"its 6 years later and she's still fine"

Ah yes but she has to die sometime and cancer has pretty good odds

Re: Can anyone tell me

"Why do Psychics need to advertise and use TV?

Surely they can just broadcast their shows telepathically to everyone"

I always thought that if I needed a psychic help line, they should already know and would ring me

I'm still waiting...

Re: Homeopathic remedies?

"Are these also included in the ban?"

Yes along with bibles, korans and all other junk purveyed by people and their imaginary friends

Re: Finally!

I saw this on the Holy Grail

Bedevere: What makes you think she is a witch?

Peasant: Oh, she turned me into a newt!

[Bedevere gives him a disbelieving look]

Bedevere: A newt?

Peasant: Well, I got better.

Peasant Crowd: Burn her anyway!

Re: We seem to be ramping up for war with Ecuador...

"Wouldn't we be lucky if we could get our local plod to do 100th as much when we had a real complaint..?"

Couldn't get the local police interested when my house was broken into which in my eyes, is a worse crime than not wearing a condom.

Re: Abducting a UKUSA Citizen

"With respect to the Aussies, Assange hasn't contacted them for assistance, so they aren't going to do anything."

Australia is Obama's bitch.

Australia has a history of selling out it's citizens to the US.

Assange would be better off booking a flight straight to the US. He'll still end up in the same location but he'll save 20 hours of flying.

Re: insurance problems and texting

"1) There's these old farts here who are completely oblivious. They drive 10MPH under the speed limit in town, and about 20MPH under on the highway. At stop signs, they'll look if an intersection is clear, then pull out like 10 seconds later (even if by then the intersection is no longer clear!) They pull right in front of cars (then don't try to accelerate to match their speed), change lanes without looking, and so on, completely oblivious to the near accidents they almost constantly cause. BUT, they are driving slow and smooth -- BAM! LOW INSURANCE RATE!"

The insurance company looks at their age and up it back up anyway. Young people are more likely to be in a single car accident but old people are more likely to be in a multi vehicle accident.

"2) I tend to accelerate briskly onto the interstate -- it's safer to have a little extra speed and coast at the end than to find out you don't have enough speed to match the flow of traffic and find a gap. Some jerks will slowly cruise up this ramp, and try to merge into 70MPH traffic at 55MPH, ignoring the yield sign at the end of the ramp. These cars who fail to yield to the 70MPH traffic would get a lower rate because they are not accelerating "excessively", AND would cause insurance penalties to the cars on the interstate who have to abruptly brake or change lanes to avoid the badly driving car."

Yes it might be safer but you can still get booked for it. My brother was once booked for accellerating too quickly to the speed limit. He didn't even squeal the tyres.

Re: "love normally"?

"Wasn't there a Bond villain with attachments for that?"

No It was Austin Powers

Re: TV Tax letter

How do you know that it's not legitimate diplomatic baggage without opening it? What if you opened it and it was?

If Assange manages to sneak off to Ecuador will the UK invade to get him back?

Re: Disable the phone?

Personally is a dumb idea. Phones have a GPS. You could just lock and mute the handset if the speed is over 10km an hour. Ok so can't use it as a passenger or on a bus or train but thats not always a bad thing anyway.

Sending SMSs to parents is just rubbish

Re: Insurance with 'computer monitored driving'

Give it ten years and all cars will have them. GPS, time, current driver and video. Maybe even passive breath anaylizer.

You drive past police wireless hotspots and your car downloads your history to them and the fines are automatically deducted from your account.

And it will all be installed for our safety........

Re: Hmm

"I'm a biker. I'd like to see rear-view mirrors being banned, too many idiots doing their makeup in them. Air-con and heating controls are a flipping disaster, as for the lunatics twiddling with radios and sat navs, jeesus, not to mention cupholders ! Worst of all are those chatting animatedly with passengers, turning around to look at them and and waving their hands in the air. When will all these things get reported back to base ? Same logic."

Yeah lets ban passengers expecially small children cause their actually more distracting than phones.......

Lets ban buxom blondes pedrestrians cause they will distract male drivers. And freaky people too. Burkas... Burkas for all pedrestians....

The world is full of distractions and you can't ban them all. Worst distractions are actually road signs and the bastards keep adding more and more of them for our safety.

Re: Hmm

"Old enough to drive but not old enough to be allowed take responsibility for their own actions ?"

Society as a whole is set up so individuals at any age don't have to take responsibility for their actions. It's always someone elses fault. Someone has a drinking problem so it's not their fault. Someone is a nutjob and murders several people but it's not their fault. Someone fell asleep at the wheel, crashed into another vehicle and killed them but it's not their fault.

Just look at the examples. A thief breaking into a house through the bathroom window hurts himself and sues the owner and wins. Someone jumps off a bridge into the river despite plenty of signs saying not to sues the council and wins because the council should have said why and just saying not to wasn't enough. Just look at all the "slip and fall" lawsuits. Look at all the workplace safety rubbish.

Everything is geared to make it not your fault and then you sue someone for not protecting you from your own stupid fault.

"I actually agree with his prosecution, he was profiting from the piracy, which is no different to selling bootleg DVD's IMHO...

But P2P sharing with no profit is different.. And I do believe we need piracy in the P2P form to convince big media companies to provide content in forms that consumers want, i.e. instantly available HD downloadable content that is able to play on any device..."

This doesn't make sense. Either you support piracy or you don't. Your statement is that you don't support pirates cause their evil but the privateers are good guys.

Yes he was profiting off piracy but indirectly. He didn't host the pirated materials, only allowed users to submit links to where the content was located which users could have done using only Google. This same argument and conviction could be applied against all search engines right or wrong.

Personally I support pirates because thats the only way we are going to ever force the media companies to release the material in the formats we want and at a reasonable price. $30+ for a DVD is a rip off assuming you can even buy the DVD cause it hasn't been released in your country.

If it was left to the media companies, there would be no TV and the only place to see anything would be at cinemas at $50 a head.

Re: Evil pirates of the high seas!

"That's no better! Going without harms the industry harms the industry as much as the piracy does! What possible justification can you have for doing without when it robs poor media producers from their deserved sales?"

Actually they've proved that going without hurts more than piracy. If you watch a pirated movie and you really like it, you may buy it or at least tell your friends about it who may buy it and so on.

Look at Minecraft. They allow piracy because it promotes their product which in turn increases actual sales. If they had prevented piracy, they would not have grown as they have.

Then look at France's Three Strikes rule. Piracy has dropped but actual sales have dropped as well.

As Bill Gates once said "If people are going to pirate an operating system, I would rather they pirated mine"

Re: Engage smug mode ....

"NOW will you all believe when I say we are ruled by 6 ft lizards in human suits?"

I thought it was 6ft monkeys in Armani suits

Re: Better idea

Smokers lungs beats no lungs and an old kidney beats no kidney. When your dying you'll take whatever you can get. If nothing else, it might keep you alive until a better one is available.

Re: WTF indeed

Rich white bloke needs a kidney. Poor dumb kid wants some money to waste. Surgeon has gambling debts. It's a match made in heaven.

Only way it will end is if they work out how to clone body parts. No need for the dumb kid anymore.

Re: Punked fanbois? Not really.

I must be a dimwit cause I can see Apple using custom screws to lock people out. It's not like Apple has any objections to people opening their iThingy up to take a quick look or to mod it or anything.

If nothing else this rumor has given Apple a really good idea......

"how long until we have an iKidney?"

Yeah but he'd have to sell his liver to buy it

Re: Hmm

"Strangely, no cases like this have arisen where the finger has been pointed at an Andriod device."

Android users are not that stupid

Re: *sigh*

Still an idiot. A fool and their kidney are soon parted.

Re: At a guess

"The structure provides a firewall through limited liability. Losing a patent case has the potential to generate substantial costs in damages. Trolls don't want to risk being wiped out by a couple of losses."

Problem is patent trolls don't want court cases cause that costs everyone money and nobody wins. All they want is a sweet licencing deal which they obtain under the threat of legal action.

If it's going to cost you $2M to take it to court and no guarenteed outcome or $1.5M to licence it from the troll what do you pick? This is how the trolls make their money.

The simple solutions is that patents cannot be owned by entities that don't use the patent. Trolls make nothing and therefore cannot own patents

Re: They're already heavily moderated

Some yes but others no. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/04/veet_reviews/

The ramifications go much further. It's not a huge step to make the websites liable for user comments.

Just imagine The Register where all comments need to be approved by a lawyer before publishing. Any sites that allow public comments will cease to exist. No Facebook, Youtube or Twitter. The internet would shrink to a quarter of it's size

Re: Suggestions...

"So? You think that all of his sensitive files were on SERVERS?

Or do you think he'd maybe have a bunch of stuff on PCs and laptops in his house?"

And all the data was encrypted anyway so the whole raid was a waste of time.

"What about Sheldon Cooper?"

I'm sure he's bagged more than $3M already

Re: Hameric-uh!

"Rather surprised the police didn't 'find him' swinging from a tree in the back yard. Crowd of cheering rednecks around him."

Don't you mean cheering corporate suits?

Re: Suggestions...

Easier to have the data stored on encrypted hard drives. The moment it's powered off, it can't be accessed until the password is reentered. Standard OP is to take all the hardware for forensics. As soon as they power up, the drive is unreadable.

I'd also boobytrap the OS to reboot if it detected any funny business

Re: Puzzled

"Leaving aside the apparent overkill by the NZ police in tooling up for the raid, I'm particularly puzzled by their need to beef up their numbers with agents of a foreign power."

The masters didn't trust their lapdogs to do it properly

Re: Don't worry Thorne

Hmmm I must have insulted five artists

Re: @AC

"Careful there, Thorne. You don't want to suggest that parents should interfere with what is, after all, the proper responsibility of the state."

All your children are belong to us

Re: There used to be a time

"Bit of an over reaction here don't you think?"

Not really. They were told they were going after a pirate so watched all the Pirates of the Carribean so they knew what they might be up against.

The large number of police was just in case Kim has a murderous crew with him.

The assault weapons was in case he was armed with cutlasses and cannons

The dogs were there to sniff out buried treasure.

The helicopters were there in case he tried to escape on his ship.

There was also a submarine that you didn't see just in case he was one of those undead pirates who could walk under water.

All perfectly reasonable

Re: @ Thorne Bradley Manning, Credit [to the] US Army

Ummm I didn't say that. It was a quote from the other bloke wearing the tinfoil hat

Re: @AC

And some people do care. It's called parenting and usually happens before the child gets to year 8. Usually these same parents also care about the high scores and get annoyed with touchy feely crap time wasting subjects.

Strangely it's the parents who don't care about stinky sociopath children also don't care about their scores and no stupid high school course is going to change that

Re: Don't worry Thorne

"No it is one of those classes that (in theory at least) teaches life skills like hygiene and social interaction. You know, the stuff that makes you pass for human rather than an animal or an extremely inefficient adding-machine."

You need a class to wash your hands or talk to people??? Sounds like a high school version of an "Arts Degree"

Re: Hydrogen is not efficient at all

"So hydrogen simply makes no sense at all"

Hydrogen makes sense because you can store it. Effeciency is not as important as storage. Wind and solar is not reliable but if you can store the power, it becomes viable as a base load power source.

Battery cars are not viable due to recharge times. Hydrogen you can fill up and drive off in minutes.