Re: Just political bullshit

"Most gun "accidents" that this would prevent (eg. the 6year old shooting the 4 year old) could easily be achieved by what we have in our house: a gun safe."

Trigger locks would probably work just as well and be less expensive.

Re: What? It isn't green?

The investors are green; isn't that enough?

Re: Postal Police? OK...

As a general rule of thumb, any government body with the word "police" in its name is not to be taken lightly.

@Steve Knox

"Well, to be fair, he never said from which direction they're approaching the line..."

True. Too true.

*sighs*

Re: So what is the difference between No. 10 and 1600 Pennsylvania

It's like this: UK Prime Minister David Cameron's top adviser is Steve Hilton, whose wife, Rachel Whetstone, is "global head of communications and public policy for information technology company Google." (Wikipedia)

Hilton and Whetstone are godparents to Cameron's oldest child, Ivan Cameron. Who the fuck is "Viscount Younger of Leckie, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Intellectual Property"? Just some dumbass nominated to take the bullets for Cameron and the civil service IP cabal.... Go ahead, ridicule and mock him - that's what he's there for.

And when it says Whetstone is the "global head of communications" is there any doubt that the "communication" which Whetstone oversees, is the "communication" of Google's desires to Cameron, the UK government, and the civil service that actually runs the UK? Why do you think that Google even pays her a salary, ffs? For her tax-accountancy and -evasion skills?

Is there anything here that's unclear to anyone other than the willfully blind or terminally naive?

Re: Torn between them all

"Why do I still have Android? Well iOS started boring the crap out of me, I felt like Apple just were not moving forward especially with the small screen sizes. Windows Phone had too few apps for me, so I bought the Galaxy note. So I guess the open, messy nature of Android actually meant that I could find a product with the general requirements that I have. But for some reason I still want to escape Android lol. Anyone got a cure for this confusion / indecision?"

Yes. Time.

@Nicho

"'Cracking down on violent and dangerous cell phone thefts is important for New Yorkers .' Wow .. I always thought it was avoiding getting randomly stopped, searched and/or shot by police that was important. Oh wait, he means white noo yoikers .. sorry."

Just as a little technical note: "getting stopped and searched" and "getting shot" are not equivalent. Hopefully you will find this out by personal experience.

But as long as you've broached the subject, could you perhaps give me a few examples of people who were randomly stopped and shot by New York Police?

Your ignorance of the economic demographics of New York City is hopelessly racist - although it is in conformity with left-wing stereotypes.This is obviously connected to your idea that only white New Yorkers have smartphones; and your related idea that non-white smartphone owners either do not exist, or, if they do, then they do not or should not or would not mind having their smartphones stolen or that they are somehow immune from crime - and so only white New Yorkers need, want or deserve to have their property protected. That's also quite overtly racist.

A Password.

" I don't have that problem with a password as its always with me in my head."

Most people don't have that problem with a password, either. But most people don't have "a password" - they have a large number of them - unless for example they use their bank account password for everything else, too. (My impression is, that most people don't do that, but I don't really know.) If people use strong passwords, i.e. those not subject to dictionary attacks, then remembering passwords becomes even more difficult if not impossible.

I don't think that carrying a security token should necessarily be more cumbersome than carrying an additional credit card.

@AC Wednesday 8th May 2013 14:45 GMT: Re: But does he ever use them?

You are just the dog shit that people step in when they go out on the street and don't watch where they're walking.

@DrXym

"They're probably more useful in a commercial setting - people fulfilling orders in large warehouses and so on where a HUD might be useful."

That's a good point; that sort of use hadn't occurred to me at all.

It will be interesting to see if their use is restricted to that, however: I personally would expect that there will be jurisdictions that will outlaw these things from being worn in public places, as being far too intrusive into people's lives and activities.And there will be any number of commercial establishments that will prohibit people from wearing them on premises.

(But on a personal note, I need not concern myself with any of my friends wearing them while at my house, or when being with me at all. Because I don't have any friends who would be interested in this sort of shitty little gimmick.)

@ForthIsNotDead: Re: Microsoft have a problem

The idea was that things like folders and file paths would become meaningless; you could just "query" the file system whith an SQL like syntax and get the files you need. Physical location would be irrelevant. But they never delivered on that on. I'm still waiting after all these years."

For the way that *I* work, and store and organize, and access my data, files, file paths, and folders will never become "irrelevant". (I understand that you are not necessarily advocating this and are only pointing out something that was supposed to happen.) What will become "irrelevant" for me is any OS that omits files and folders, that requires "cloud integration", that adheres to the "software as a service" scam, well, you get the picture, I am sure.

Re: Rip-off UK pricing

"The annual plan in the USA costs $49.99. In the UK, the same plan is £46.88 which equates to $72.84, an increase of 46%. Since everyone is access the same software from the same servers, in the same language, why is the UK being surcharged?"

Wouldn't VAT account for a heft proportion of the price increase?

What to buy, what to buy?

"Another alternative would be to buy a DVD player that had a manual release"

You don't seem to understand quite how things work under socialism. It's not like people can walk into a well-stocked store like you can and choose from a selection of similar but different goods: they buy whatever they can get and consider themselves very lucky. In other words, it's not that one day they said to themselves that they need a DVD player, it's that they got lucky and found a store, or a black marketer, who has a DVD player for sale.

Re: Surely that's untrue?

"Err... Are you trying to tell us that Senator Joseph McCarthy was a figment of our imagination?"

Are you trying to tell us that McCarthy had anyone sent to Guantanamo at all? You do know - or maybe you don't - that the only people who went to prison for anything connected with McCarthy were people who perjured themselves, right?

@jubtastic1: Re: Surely that's untrue?

"I think it's way more likely that this is simply propaganda, reported as fact in the Nork media..."

Neither the original article, http://www.northkoreatech.org/2013/05/02/dprk-moves-up-a-point-but-still-worst-for-press-freedom/ or this article in The Register say anything about this being reported by or based on information from the Nork media. The original North Korea Tech blog article simple states that their report is based on "information from the country".

"i'm pretty sure Mr Kim already knows that they're all dissidents."

That's probably not too far removed from the truth, but unlike the Nork regime, you seem to not realize that there is a distinction between those whose dissidence is strictly internal, and those whose dissidence has gone so far as to actually involved actions of some sort.

"probably intended to keep the state owned version of blockbusters in business". I'll assume that that was not intended as a joke. If the regime can starve their people to death in droves, then you surely can't expect them to care what kind of profit the culture industry aka the propaganda apparatus is showing, can you? The regime is concerned about ideological competition and the ability to define "truth", and about the control of information, and not costs and the profits and losses being rung up by the propaganda apparatus. I'd have thought that this would be painfully obvious to anyone...

Extradition? No, sorry.

"I wouldn't be surprised though, to see extradition proceedings initiated by Iraq and other countries once his release date approaches, though. "

You know that he couldn't be extradited from any member-state of the EU to any country where he would be in jeopardy of receiving the death penalty, right?

In addition to the EU law, most of the member-states of the EU have had their own laws about this too. Because it is just so fucking important to the bourgeois conscience that the lives of murderers and their ilk be protected....

Re: @asdf Exacty The Kind Of Situation...

"Say the guys slagging off complete strangers of a trashy tabloid IT website. Class act, the pair of you."

Don't worry your little head about it. Jony and Timmy are big boys now; they can take it. Didn't your mommy ever tell you "sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you"?

If she didn't, then she was a negligent mother. And it shows...

Re: Hailo, is it me you're looking for...

Hai-la, Hai-la Hailo-a.

Guess!

@I think so I am?: Re: ""I would like to point back to my post"

"I would like to point back to my post http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1712081 on the 31st of Jan."

I'd like to point out one of the responses to your post:

"They need to get a clue in the UK as well. For 8 weeks the area I live in was ravaged by 2 scumbags who burgled as many homes as possible. The police knew who they were but were powerless without any hard evidence. The reason they were doing this? They were awaiting sentencing on similar charges and knew they would get jail time. Since all sentences in the UK are concurrent they had a "free pass". If they were caught they would have it added to their charges and it would make no difference to the sentence they were going to get."

(http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/01/30/fbi_arrest_sexploitation_hacker/#c_1712342 -

Anonymous Coward Thursday 31st January 2013 10:31 GMT)

@asdf Re: Exacty The Kind Of Situation...

"Ive or Tim Cook?"

I was actually referring to Ive but now that you mention it, it might very well also apply to Cook. So that's a very good point right there. On the other hand, Jobs' position in Apple was kind of specifically tailored to Jobs and so anyone who took the job was going to be a poor fit at best. But it was necessary for someone to take his place - and Cook it was. Still, whether Cook is cut out to be any kind of CEO at all is a good question and time will tell.

But giving Jon Ive his new, expanded responsibilities does not seem to have been done as a result of the same type of iron necessity that forced the advancement of someone - anyone! - into the role formerly played by Jobs. So while the Peter Principle would apply in Ive's case, it might not really fit the "somebody had to replace Jobs and it might as well as have been Cook as anybody else" situation.

@Suricou Raven Re: In a word...

"Energy. Maxing out a GPU to mine bitcoins sucks up a lot of power "

Yes but could there possibly be a way to reasonably estimate how much extra money each gamer had to pay in electrical costs because of this incident? I can't imagine that there is.

And also, let's be honest, anyone who has, as in the given example, a triple-SLI or Crossfire setup can be expected to be able to afford to pay the extra electrical costs. One could even say that they deserve to take the hit for having been so wasteful of money and power in the first place. (I am not really sure that I would buy into such reasoning, personally.)

But the company seems to have made a legitimate effort to make good the harm done, has not come out ahead in the matter, and hopefully done some good too. (And none of this seems to have been done under duress or immediate threat, either. )

@TeeCee: Re: There is nothing new under the sun....

'"...spies have been scribbling reviews of books...' You mean just like Robert Redford's character's job for the, er, CIA in "Three Days of the Condor'........?"

To the best of my remembrance, that was not really the same thing. If memory serves, the Redford character was employed to read the books and write synopses of the plots, on the off-chance that this or that plot could be too similar to a real-life (in the context of the movie) operation. I don't think (and highly doubt) that Redford's character actually knew any details at all about any on-going ops; as that would have entailed far to much access to be given to a very, very low-level employee.

Re: Congressmen, please keep it to d*ck-sucking, m'kay?

"Well, since most RepubliCLOWN lawmakers are chicken hawks who never served in the military themselves, they feel they're FULLY qualified to pass judgement on what the military needs..."

And where are you sources comparing to the number of Republicans and Democrats who served in the military? Here's mine: http://www.whoserved.com/congress.asp where we see that 21% of the members of Congress have served in the military, and that two-thirds of them are Republicans.

So you support the Democrats because they have even less personal military experience that the Republicans and you hope that they are simply going to rubber-stamp whatever proposals the Pentagon puts forth?

Also, at such times as we have a President who is not a armed forces veteran, who do you want as Commander-in-Chief? LeMay and Patton are dead, after all. And so is Custer, I regret to have to inform you.

And I know about a guy who served, with distinction, in the trenches, in the military and later, as a political leader, considered himself to be a gifted strategist. He wasn't. You can see some pictures of the results of his military insight and the effect that they had on his country by googling "Berlin 1945".

In short, the idea that having served in the military necessarily gives someone any real insight in military affairs is simply stupid. And that should enable us to see who the real "clown" is: it's not the Republicans, it's you.

@nuked

"Google consistently demonstrate that they are outside of the law, due to their value and influence, and unless a sizeable nation slaps them back into place, they will continue to do whatever the hell they like."

And the very surprising thing about this is that they are just an advertising company, for heavens' sake. They are not a company that produces anything that anyone really needs, a physical good of some sort that no one else could produce. They are wholly parasitic on other people's content as ad-bait. Google's £2.5bn in revenue in UK is simply a tax, the cost of which is added to whatever goods and services you buy. It's very much like the operation that those extortionists at ICANN have got: most businesses have to buy their own names and trademarks as keywords simply to prevent other entities from hijacking them.

(And although no one here really cares, I'll point out that this Google tax is a highly regressive tax that affects the poor disproportionately. Furthermore, I'll point out that Google further harms your economy by destroying the value of creative work [of i.e. photographers, musicians, film-makers, journalists, coders] solely for the sake of ad-bait and making it extremely difficult to earn a living from those pursuits.)

@The BigYin: Re: Another PR stunt by MPs

"If they want to stop Google's antics there is a simple answer: change the law. They won't do that because too many MPs (and their pals) also avoid tax by using the similar tricks."

"Similar" does not mean "the same". It's kind of doubtful that the MP's rely on the same loopholes as Google. And even if most of the MP's *do* rely on the same loopholes, it should still be possible for them to rewrite the laws so that they can make Google pay some real money in taxes, while still safeguarding their own loopholes.

And if they did do that, if they did safeguard their own loopholes, while forcing Google to pay meaningful taxes, would you be worse off than you are now?

@Jon Green: Very Serviceable.

"...smell-by date..."

That is a very serviceable addition to the set phrases of the English language.