GOOD for someone else's environment perhaps.

Deforestation is the key. It's been made by a few people here, but only a minority.

From reading between the smugness in the article: the original paper appears to be saying we 'might' be okay as long as we don't chop down any trees. However we ARE chopping down trees. Thousands of the bastards. Forest fires are natural events (normally) and in areas where they're prone to happen, the trees have indeed generally become resistant and grow back fairly quickly. Deforestation for development/agriculture/burning out the local rebels is a very different matter. Those CAN'T grow back because people are dumping asphalt, farms and airports over the top of them.

So the basic argument that "everything's okay" is only valid if you believe we live in a totally different world than the one we actually do. If you do, then carry on. Just accept you're delusional.

Apple's poor showing

Gotta love an article about the rise of Webkit that manages to rubbish Apple. Aye, I'm sure they're kicking themselves for betting the farm on the right horse.

@ Soruk

"The EU shouldn't fine the government, since that means the taxpayer has to foot the bill. Instead the ministers responsible for this should be forced to take responsibility for their own actions and pay the fines themselves."

..and presumably the taxpayers - who voted the ministers in, or stayed at home/spoiled their ballots allowing other to vote them in - don't bear any responsibility?

Democracy Fail

@breakfast

It's the only choice.

Er, hang on a minute...

"So, Metallica’s drummer’s views about peer-to-peer downloading have clearly mellowed in recent years."

From the statements in this article that's a ridiculous conclusion. The implication in his statements is that this was the first time he'd ever downloaded anything from a file-sharing site (given his apparent surprise at the ease), and he did so in order to see whether or not his work was really being so easily pirated.

The subsequent leap that this in any way represents a mellowing of his views, let alone 'clearly', is nothing more than conjecture. For all anyone knows this has simply hardened those views, unless the author is holding back some other piece of the puzzle.

I'm not expressing any opinion here regarding Metallica, Lars Ulrich, or the legality of the process. But if you're going to infer things then print the quotes that led you to that inference - otherwise you're just making stuff up.

Pointless Euro-bashing

Andy Burnham is an idiot and the meat of this article is sound. But there seems to be an increasingly right-wing Daily Mail-esque smell coming from more and more Register articles these days. One that's made worrying when you consider that:

a) they are generally dressed up as 'setting the facts straight' unbiased pieces supposedly from a more scientific/technical viewpoint.

And b) That with point A being such a useful, informative and interesting service all by itself - there is really no need to inject cynical, sensationalist vitriol into such pieces.

The link to the Swedish bloggers story is a prime example. In the article above it's cited as an 'abortive attempt [by] the European Parliament to clamp down on blogs' - and indeed is supposedly 'just one example of this trend'. Very sinister indeed. Since no other such examples are offered, this one clearly demonstrates the point fully, right? Er, no.

The whole point of the article linked is that as per standard Euromyth template, the row centered around one Eurocrat who'd come up with a wheeze and got a committee to have a look at it. Said wheeze probably involved a couple of big lunches, and may have been a waste of taxpayers money - but it was always a stupid, ill-conceived and completely unworkable idea without any substantial support - and inevitably ended up discarded. The article actually makes a point of how crazily paranoid, self-serving and sensationalist it was to start extrapolating that this was part of some kind of 'trend'. Yet a couple of months on... that's exactly what we see in another Reg article.

WTF?

WTF?

But wait? This makes no sense. A man who appears to have become the face of Murdoch's Sky is attacking the BBC?

Oh wait, no that makes perfect sense. It was probably in his contract when he signed up with a company who's Chief Exec stood up a couple of years ago and made a speech to the industry insisting that the role of the Beeb should be to take risks on new programming with public money - then hand anything successful straight to the commercial sector so that they could cream the profits.

Blame the audience

The fault lies squarely with the hopeless quality of the commercial broadcasters' output.

If you want listeners - give them compelling content to listen to. All these stations to choose from and the only things people are saying they'll miss are a couple of programmed music stations?

This is all digital broadcasters have managed to come up with? It's pathetic.

"Huh? We invested nothing in original programming, made no effort to produce compelling radio, and instead just trotted out cheap programming largely cobbles together to fit either a stupidly narrow 'niche demographic' (which we now claim is unsustainable because it's a niche), or to shoehorn a pre-existing brand onto the air and hope that the country is full of the kind of person who thinks "Hey, this magazine's alright - wish it had an identical radio station"...

"... And it didn't work? We don't understand. The audience must be stupid. Why won't they just buy/listen to whatever crap we throw out there?!"

@Greg Ayres

Good for you Greg. You've saved your £600 or so. I assume that you don't have a mobile phone with a contract then, or that you get yours free. In which case - you truly are a smart consumer.

Of course if on the other hand like most of us you're also forking out an additional £30-£60 a month for a mobile contract in order to make telephone calls to people: then one could argue that you're talking out of your arse when claiming such a massive saving over those dumb (yet generally inexplicably happy) iPhone owners. But I'm sure that's not the case, otherwise you wouldn't be making such a stupid comparison. Right?