* Posts by Steve Roper

930 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2007

WD thrusts forth its mighty 3TB internal hardness

Steve Roper
FAIL

And...

Youtube/Metacafe/Vimeo videos, Hulu/BBC/ABC TV shows, iTunes songs, Windows updates, and other perfectly legal forms of hard drive filler. So your snide implication that everyone is pirating everything fails rather hard, actually.

YouTube clasps naked dancer to bosom

Steve Roper
FAIL

So...

when TV stations and newspaper censor or slant the news to an agenda that's OK is it, because it's YOUR TV station, YOUR rules? So if Google, which all but controls the Internet these days, decides to remove your website from their search results for whatever reason they like, forcing you into bankruptcy because you've just lost all your traffic, that's OK is it? So you think big corporations should just be able to do what the fuck they feel like, because they're private entities and aren't bound by the freedoms enshrined in a number of constitutions, right?

Anyone with an IQ higher than that of a flatworm would realise that as an organisation becomes bigger it SHOULD become more publically accountable. Otherwise - well, do the words "corporate dictatorship" mean anything to you? Probably not.

I hope for humanity's sake that you two idiots haven't reproduced.

Notorious Anonymous hacktivists launch fresh attacks

Steve Roper
Flame

Erm...

That'd be people who actually enjoy playing music for its own sake rather than for the dollar signs?

Maybe we'll start seeing real music appearing again, like it was in the days of Beethoven and Mozart, when copyright WAS about protecting artists rather than greedy corporate pigs, instead of the canned and market-appeal-calculated trash-for-profit we're being spoon-fed now.

Steve Roper
Pirate

An answer

You can't legally perform a DDoS attack, because doing so constitutes intereference with a computer system. However, you seem to be a bit confused as to the nature of the illegality. The "botnet" that Anonymous are using is comprised of computers whose owners have voluntarily installed either Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) or Bandwidth Raper (BWRaep). These programs allow you to specify an IP address and bombard it with spurious requests. After installing these programs, people go onto the Anonymous forums and boards for instructions on where to aim them.

Consequently, Anonymous' members haven't broken the law in terms of hijacking people's computers into a botnet - the "botnet" members have joined voluntarily. That said, it's still illegal to maliciously send spurious requests to a web server, so people using LOIC or BWRaep are doing so at some risk to themselves.

Interestingly, the copypigs are also breaking the law by DDoSing torrent sites. However, given that the law exists only to enslave the commonalty and doesn't apply to the corporate nobility they won't ever be prosecuted for it.

Employers get Equality Act info from mega-thick codes

Steve Roper

That's right

The "squeaky wheels" being anyone being sexually interested in their own sex, having a skin colour other than white, and/or lacking a penis. Meaning that if you have a penis, white skin and are sexually attracted to people with no penises, you can expect to be discriminated against as normal with no recourse. You know, like it's perfectly OK to have women-only gyms and clubs but anyone even suggesting a men-only gym or club is a patriarchal misogynist pig.

Spycam school to pay damages for kiddie snaps

Steve Roper
Flame

To Ross 7, Pahhh, and Yet Another AC

The reason your comments have been downvoted, and the reason why people are complaining about the school being let off because of "no criminal intent" is the monstrous double standard that has been laid bare here. We've all known for years that there's "one law for Them and another law for Us" but never before has there been such concrete, in-your-face proof of it.

Consider it: If you or I sold laptops that snapped pictures of children because the laptop might have been stolen, and had those laptops transmit said pictures to our computers, you or I would be looking at hard time for child pornography, and the question of "criminal intent" wouldn't even have been raised - and if it was, would have been ignored in any court. But when a statutory authority (in this case a school) commits the same offence, there's "no criminal intent" and the people involved get off scot-free.

What it establishes, beyond any doubt, is the agenda of political correctness, the politics of fear and the the misapplication of law to create a culture of oppression and tyranny that robs the average Joe of his freedom and serves only the will of the rich and powerful. This is one concrete thing we can point to and say "They're allowed to do it, be We aren't! Why is that?"

Google robo cars drive selves on public streets

Steve Roper
Big Brother

Logical conclusion

What will happen once automatobiles (thanks Mr. Asimov) are as good as human drivers is this: First it will be a luxury option. Then it will be standard. Then it will be mandatory on all new cars. Then the safety nannies will want the option for human control switched off - nobody will be allowed to actually drive a car any more, once it's shown that a robot driver is safer than a human one. And a useful human skill will be forever lost amidst the burgeoning paranoia that will eventually lead us to live in our world With Folded Hands... And Searching Mind.

iPhone makes many Aussies late/early for work

Steve Roper

For once I don't blame Apple

since Australia's government is worse. Australia's daylight saving regime is a bloody joke, and most devices that adjust for daylight saving get it wrong, not just Apple's. With different daylight saving times in each state (which means no less than 6 changes as each state government has its own criteria for setting when it happens, and the fact that the day it happens on changes every other year as one state government or another decides to bring it in early or late to accommodate some event or other - it's no surprise timekeeping devices can't keep up.

I gave up trying to track Australia's daylight saving system in my web app code years ago. Since we're based in Adelaide but our servers are in Sydney, one can imagine the daylight-saving horrors we went through each year, as SA goes forward but NSW does not, and so on. After much hair-tearing on my part, all the timekeeping applications on our websites now go by GMT and I adjust the current time with a constant in my code which I can manually toggle to add one hour or not. And I toggle this constant myself, twice each year, whenever DST happens to fall. It's the only way I can make it work!

Prosecutor won't resign over lewd texts to 'hot' crime victim

Steve Roper

That's pretty average

for houses in Australia. Where I live in Adelaide, $350k is the median price for an average suburban home on a quarter acre block. Many are $400k upward. Thanks to foreign investors and land bankers driving house prices through the roof, Australia is now one of the most expensive places to buy a home anywhere in the world.

UK passes buck on Europe's cookie law with copy-paste proposal

Steve Roper
FAIL

Obviously you don't understand what cookies do

Their primary design function is to preserve state, because HTML is a stateless language. In case you don't understand what that means, let me explain: Each new page load, it's as if you had just come to the site, and any information that you might require from the previous page is lost. State preservation means the browser can "remember" things you did previously on the site, such as adding an item to your shopping cart, or editing a document on the site.

Granted, the other way you can preserve state is with a session ID in the URL, but this is basically shifting the cookie from the cookie jar to the address bar. It still tracks what you do, and with a URL-based session ID the user has no option to turn it off, as with cookies.

So the vast majority web applications, as opposed to mere web *sites*, DO require cookies or some equivalent means of stateful process to function. Imagine using Word to type a document and Word forgot everything every time you flicked to a new document, and you had to start again each time you went back to your first one. Applications NEED to preserve state for this reason, whether they are running on your desktop or as part of a web page.

If that means of state preservation is not a cookie, then it's a functional equivalent like a session ID. So when a developer (like myself) says that cookies are necessary, it's because we know what we're talking about, unlike yourself who obviously hasn't a clue.

Steve Roper
FAIL

I was with you there

right up to your last paragraph, where you advocate forcing webmasters to allow access to every site without third-party cookies. This statement is why I downvoted your post.

Sorry, but - my website, my rules. I PAY for the bandwidth so people like you can read my websites. If my business model (even just the plain fucking ability to pay my bandwidth costs) relies on revenue from third-party advertising, then tough shit. If you don't like it, don't use my site. Nobody's holding a gun to your head forcing you to visit my site, so I'm perfectly within my rights to block access to content if a visitor refuses to allow third-party cookies. It IS a REASON, not an excuse, when it's the only way the website can continue to exist.

Judge Dredd returns to the silver screen

Steve Roper
Thumb Up

@ John 62

I don't believe you got 8 downvotes for your opinion, must be moron day on El Reg. Don't worry mate, I absolutely agree with you. The 5th Element is a plotless, pointless montage of special effects mixed with Milla Jovovich's little white body, and as for the "5th Element" being "luuurrrve", well - says it all really. Anyone who thinks this movie was worth the time wasted watching it is a twit.

Go on commentards, downvote me. Prove your idiocy!

Oz school in homosexual kookaburra rumpus

Steve Roper

Considering

that song has just been established in court to still be in copyright 70+ years after it was written, as Men At Work have expensively found out, I trust this school has paid its $500,000 or whatever licence fee for the right to publicly perform this song? After all, we wouldn't want the original songwriter's great-great-grandkids to starve now would we?

CarderPlanet founder charged in $9.4m RBS WorldPay hack

Steve Roper

String him up...

Hang him high!

Undead Commodore 64 comes back for Christmas

Steve Roper

And...

Run/Stop + Restore should function as Ctrl+Alt+Delete!

Now all we need is an Action Replay cartridge for it. Those were the days...

Pentagon confirms attack breached classified network

Steve Roper

To answer that...

...no, it means they'll blame Gary McKinnon for this latest breach as well and use it as an excuse to ramp up even more pressure to get this evil and dangerous cyberwarfare mastermind extradited to the US for his show trial.

Robocopter combat cargo skyhook chosen by US forces

Steve Roper

So...

By removing the human pilots and thus the need for a gunship escort, presumably the Taliban potting these things with RPGs won't pose a problem for the troops needing what they're carrying?

Energy-saving LEDs 'will not save energy', say boffins

Steve Roper
Thumb Down

Why motion sensors?

Back when I was a geeky kid in the early 80s, I built and installed a lighting control system in my parents' home which is still there and operational. It was actually a reaction to my Dad complaining about us kids leaving lights on all the time.

It used a IR LED / phototransistor setup putting two beams across a doorway. When a person walked into a room, Beam A was broken before Beam B and this incremented a divide-by-15 counter. When a person walked out of the room, Beam B was broken before Beam A and this decremented the counter. If the counter was at zero, it tripped a relay and the light turned off. It thus kept count of up to 15 people in a room (which was more than any of my parents' rooms could hold), turning the light off only if nobody was in it. Obviously you could also manually turn the light off to go to sleep or if it was day.

So no need to keep moving every few minutes, or waving hands or other such rubbish to stop the light turning off. My system was simple and it worked. And that was pretty close to 30 years ago!

Network Solutions pulls widget that tainted up to 5m websites

Steve Roper
Thumb Down

No surprises here

NetSol have been a bunch of shonks from day dot. I still remember the scam they pulled a few years ago, where if you searched a domain on their site to see if it was taken, and it wasn't, their system automatically registered it on the spot so you couldn't then register it through any other provider - you had to buy it from them, and not at the cheapest price either. Not to mention the pushy hard-sell 50-page click-through offers you had to go through just to get your domain name. Or the 6-month lock-in that prevents you from transferring to another registrar within that period, even if you sold the domain name - forcing your client (or you, if you bought the domain from a NetSol victim) to maintain an account with them. Their whole approach just reeked of spam and scam.

My company hasn't dealt with those crooks for years. And it's par for the course that their system was loaded with malware. It fits in with their entire ethos (or lack thereof).

iPod meltdown strands Tokyo commuters

Steve Roper
Badgers

Some people just don't "get" El Reg

OK. Stop a moment. Take a deep breath... that's good. Now think about what you just said.

"...undercurrent of hate towards Apple, Microsoft, Linux, ..."

Which pretty well covers *all* the big ones, no? You may also have noticed that El Reg aren't exactly affectionate towards Google, Yahoo and Facebook either. Now take a good look at the site. 1. It's a redtop. 2. Its symbol is a pissed-off vulture. 3. Its tagline is "Biting the hand that feeds IT". Got any clues yet?

Look, if you want staid, competent reporting about technology, you should have a look at Ars Technica or ZDNet. If you want sarky, cynical, iconoclastic, in-your-face journalism about a broad range of generally (but not always) tech-related subjects then here is where you end up.

So yes, someday soon we just might well end up with something like "Gates, Torvalds worship Satan, Martha Stewart", if such people appeared, illusorily or otherwise, to be doing anything remotely resembling that. Wouldn't surprise me at all, because it's the sort of thing they do here. That's why BOFH is here and isn't likely to go anywhere else. Because it's what El Reg is all about.

NASA 'nauts wrap ISS pump job

Steve Roper

I would imagine

that it's astronomical.

Craigslist 'killer' kills himself

Steve Roper
Grenade

Good to see

that the good ol' pitchfork-wielding witch-burners are alive and well, judging by some of the cretinous comments here. When I see people carrying on like that, I like to imagine their faces when it's their own innocent wives/husbands/children on the chopping block. Or even themselves.

I wish that yoinkster and the two ACs above who think that this guy's fate is tough shit would find themselves in the slammer charged with paedophilia or something. You're innocent, I'm sure, but hey, who gives a shit?

Yes, idiots like you are why we have no fucking freedoms left.

Hackers spoof car warning system

Steve Roper
Boffin

All of you

who think there's no way to get power from a stationary source into a rotating object have obviously forgotten (or never learned) about how commutators and brushes in electric motors work...

Blackhole your malware

Steve Roper

What about fast-flux malware?

While I'm sure that malwaredomains do an admirable job, it's pretty certain that there's no way they can capture all of the fast-flux domains used by modern botnets. When you have 20 million domains like dlxfrglh.com and orutyerou.com and so on, the blacklist becomes huge, unwieldy and seriously impacts network performance.

I know, because I tried this a couple of years ago, and Internet access slowed to a crawl. In the end, I simply ended up bit-bucketing anything to do with China, Russia, and most of Eastern Europe - because on the odd occasion when we did get infected, it nearly always came from, and reported to, one of those places. While I acknowledge that this is not a workable solution for many enterprise-level networks, for SMEs whose business is largely local (and whose networks aren't exactly high-powered) it takes a huge amount off the blacklist, leaving only the US and Netherlands as the main offenders, and that is easily dealt with using a much smaller blacklist. It doesn't eliminate every possibility, but good security practices and proper system maintenance should cover the rest of it.

Oh, and @PC Tech: While I'm as big a fan of Firefox, AdBlock and NoScript as anyone, they are not really a good defence in a network context (no client-controllable solutions are), simply because users can disable AdBlock and NoScript, or in the case of NoScript, simply allow scripts from a suspect domain. I actually caught a few users in my workplace running with NoScript in "Allow Scripts Globally" mode, because they complained it was "too annoying" to have to keep clicking "Allow" in Noscript for each new site they visited! So while it's a reasonable supporting plan to have client-side defences in place, it's a very bad idea to rely on security in the hands of your users!

ISS spacewalkers tackle failed cooling pump

Steve Roper

Brute force in microgravity

would require some interesting skills. Simply bracing your feet against the truss and yanking would very likely send you off on your own private orbit of Earth via simple Newtonian mechanics once the part came free - you'd want to hope your lifeline didn't snap or come loose! So I wonder exactly how they went about applying brute force without risking launching themselves on a slow track to the moon...

Free Android antivirus clocks up 2.5m downloads

Steve Roper
Thumb Down

Android won't replace Windows

for me at least. no matter how much Google plug it. Any OS that allows its maker to secretly install and remove applications, and spy on what I do, will NEVER find a place on any machine owned by me.

Judge halts domain registration scam

Steve Roper

At work

We get letters from scammers like this all the time, claiming that one or another of our domains is about to expire and we should pay $X (usually $100 - $300) to reregister it. Since all IT-related mail comes to me, I just ignore it. Our domain registrar advises us repeatedly and well in advance when any of our domains come up for renewal, and there's no way the scammers can snatch the domains while we have them anyway.

That these scammers pulled $4.5m shows that a lot of IT managers aren't doing their job. Any IT manager with an ounce of nouse should see these letters for the scam they are.

Satnav leaves family stranded in Outback for three days

Steve Roper
Stop

The determination of idiots knows no bounds

Near where I used to live there was a ford across the River Torrens in Adelaide. Now for most of the year the Torrens is a dry creek bed with no running water to speak of, and you could cross this ford without even getting the tyres wet. But during the spring rains in August - November the river can quickly swell into a raging cataract, flooding the ford to a depth of up to 8 feet.

It was a regular occurrence that some wanker would try to cross the ford while it was covered by 6+ feet of thundering water, and had to be rescued by the fireys. Eventually, the council closed the ford - permanently - by erecting road-ends signs (wide horizontal signs spanning most of the width of the road with black and white vertical stripes on them), and no-through-road signs at the entrance to the road, with signs directing traffic to use a bridge not 2 kilometres away.

Those signs may as well have not been there; the idiots would simply mount the footpath to drive around the road-ends signs and cross the ford. So the council put some bloody big boulders either side of the road to dissuade them.

So the idiots then drove INTO THE ADJACENT PADDOCK to get around the boulders. As often as not, they'd get bogged, and come knocking on doors asking for assistance. And the abuse those of us who lived there hit them with did nothing to dissuade them.

Next, the council put permapine logs along the footpath to stop people driving into the paddock. Did this stop them? Noooooo... they started driving across the FRONT GARDEN of the house at the end to get into the ford. Until some dickhead actually used a chainsaw to cut away one of the pine logs so he could get through the paddock.

Then the council simply dug out the concrete ford, returning the river bed to its natural state. Yet there were STILL at least one or two idiots a month in 4WDs who insisted on trying to cross and had to be winched out of the riverbed by the long-suffering fireys.

Finally, the council closed off the road with 5' high reinforced concrete barriers sunk 3' into the ground, running along the edge of the guy's front garden, across the road and then 150' up the side of the road on the paddock side, to where a stand of large gum trees prevented cars from getting into the paddock at all. Only then did these bloody fools get the message.

Yet until I moved away, there were still several cars a week whose drivers would ignore the no-through-road signs, drive right up to the barriers, sit there scratching their heads until their two brain cells figured out there was no way across, and then crank out a 20-point turn to go back the way they came.

And all this, with a bridge barely more than a mile off.

With determined wankers like that on the road, it comes as no surprise at all that this family in the article weren't dissuaded by any mere road-closed signs!

UK privacy watchdog clears Google Wi-Fi slurp

Steve Roper

@spodula

Google *weren't* just collecting SSID's and MAC addresses. They *were* swiping actual data packets from any wireless router which wasn't using an encrypted connection. Imagine if you'd been viewing hotwetsluts.com at the time the Googlemobile passed your house. Google would know not only that the person living at 35 Something St, Somewhereville was visiting hotwetsluts.com but also that you were looking specifically at a picture of Candy Bigtits playing with her pet pink dildo as well! Sorry, but however you colour it, *that* is a gross invasion of privacy, besides being rightly illegal, so I'm in agreement with the majority of commenters here in this one.

UK.gov sticks to IE 6 cos it's more 'cost effective', innit

Steve Roper
Go

@ Matt 75

We've been charging a 20% loading fee on all jobs required to be compatible with IE6 for the past year. And we've turned down contracts where the customer refuses to pay the fee. Developing for IE6 as well as modern browsers is a real cost burden; additional development and testing time, doubling up of CSS and page layout markup, redundant Javascript coding, it all adds up. Prior to us implementing the loading fee, every single project we worked on that required IE 6 compatibility went into time and cost overruns, which is why we implemented the fee. We're perfectly happy to tell customers to go elsewhere if they don't like it. And such customers are fast running out of options, because since we've started doing it, another four big web dev companies in our city have so far followed suit.

Google sets Android on pirates

Steve Roper
Thumb Down

Just another reason not to use Android for me

While it's reasonable that developers should have some means of protecting their work, the features mentioned for the API in this article go way beyond that purpose. Giving developers the option to limit the number of times the app can be launched? That stinks of the same rip-off as that known as pay-per-view. If I pay for an application or media content, I get to keep it for as long as I want and use it whenever I want, without being forced to pay again and again for what I've already purchased. These artificial restrictions are tantamount to theft, because they take my money and then prevent me from using what I paid for. And it guarantees I won't be using the Android platform now or in the future.

ACTA leaks - but secret squirrel stays secret

Steve Roper

Not necessarily the US

Given the Australian government's love of keeping things secret from voters and the fact that it considers public debate of contentious issues "unnecessary", I'd be more inclined to blame them for the secrecy blanket than the US. After all, if it WAS the US, they would have denied it outright.

Australian Senate censors print link to cartoon

Steve Roper
Big Brother

"premature unnecessary debate"

If EVER you required concrete, irrefutable proof that Australia is now a totalitarian police state, NOT a democracy - even in the most imaginative sense of the word - those three words are it.

When public debate is deemed unnecessary by any government, the last vestige of democracy has ceased to exist.

I will be leaving this hellhole the moment my savings reach the point of allowing me to do so and set myself up in a new country - currently looking at Canada or Spain. Which should hopefully be sometime around 2012.

Even returning to the UK is starting to look like a better option than staying here.

Google tests (semi) HTML5 YouTube embed code

Steve Roper
Happy

Exactly

People seem to conflating the term "HTML 5" with just the <video> tag IN HTML 5. It's a lot more than just a video tag. If you want whizzy bits in your player, you use the <canvas> tag along with Javascript. Which I've been playing with a lot recently, and it's a hell of a lot better than pissing around in Flash Builder - I can do all of my development code in the one IDE (namely, Notepad++).

You can do smooth image fades and transitions, swirly slidy clickable things, water ripple effects, plasma waves, sprites and all the eye-candy that Flash can do - without requiring any plug-ins. I haven't had this much fun since my days of coding Commodore 64 demos back in the 80s. Speed the day everyone uses a browser that supports it so I can throw Flash out the bloody window!

OFT outlines plans to protect online shoppers

Steve Roper
Thumb Down

Drip pricing

While some charges added at the end are clearly preposterous, such as credit card processing fees and such, there is, from the retailer's end, a necessity to add postage and handling charges only at the completion of the order.

This is because a) you don't know the size and weight of the package to be shipped until the customer has finished ordering and proceeded to the checkout; and b) you don't know where the package is to be shipped to until you have the customer's delivery details, which are usually asked for only at the checkout stage.

In some cases, the postage and handling charges can become quite substantial. For example, if somebody orders 25 kilos of books, and wants them shipped to the US, the postage on that is going to be at least $100 if not more. But we can't know that until the customer goes to the checkout. Of course, if it's an existing customer who signs in to purchase goods, then we at least know where they're likely to want them delivered to, but we still don't know the weight and volume of the order until they've finished.

Now some sites in defining "drip pricing" are attacking companies who don't display postage and handling charges until the end. That's simply not fair. The only way around this then would be to require the customer to provide a delivery address and an "educated guess" about how much they're going to buy, the moment they click on "add to cart" for the first time. Clearly, it's ludicrous to expect a customer to do this, just as it's equally ludicrous to attack a company for not including postage and handling until completion of the order and calling it a scam.

MPs call for crackdown on pre-paid credit cards

Steve Roper
Grenade

Is it really?

Then I suppose you'll have no problem telling us your REAL name (It's not Tom 38), your current address, your phone number, your date of birth, the names and dates of birth of any children you might have, where you work, how much you earn, and how much you have in your bank account. Because if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, right?

Grenade instead of fire because mere flames don't rid the world of these fucking morons fast enough.

Zuckerberg: I'm 'quite sure' I own Facebook

Steve Roper
Stop

Have to love the wording of Z's response

"I think we are quite sure..." is generally in the same ballpark as a programmer saying "It SHOULD work", which actually means "I have my doubts and my opinion is based more on hope and wishful thinking than facts and logic, and I don't to be blamed if it goes pear-shaped."

I get these weasel phrases from my team sometimes, and I jump on them straight away. "Will this solution work?" I ask. If I get "I think so" or "It should work" in response, my answer is, "No, either it WILL work or it won't. Which is it?" Weasel phrases like "I think it will..." and "it should..." are just arse-covering avoidance of responsibility. Go and MAKE sure before you come to me and open your great flapping cakehole!

I mean, you're either sure or you're not. If you only THINK you're sure, then you're not really sure at all, are you?

The Hack in the Box ATM talk that never was...

Steve Roper
Thumb Up

And it was many years ago

I knew about that trick as well, but it's long since been fixed. The ATMs round my way count the notes and scan the denominations when they're pulled back in now. :(

Dell pays $100m to settle accounting fraud charges

Steve Roper

Well, considering

he probably earns on the order of $90+ million a year paying that amount to him would be no more annoying than you paying a speeding fine...

Toshiba Australia boss waves tablet around

Steve Roper

Looks good, and it's here in Aus

I most definitely am looking to buy an iPad-style mobile computing device (with Windows 7, not Android), and I would like to do so this year. Sep-Oct release, if they stick to it, sounds quite good. And it'll be purchasable in my own country. I will be watching this with interest.

Zuckerberg admits working for man claiming Facebook ownership

Steve Roper

If you have a common name

it's more than likely you'll turn up as a character in a TV show, movie, book or comic. Simpson is certainly a common surname, and while Homer and Bartholomew aren't high on the list of common forenames, Lisa and Margaret certainly are. There's likely hundreds if not thousands of Lisa and Margaret Simpsons getting around who have had to wear the connection with the iconic TV show for the past couple of decades. This is why movies and suchlike productions generally carry a disclaimer in the credits along the lines of, "This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental."

Even my name isn't immune. Imagine my stunned surprise one day when I opened a comic book and found a strip describing my namesake as an "intrepid photographer" with a faithful sidekick named Chief Wahoo... I definitely had to do a double-take on that one!

(It does, however, confer the advantage that anyone trying to Google my name is likely to stumble across pages of comic strips and fan art before getting to anything I might be responsible for, an advantage I'm sure that Lisa Simpson, Facebook lawyer, also considers adequate compensation for sharing a name with a famous character!)

Firefox update guards hen house

Steve Roper
Troll

"even IE 8 is loads better than FF"

Obvious troll is obvious.

YouGov tests the waters on internet snooping

Steve Roper

At least your powers that be...

...actually have the decency to ask. Not like our government here in the People's Nanny State Republic of Ausfailia, who just chuck out laws requiring ISPs to retain all emails and user data for 10 years for police fishing expeditions without even giving a fuck whether people want it or not.

NASA's WISE eyes skies

Steve Roper
Joke

@ravenviz

Yes, but as any good conspiracy theorist can tell you, that picture isn't actually the *real* Pleiades, that's the laser-projected computer graphics NASA beams into space to cover what's actually in that part of the sky!

Flaw could expose 'millions' of home routers

Steve Roper
WTF?

@BristolBachelor

Change your ISP. No way would I stay one more second with an ISP that treated me like that.

The Register comment guidelines 2010

Steve Roper

My .02 worth...

I must say I've never really considered these comments strips as a "forum". To me a "forum" is a site usually powered by something like SMF or phpBB where posts appear immediately and, if unsuitable for the forum, end up getting deleted by a moderator (and possibly getting you warned / banned into the bargain).

This to me is more of a letters-to-the-editor system, such as you might find on any newspaper. In a forum, I might post 20 or more times in a thread while back-and-forth-ing in a debate with someone. Here, I rarely post more than one comment in any thread, the same as any other newspaper site. Only if some twat replies to me with a comment that really deserves a poke in the snoot will I post a second or third time in a comment thread.

It's also why I use my real name here, the same as any letters-to-the-editor column, for legal reasons, rather than using the net handle I use everywhere else.

That said, El Reg is a lot more liberal with its comments than any other newspaper I've commented on, and it's more liberal than many of the forums I post in. Some of the comments I've posted (and that the mods have published) here would have gotten me banned on most of my forums. In fact the only place I've found where I can be even more offensive or abusive than on El Reg is 4chan!

Blog service shut down by order of US law enforcement

Steve Roper
Flame

You will notice

at 5am one morning when the police kick your door in for something you know nothing about, because nobody noticed or gave even a small amount of poop.

Quoting Pastor Niemöller here would be superfluous.

'Eternal' sun-plane still aloft after 7 days, aiming for 14

Steve Roper

Well, considering

that pretty much every trouble-spot country needing American military intervention is within a bull's fart of the equator anyway, I don't see a problem with it. When was the last time anyone had to deploy troops in Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia, upper Scandinavia or Antarctica?

LPG lake on Titan evaporating in scorchio -180°C heatwave

Steve Roper
Boffin

More pedantry

In scientific terminology, the prefix "hydro-" refers to the behaviour of any fluid medium, not just water, such as in "hydrodynamics". So the use of the term "hydrological cycle" to refer to a hydrodynamic system in this context is in fact correct.

Gizmodo editor reunited with seized goods

Steve Roper
FAIL

Not stolen property

To all those above going on about the iPhone in question being stolen property, no it isn't. It's *lost* property, which was (intentionally or accidentally) abandoned by it's owner in a public place and subsequently picked up by the finder. While we may hold that there is a *moral* obligation for a finder of lost property to return it to the police or owner, there is no *legal* obligation to do so. If I find someone's dropped wallet in the street, it's up to me whether I do the "right" thing and give it back, or put any cash in it into my own pocket and dump the rest in a bin, or even sell it to someone who can then choose to return or rape it. For my part, I'd hand it back because I'm that sort of person, but I'm not legally required to do so.

So Chen is by no means guilty of buying "stolen" property, he bought "lost" property, which is a completely different game.