I call salesman bullshit on a lot of these claims. Real time https breaking - bullshit, why are so many certificate issuers getting hit? That's the route. For Skype etc it's likely a trojan. They'd love you to think they can break the crypto rather than bug the pc, and pay for it accordingly. I guess being legally obliged to hand over crypto keys is just a cunning cover for them being able to crack it all anyhow.
Is it any surprise that such articles are coming to the fore in the run-up to the start of the carbon tax? I predict many more will come out over the next 6 months.
This carbon bullshit is all attacked the wrong way i.e. a carbon tax whereby big users are given exemptions or relief whilst residents get fucked over. Surely cap and trade with caps reducing makes more sense for big business? If you want residents to use less then tier the pricing so that reasonable use is reasonably priced but heavy use is heavily priced. The average daily consumption for a household is something like 18kWh. We use 10-14 including heating and air con usage (depending on time of year). I've spoken to sparkies and air con fitters that have worked in houses using 40kWh per day (on average), that is just fucking nuts. Don't even get me started on the covered shopping centres with no doors that are blasting out so much cold air you can cool down in the height of summer by standing within 10m of the entrance.
I was with his post until he started talking about abandoning the Eurofighter and blathering about making a smart choice like the Australians in buying the F/A-18.
1. It wasn't seen as a smart choice in Australia but was greatly questioned - "if an intermediary aircraft was always a requirement then why didn't we ditch the F-111 earlier" amongst other things. 2. Who knows what electronics they are ending up with as the yanks don't tend to give you their top of the line kit.
3. We already signed up to the Eurofighter, trained for it and have introduced it, ditching it makes no sense unless you can break-even in the used aircraft market - we'd take another loss. As for spares, we make the f*cking aircraft.
4. From what I've read, I'm led to believe the Typhoon shits on the F/A-18.
5. As stated above, the French option makes more sense if an alternative were needed. Smug they might be, but continual animosity towards your immediate neighbours, trading partners and carrier partners makes little sense save for generating a red-top headline. I'm sure they'd quite like the fact that someone was endorsing their decision to go their own way. Hell, you might even forge future joint development sans EF2000 bullshit down the line.
Hayden, have a look at some of the photos out there (flickr etc) that have been taken with the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 prime lens - I think there's even a site dedicated to it. This lens is often touted as a great one for street photography, low light etc. and the shots I've seen taken with it are something special - the advantage of prime lenses. 20mm works out at more or less a standard lens for this format and makes the camera incredibly pocketable. I don't have one but it's one of the things I'm debating about as a carry around alternative to a DSLR, the other being a Canon S100.
I understand that the US political class is full of tossers. I also know and understand how they control their companies to data-mine for them. However you have not explained how a country protecting the data of its citizens against a company or country that will abuse that data is a WTO closed market issue. That is simply disingenuous bullshit.
Microsoft need to look up the term disingenuous. It has everything to do with security - by keeping them within the confines of your own legal system you can ensure that some numpty like MS losing or revealing them when inappropriate gets absolutely smashed. How on earth is forcing sensitive private data to stay onshore under your legal system rather than ending up in the third World a WTO breach? This is about the first thing I am totally in agreement with that the Government has done and I hope they tell them to "go get fucked".
"He reportedly "ignored" the warnings that the shark was close to the shore. Michael Cohen, 42, lost one leg in the attack and his other leg was severed below the knee."
I've never understood the logic of people who ignore such warnings especially when they are in foreign climes being told by the locals. Still, won't do that again will he?
Indeed, it's great to see the regulator give its tacit approval to the ISPs to totally fuck over their clients by no doubt introducing ever more filtering post contract signing with the "market" able to sort things out. Great. It's just so easy to move ISPs when most want a 12 mth lock-in. Looks like there's still hope for the smaller players offering rolling monthly contracts on the basis of not being total arse holes and actually offering a service. Doubtless they'll end up getting squeezed out of existence by the vested interests. Colour me sceptical.
Oh no silly it's not a tax, but you just pay more for your compulsory purchasing of energy than you otherwise would to promote bullshit wind power. If something is essential to your existence, and power is, then any price rise forced upon it by Government to subsidise something so fucking worthless as wind power is a tax.
"It's like their house is on fire and they're arguing about how it started instead of calling the fire brigade"
Disingenuous in the extreme. The fire brigade can undoubtedly fight the fire although perhaps not defeat it. It is highly questionable whether raising the cost of electricity or general taxation will achieve the same for climate change. Utter shite.
I'm taking global warming very seriously - I've just had two new split system air conditioners fitted to my house. No way I'm sweating my arse off indoors in summer.
Agree with yours and respondents points about the save the planet bullshit. The concept flies in the face of the will of nature. If we screw the planet up we'll be taking ourselves out of the equation so something else can prosper.
"And you talk about 2C warming in 100 years as if it represents something insignificant..."
And you haven't been here for the last several hundred million years so you don't know that it isn't a reasonable natural occurrence.
The point is, for all this climate change carbon reduction malarkey to make a difference, it has to have been us that caused it. If it wasn't then we're fucked anyway so no point taxing yourself back into the stone age. If you want me to live the rest of my life under oppressive taxation and high energy costs you'd better prove that: 1) It's us causing it, and 2) Your solution makes a difference other than removing taxpayer wealth. Otherwise "no deal".
Man made pollution of the water and land environment (think industrial waste and mining) is a different matter. That's provable and shitty.
It is certainly bullshit. Although not a Nikon user I sometimes download my Canon firmware updates from the EU site, sometimes from the AU site and sometimes from an English language version of the JP site. How on earth are they going to region lock it? Serial numbers? Purrrrlease. They'd instantly lose all of their professional users that would be fucked over in the process. A price not worth paying.
On a separate matter the loss of warranty is not entirely FUD. I would much rather have a 12 month warranty from the manufacturer than from a store (despite reputation) that is still more likely to go out of business and also needs to get the expertise from somewhere - local authorised agent maybe? The best that can happen is it makes the manufacturers have a rethink. Despite the supposedly higher prices I managed to get a 5D MKII with lens cheaper at launch in JB Hi-Fi than anywhere I could find in the UK (genuine local stock in each location).
Exactly. Fords and Holdens only became 5-star safety rated in the last few years along with the fitting of standard safety measures that Europeans have taken for granted for about a decade. A 2010 Ford Falcon XR6 doesn't have any rear airbags. Fuck the passengers eh? I even remember a friend buying a new Toyota Corolla locally in 2007/8 and being told ABS was an optional extra. Local safety standards, oxymoron.
"Permanently screwing up large areas of the countryside is a no-no in my book."
We don't get tidal waves or suffer massive earthquakes and I would also hope that we wouldn't be building 40 year old nuclear reactors and surrounding containments. I have very little issue with *modern* nuclear energy and would much prefer that the existing stock were replaced by it rather than inevitably allowed to go on past their use-by dates.
Size in model number is pretty much standard these days and easy to discern.
More important in these times would be the power rating and standby usage (which should be low in EU). Some of these TVs will be like storage heaters. The 65" VT65's figures are 311W and 0.30W respectively (454kWh annually - IEC 62087 Ed.2 measurement method). A 50" model in the same series has 190W, 0.3W (and 277kWh) respectively for comparison.