Posts by Julian Bond
130 posts • joined Tuesday 20th February 2007 18:51 GMT
2 issues and one annoyance.
1) Is Google obeying the letter of the law? If not then what are HMRC doing about it?
2) If Google is obeying the letter of the law, what's the Government doing about it?
These questions matter much more than some grandstanding about corporate and government ethics, not to mention "EVIL"; however entertaining that might be.
And what's Google's profit on that £4.3bn of UK sales revenue? Because in the UK we don't tax corporate revenue, we tax corporate profit after a whole range of allowable costs. Saying "£2.4m in tax on £4.3bn of sales is just a joke" is meaningless. Especially if, say, costs were £4.299bn.
Posted in Has Europe finally passed Peak Disk?
So where's my 1Tb iPod Classic? Oh. Sorry. Wrong thread.
Faraday's Shed
Slightly off topic, but I can recommend http://www.trinitybuoywharf.com/whats-on/news/2010/11/regular-attractions-the-faraday-effect.php to fans of Faraday's sheds. Just by Lea mouth on the other side of the city.
The Big List
So where's the big list of Tech City (or Silli Roundabout, or even Hoxditch) startups? Because part of this game is promotion, isn't it? And are there any moderate success stories?
Buck? Period.
"buck to be made". "period." Ya'all are not from around these parts, are ya' boy.
Re: Netbook 2.0?
So what's the Acer like with Win7 Home Premium installed on it?
Re: Apocalypse in 9/8
Always found that one easy. One-Two-Three-FOUR, One-Two-THREE, One-TWO,
Try this as a marching tune.
I LEFT my wife and my four fat children, RIGHT in the middle of the kitchen floor, I LEFT my wife...
Posted in 2012: The year that netbooks DIED
Recreate the netbook?
Are people still self-assembling laptops at the start of meetings? By the time you've got the iPad, psu, keyboard, mouse, stand, iphone, out of the backpack and plugged everything together so you can use cut down "App" versions of your desktop/laptop programs, wouldn't it have been easier to just open a small laptop?
Rather than netbooks, or ultrabooks, or pads with add ons (or high end desktop replacements), I'm sure there's still a market for a small, full function laptop focused on portability at a reasonable price. Can we just get back to that please, rather than continually trying to stretch the laptop away from it's sweet spot.
Re: Tipping point
For balance: What is the point at which you will admit your guesses are wrong? 10 years? 20 years? At least you should still be around to see the damage you have done with your nay-saying when the warming is worse than even the most pessimistic predictions.
That's a first
Did El Reg just called Einstein a dickhead? That has to be a first.
Comparing Paris with Marilyn Monroe is a bit much but I'm sure that just like Marilyn she would know what to do with Einstein's brain.
Re: ...over-rated tat-bazaar that is Forbidden Planet
Yes indeed, +1 for Dark They Were... Hell, +1 for the old Forbidden Planet when it was in New Oxford St.
And for bonus points, Compedium in Camden? Especially the 2nd shop that was exclusively weird magick books. Of which, how about Jimmy Page's book shop just off Ken Church St.
Never mind the comics, book shops aren't what they used to be either.
Re: The Cloud Industry
The government has basically said they can take any servers because someone has done something illegal using it and all the legit users have no rights to get their files back.
It's worse than that. The US gov has said that and that it applies to any server anywhere in the world accessed via a .com. .org, .net address or hosted by a government friendly to the US. A nice position to be in if you can get it. So no wonder they don't want the UN coming in and limiting that power (sorry, 'stealing the internet'). Most other governments would probably say the same thing but at least they would be limited to servers actually hosted or administered in their own countries.
Damn, where to start
1. All that macho bullshit about super dry martinis where the shaker is waved at the vermouth is just that, macho bullshit. If you want to drink frozen gin shooters, go ahead. Just don't call them Martinis.
2. Yes, Gordon's is cheap rubbish, but Bombay Sapphire is moderately expensive rubbish. It's more like a flavoured vodka than a properly flavoured gin. That doesn't matter in a Gin and Tonic which is actually more about the quality of the tonic[1] than the gin.
3. Martinis should be completely clear. That's the biggest reason for stirring not shaking, and for using quality clear ice.
4. Dirty Martinis are an abomination. I'm all for the olive taste and tiny addition of salt but swamping all that effort to create elegant flavours in the gin and vermouth with sea water is just silly.
5. One Martini is just right, two's too many and three's not enough. The other bit of related life wisdom, "count your martinis and punt".
6. Match elegant gins (Miller's, Sacred, Adnams) with Noilly Prat. Match more aggressive gins (Beefeater 24, Tanquaray) with a more aggressive vermouth like Vya.
My favourite. 60ml Gin, 10ml Vermouth, stirred in ice for 40 secs, served in a Martini glass from the freezer. Two briefly washed olives from a fresh jar of olives in brine on a cocktail stick. Current favourite gin, Sacred with Adnams a close second. As far as I can tell, all the London and UK boutique straight gins are excellent. Explore!
What about the Vesper? Well Lillet Blanc is interesting. All that vodka will dilute the unpleasant taste of the Gordons. And the lemon probably goes well with the Lillet. So why not. But I'd be more interested in exploring the lillet-gin corner of (non-euclidian) mathematical martini space.
[1] 1724 is the best tonic by some way with Fevertree an acceptable alternative. Avoid Schweppes and especially avoid tonic from a mixer dispensing gun.
Re: So now can we ban iPhones and anything else made in China from work???
Quite right. You certainly wouldn't want to work with people wearing Matalan suits, shirts, ties, shoes. M&S clothes made in Pakistan are just so much more elegant.
Re: Diligently obeying the law
I think you'll find that among civil servants, nobody ever got fired for "Diligently obeying the law".
Comments
I'd love to see a similar study done on the comments in articles of this type tracking levels of climate change denial versus the country of origin of the commenter.
I suspect that there's a strong correlation between the USA and strong climate change denial in comment trolls but that could just be my annoyance and selection bias as a cynical Brit. And the "moebius strip of endless douchebaggery" that such articles tend to generate.
In other news, reality apparently has a dystopian bias as well as a liberal one.
Is "probably not time to panic yet." A registered trade mark? For who, Rayban?
And the UK?
The UK has laws making it an offence to incite religious or racial hatred. Why doesn't Google censor the video there?
Oh, wait, it doesn't involve copyright. As you were.
third option.
"Broadly speaking, there’s two ways we go about this:" There is of course a third way. The ICO simply ignore it as it's a stupid law. But the whole idea of laws that are simply ignored and not enforced because they're stupid seems to be an impossible concept for UK civil servants and enforcement groups.
A.N.A.Lyst reports
In shocking news, an analyst reported today that the X market would be Y big in Z years. The first paragraph of the press release was then posted on 10 different tech news websites in minutes with only slight spelling mistakes added. What do you think about this? Tell us in the comments.
Re: A prize for the best should be called:
"Bit of a mouthful I will admit, but then so is a good bacon sarnie!"
That's what she said.
Re: Good work as always Lewis!
The real puzzle is why El-Reg keeps publishing this stuff from Lewis and Orlowski. Maybe it's good for page impressions and click throughs or something.
Glitter
The largest turd-glitter-rolling attempt in history, surely.
Trolling article
Successfully trolls. Is there perhaps some correlation between approaching end of month page impression figures on El Reg and contentious articles posted about AGW, Religion, the Stupidity of Septics or such like.
Posted in Motorists' e-car interest revs up
G-Wizz?
Curiously the G-Wizz is not actually a car but a Quad. This gets it round a whole bunch of type approval regs. It also means it's not eligible for the subsidy (IMHO) and doesn't get counted in the stats about electric and hybrid car sales.
It would be nice if the gummint provided a workable subsidy scheme for electric bicycles as well instead of the faintly ridiculous "ride to work" scheme. Perhaps they could just make Bicycles and E-Bicycles 0% VAT rated. As if.
Posted in DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC!
Surely, they just need to
Reverse the polarity!
In the last 10 minutes of the film, leaving ample time for the epilogue.
Paris, obviously, since she knows a thing or two about films.
Cable
Still trying to understand how BT is forced to offer LLU, wholesale and duct access to 3rd parties, but Virgin isn't.
Thatcher and crew gave a broad set of incentives to the cable industry to build out a new layer of infrastructure. Perhaps it's time to offer the same sort of incentives to the nascent fibre industry to do the same thing.
Maybe there's a Murdoch in there somewhere.
Mine's the one
with the candles in the pocket.
Music, books, videos
DRM was killing music but we headed that one off. Now DRM is killing[1] eBooks, Videos and the mobile Apps market and it's still a rip off.
Just say No to DRM. And if that means just saying no to Apple and Amazon then so be it.
[1]Yes, I know the video and iPhone Apps market is not exactly dying. And I really hate the argument that "it's not Apple/Amazon's fault, they're being pushed into it by the copyright owners". Apple/Amazon are the retailer that we deal with and they're colluding in the lie that DRM works or is good for anyone.
Spam
They've got a huge problem building with spam and malicious comments beginning to appear. it's going to be fun watching them deal with *that*.
And Virgin?
How about they force Virgin Cable to sell bandwidth wholesale, provide LLU and open up their ducts to 3rd parties? After all, the cheap loans and tax incentives to the original cable companies[1] have all been used up or buried in multiple buyouts. So if one half of the duopoly is constrained and forced to provide for a 3rd party market why isn't the other half?
[1] Maybe it's time for another round of tax incentives and cheap loans for new operations who can lay fibre to the home?
And Ian Dale
And can we please keep him off our TV screens as well.
Thatcher and Cable
Wasn't it Thatcher's government that provided some very healthy tax incentives and cheap loans to the nascent cable industry? Maybe it's time to start treating Virgin like BT and requiring wholesale bandwidth and LLU from them, while starting a new infrastructure industry?
Then we can all enjoy the next players digging the roads up again.
Port Police?
I have this sneaking suspicion that they've sold a bunch of these to the customs police at the Channel Tunnel. I was part of a bit of security theatre there that makes it all feel familiar. Me and a mate (40 something and 50 something) on clean late model motorcycles covered in luggage get called over on our way out of the country. The police wave a magic wand over the bikes and then send us on our way. I've been wondering for a couple of years now, exactly what that wand was supposed to do. Now I know. The Police were in fact part of a crack squad of psychic detectives looking for hidden truffles with $8000 worth of "Advanced Detection Equipment".
Gatsos
Never mind cars, could we use this thing on Gatsos and other speed traps?
Posted in Is Mandy right to cut science funding?
LHC
How about we collide Mandy with a large hadron?
Mine's the black one with the hole in the pocket.
Mandy
"The case shows that artists and music companies need better protection."
So I guess they'll be flying the Evil Lord Mandelson off on an all expenses paid trip to the Caribbean. He'll still be around no matter who gets in at the next election so keeping him sweet writing a few more advertorials for the copyright biz in The Times will still be cheap publicity even if he can't direct government policy to the same extent.
Mandelson and Badgers? I feel sure Matthew Parris will announce the connection on Radio 4 shortly.
I for one
look forward to China extending this all the way to Vienna. It must make more sense to move all those container loads of electric bicycles to Europe via train rather than ocean going ship.
Shortly afterwards I expect somebody to commission a new TV Play. "Murder on the Guangzhou Express"
These are
not the androids you're looking for.
Stop right now
As other's above have said, we cannot live under this lop-sided treaty.
There's enough law in the UK (and EU) to prosecute him for computer misuse and for him to serve a sentence in the UK, regardless of exactly where the computers were located. Shipping him off to the USA just because the USAians ask for it, cannot be a good thing for any of us.
Needless to say this wouldn't apply in the scenario where UK forces had picked him up, and shipped him off to some CIA terror camp in Algeria via extraordinary rendition from where he was shuffled around for 5 years and finally ended up in Gitmo. Because obviously that would be entirely justified.
So let's hope everyone can string this out till after the next election and the incoming Home Secretary can stick two fingers up to the USA.
Control
"there is a finite number of devices on which an Ad Hoc build will run". What is it, I wonder, which controls this?
There is a solution to this, but it's one that Apple probably wouldn't like. And that's to do as Firefox does. There's an App store. Installing and upgrading from the App store is trivial. But you can install an App from a 3rd party website providing you mmake a couple of extra clicks to say "I know this is dangerous, but I want to do it anyway".
I don't buy the "security of the phone system" argument. If the iPhone exposes APIs that are dangerous and could affect the security of the phone system, then it's broken and should be fixed.
As for one way upgrades, I think this really applies to all software thes days. We want automatic or at least painless upgrade systems, and the price for that is that there's no going back. It doesn't really matter what software environment you're talking about.
Posted in Disney kicks 'Ho White' out of bed
Australian national sport
As this is Australia, shouldn't they have worked in the national sport of Dwarf Tossing?
Ithankyew. Mine's a XXXX.
Skype
So use Skype?
We're all doomed!
So enjoy it while you can.
Compete with free
There is a price that competes with free. And it's pretty much what AllOfMp3 used to charge. $0.10 to $0.25 (you do the maths) per track and $1.00 to $2.50 per album. All for 192K LAME VBR Mp3s. You can probably charge a little more for FLAC. Even if you habitually download and share music (or just swap hard drives), the convenience of a reliable source of quality encoding and tagging is worth that much.
So how about the music industry works out how to get a distributor to license the allofmp3 software and puts out every track they've ever released at that sort of price?
Streamlining
So will they allow real streamlining?
Posted in Palm slams Apple, hoodwinks iTunes
P4S, NJB, USB
The Pre could use Winamp and Microsoft's P4S, NJB or plain old USB mass storage. Oh. Wait. no Winamp on a Mac without parallels and XP/Vista.
The real problem here is that a commercial bit of software from a vendor with a long history of lock in has become the market leader. And they have a vested interest in maintaining the lock in. It would be better for all of us if the market leader was an open system with no hardware/software manufacturng ties. Then the software developers would be striving to work with everything rather than limiting themselves to work with only one thing.
This whole area is so silly. USB mass storage with XSPF as the database would work fine and it would be easy for everyone to support. We really don't need proprietary formats for what is actually a very simple computing problem.
Posted in 'No more CCTV', cries top CCTV cop
Public Webcams
Yes, indeedy. Let's have a law that all CCTVs *must* be made available as publicly accessible internet webcams. And not just the publicly owned ones but private ones as well.
And I bet there's one or few unintended consequences, not all pleasant, in that idea.
Hard disk
Oi! Where's my 240Gb hard disk iPhone?
