* Posts by Tony Green

240 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2007

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Labour manifesto: More ID cards, less NHS IT

Tony Green

It'll all be lies anyway

In 1997 they promised in their manifesto to legislate against pubs serving short-measure pints. Thirteen years later, drinkers are still being ripped off to the tune of millions of pounds a year.

So why should we trust them to do what they're promising? Especially when Gordon Brown launched it by claiming they'd never increased the rate of VAT - which is exactly what they did on January 1st this year.

Times websites want £1 a day from June

Tony Green

Good

That should save my searches being poisoned by lies from Murdoch rags.

'Racist' job ad sparks investigation

Tony Green

You've got to laugh...

...at a foul rag like the Daily Hate complaining about racism.

Typing merely by thinking - plugless brainjack kit invented

Tony Green

Thinks...

"rm -rf slash"

Directgov kids' site apes explosive gay porn brand

Tony Green
Grenade

Lucky they've revoked Section 28

Could have had interesting consequences if they hadn't...

Italians salute Mussolini on the iPhone

Tony Green

A control freak determined to allow as little freedom as possible

And Il Duce was quite nasty too.

French mock British G-spot probe

Tony Green
Thumb Up

The French are right

And believe me fellas, once you find it and get to know how to make it work, it'll bring her to a level of ecstasy you've never seen before.

...and I always enjoy how she thanks me afterwards!

Loud sex ASBO breach woman spared jail

Tony Green

Sounds like...

...she's already been banged up.

Trouser-bomb clown attacks - how much should we laugh?

Tony Green

It's got more to do with scaring us

The authorities already know how tiny the dangers are. But they desperately need "attacks" like this one so they can pretend there's a justification for all the attacks on our civil liberties and get themselves a nicely cowed populace. You can see how much the Yanks are taking the piss by the fact that one of the charges was "attempting to use a WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION".

Al Qaida and the like are analogous with Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. A bogeyman to frighten the people into accepting the autocracy of our governments.

Stella Artois augments iPhone reality

Tony Green
FAIL

Good old InBev

You've got to love them. When Belgian Interbrew merged with Brazilian AmBev, they named the new company InBev. Evidently without any Belgians on the board to warn them that in Antwerp dialect, "inbev" is a word meaning "cunnilingus". Which at least has more flavour than most of their beers...

Tony Green
Thumb Up

There certainly is...

None of that muck in my local, the Ipswich Dove, but if you really MUST drink lager there, at least you've got the option of Calvor's, which actually has flavour: http://www.dovestreetinn.co.uk/pages/beers.php#Fizz

Nokia N900 Linux smartphone

Tony Green
Thumb Up

Correct

There's a complete development environment you can load on a Linux computer and port whatever you want, just like you could with the N8x0 tablets.

As soon as I get mine I'll be having a busy time porting Apache and MySQL to it so I can use them like I do on my N800 (but with everything running faster - yummy!)

Google not normal for Norfolk

Tony Green

"According to the Daily Mail"

I think that tells you all you need to know about the statement's veracity.

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Tony Green
Thumb Down

Totally unusable for me

I'm sure the idea behind Upstart is a good one. But not such a good idea is the fact that it doesn't bother waiting until I've had chance to type in the passphrase for my LUKS encrypted /home filesystem before starting everything and ensuring I can't type it in.

That's at least the third release of Ubuntu I've had to revert to my backups from because it's unusable. Time for a new distro, I think...

Home sec puts McKinnon extradition on hold

Tony Green

More bullshit from government

Of course Home Secretaries can intervene in this case. This appalling treaty was sneaked in by David Blunkett who bypassed Parliament by issuing an order in the Privy Council. So there's nothing to stop the current Home Secretary from using the same instrument to suspend the treaty.

Which they should do at least until the Yanks implement their side of what was supposed to be a two-way treaty. Preferably permanently, as there's absolutely no way anybody should be handed over to the US's banana-republic-style "justice" system without a hell of a lot of evidence against them.

Microsoft apes Google with chillerless* data center

Tony Green
FAIL

Data Center?

Surely Data Centre?

BT offers staff time on hold

Tony Green

I can guarantee it won't be long...

...before various people start getting messages from their managers "recommending" that they take reduced hours packages.

I got out three years ago when it was already becoming an unpleasant place to work; I've yet to speak to a former colleague still inside the wire who thinks I did the wrong thing.

Sadly, BT has gone from a company mainly run by people who understood and cared about its business to just another company run by people who think having an MBA is all they need, and who think the company exists for them to screw millions out of for their own benefit, rather than looking after the shareholders, staff or customers.

Orthodox Jews tuck into kosher Koogle

Tony Green

Strange...

... that they aren't allowed TVs, but they're allowed computers.

A perfect example of how religion screws people up.

BNP DDoS 'mega-assault' not actually mega in the least

Tony Green

I wouldn't be surprised...

...to find out that the fascist scumbags actually paid for a small DDOS attack just so they could trumpet how hard done by they are.

Clear Channel aren't exactly nice people either; they provided a hell of a lot of funding for Dubya's election campaigns, so it's hardly surprising they happily deal with British nazis as well.

Google News stumbles again

Tony Green
Unhappy

Not just news

I noticed that the embedded Google Maps in the sites I run were also crapped out last night at about 2145.

Seems whatever they're breaking is pretty fundamental to Google's systems.

Kebabs pose 'no danger whatsoever', Russians claim

Tony Green

Paranoia?

I always find it amusing how often meat eaters (especially male ones) seem to feel threatened by the fact that some people can actually feed themselves without the need for something to have its throat cut. Certainly the anonymous coward who said "Vegetarians are all completely mad" seems terribly frightened.

If a chunk of meat came between me and starvation, I'd eat it (in fact if it was a chunk of meat or a McDonald's veggie meal, the meat would still win) but all the evidence is that a vegetarian diet is actually FAR healthier than a carnivorous one. One long-term study showed that vegetarians live an average of 8 years longer than carnivores, but despite those extra years, they cost the NHS an average of £40000 LESS.

...and giving up the meat stopped me needing a constant supply of painkillers for my arthritis, so it was worthwhile just for that

Boffins list sci-fi words which wormed their way into dictionary

Tony Green

Pretty poor

It doesn't look like they researched it very deeply. Robotics certainly came out of SF, but they seem to have missed out on the word's root, "robot", which entered the language of science & technology via Karel Čapek's classic RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots).

Software generated attendance letter about dead pupil

Tony Green

Crapita strikes again

No surprise to readers of Private Eye that Craptia are yet again responsible for a cock-up. How they manage to KEEP getting government contracts with their appalling record is a mystery.

BMW driver follows satnav to edge of cliff

Tony Green

Typical BMW driver

Probably thought he could intimidate the cliff into getting out of his way.

Paris Hilton correctly identifies UK Prime Minister

Tony Green

When Paris was unwelcome

Some months ago, I found a superb story in the Dutch Telegraaf newspaper (http://tinyurl.com/5vra7n)

As it's in Dutch, here's my translation:

* Paris Hilton jeered off *

"Amsterdam - Paris Hilton was booked for the birthday party of a spoiled teenager, because Britney Spears cancelled. The guests were not enthusiastic...

When the party pig (the daughter of designer Christian Audigier) stood on the stage she cried "Do you want to see Paris Hilton?" The answer she got was not quite what she expected... Loud booing and jeering was the result. Paris left the podium in tears."

No military mobile bill-waiver from O2 and Virgin

Tony Green

But do they deserve special treatment?

Wars of aggression like Afghanistan and Iraq destroy any claim that the military are involved in "defending their country", so why should they get special treatment when they're effectively nothing more than mercenaries fighting for the US?

Speeding Oz teen may face 'gorillas in the mist'

Tony Green

He doesn't seem bothered

From the look on the little shit's face outside the court (http://tinyurl.com/6uqx3f) I think his view is rather more "I got away with it again" than "I don't want my bottie prodded".

Last Xmas for CDs, please, researcher tells music biz

Tony Green

One thing they haven't considered...

...is that there are situations where a download isn't going to be possible.

For example, most jazz musicians (and probably other musicians as well) take boxes of CD to sell at their gigs. Often they can sell enough to make almost as much extra cash as they're being paid for the gig.

I don't reckon they're going to be able to sell downloads, so the total demise of the CD will just spell more domination by mainstream (crap like Take That, Girls Aloud, etc.) "artists" and less availability of proper music.

Rail companies roll out barcode ticket standard

Tony Green
Happy

Behind the times as ever

Whenever I travel to Belgium, I can buy tickets for journeys I'm planning from the NMBS website and print it out before I leave.

Funny how so many people take the piss out of that country, yet it's years ahead of us in so many ways (and the beer's better too!)

Europe-wide emergency number is go

Tony Green

Cue feigned outrage

How long before UKIP start scaremongering that 999 will be abolished?

Junk science and booze tax - a study in spin

Tony Green

Even more holes in the "evidence"

A friend from Nottingham forwarded this piece that was published by the local Camra branch on the subject, quoting research by (amongst others) Professor Richard Doll (the man who worked out the connection between smoking and lung cancer, even though he expected his research to show that smoking was actually beneficial).

The original publication in Nottingham Drinker (large download http://www.nottinghamcamra.org/ND/Aug%202008.pdf) also includes the graph sowing how relative mortality changes according to alcohol consumption.

NHS 21 units guideline “defies the evidence” says member of Royal College of Physicians

The NHS campaign that recommends that we drink no more than 21 units of alcohol (about 10 pints of 4% beer) a week is based on the theories of Ian Gilmore, President of the Royal College of Physicians. However, a member of that same institution, Dr. Ian Gooding, told Nottingham Drinker:

“Like Gilmore, I am a gastroenterologist and see people with alcohol-related disease every working day. I am certain from my experience that the bulk of alcohol-induced disease is caused by spirits and strong cheap lagers consumed at home. “The research to confirm this has not been done, however we do have hard evidence on the association between quantity

of alcohol consumed and mortality from the British Doctors’ Study,[1] which showed a U-shaped curve. “Those who drank 18 units weekly had a markedly lower mortality than teetotallers. Above 18 units the curve slowly rises so that teetotallers had the same mortality as those who drank 63 units weekly. It has been said that the national guidelines on safe alcohol consumption were ‘plucked out of the air’, I would go further – they defy the evidence! “Gilmore’s proposals will lead to pub closures, increasing home drinking and social isolation (especially in rural areas) which will increase mental health problems. CAMRA needs to tackle Gilmore & Co, aware of the weakness of the evidence behind their arguments.”

So what do apas, the Alcohol Problems Advisory service think of all this? Executive Director Nick Tegerdine told Nottingham Drinker:

“Re the NHS units campaign, I think the whole system is pants! So do many others, and the current campaign has been discussed this last month at the most senior level within the Primary Care Trusts and the Crime and Drugs partnership and some felt it was not at all helpful. The current campaign is fatally flawed in so far as it provides factually inaccurate information”.

“The debate gets really interesting when you compare the ‘safe and sensible’ limits as defined by responsible authorities in other countries. “As a general response my line is ‘if you never drink more than 21 units (14 for women), never go out in the sun, never eat anything other than organic lettuce and certainly never a rare steak and cheese made with unpasteurised milk, and never have unprotected sex you might live a bit longer but why would you want to?” If you’re really lucky (and if my memory serves me correctly) you can do all of those things in the same

day and survive! “To be fair there is health evidence to do with increasing risk with increasing dose; it’s fairly well regarded stuff, but there are so many other variables (pre-existing liver damage; ethnic origin; body mass, interaction with other drugs etc.). At apas, we don’t worry too much about ‘units and limits’. Most of our client facing staff report service users drinking at least ten times those amounts (but no one is saying that it’s doing them any good, there are limits!)”.

So there you have it - it seems that on 63 units a week - that is about four and a half pints a day of 4% beer - a male drinker can live as long as teetotaller! (Unfortunately I have no

data for women drinkers, as the research simply has not been done.) And what’s more, if you drink 18 units a week, you will actually live longer than a teetotaller! So shouldn’t the NHS be

telling us that we must drink 18 units a week in order to live longer? As we at Nottingham Drinker have always thought, beer is good for you!

Beer is also recognised as a rich source of Vitamin B and of antioxidants, substances believed to play a part in preventing cancer, and it has been said that it plays a part in preventing gallstone formation, osteoporosis, diabetes and stomach ulcers. [2]

We should, of course, ensure that our diets and exercise regimes do not allow us to become overweight due to drinking that amount - but, that withstanding, drink to your good health!

A final point to consider - should the NHS be spending thousands on their anti-drinking advertising campaign? Is this what our 4p. extra beer duty is being spent on? Could not the money be better spent on staff and equipment?

References:

1. Doll R, Peto R, Hall E, Wheatley K, Gray R.

Mortality in relation to consumption

of alcohol: 13 years’ observations on male British doctors. BMJ. Oct. 8; 1994

2. The Benefits of Moderate Beer Consumption, The Brewers of Europe 2004

(downloadable from www.brewersofeurope.org/docs/publications/pdf-Mei04.pdf

'Podestrian' risk rising for drivers, warns insurer

Tony Green

Mobile 'phones

In my experience as a cyclist, the bigger problem's people who are too stupid to cope with walking and talking on their mobiles. I've had loads of these walk out in front of me.

Great fun watching them leap in the air when I fire off my super-loud air horn though and it never fails to cause amusement to everybody else in the area at the time.

BT's third Phorm trial starts tomorrow

Tony Green

Catching the bastards at it

Anybody know if there's a way my CGI scripts can detect if requests are coming through Phorm's servers?

I reckon if we can spot it and use that to print "you are being spied on" warnings on pages that might bring it home to people what's going on.

And since every page on my sites carries a header stating that I don't consent to traffic being intercepted, I'd then know they're still doing it, so I can kick them.

Academic wants to 'free up' English spelling

Tony Green

A point people advocating this always forget...

...is that people in different parts of the country pronounce words differently to each other. So whose pronunciation are we going to choose to base the phonetic spelling on?

Even a simple word like "book" for example. Would we use "buk" to reflect a lot of pronunciation in the south east, or "bewk" to be phonetic for Scousers?

Phonetic spelling only works in countries with little regional variations in pronunciation. It's never going to work in Britain.

K Desktop Environment 4.1 lands

Tony Green

Sadly not ready yet

I've been a KDE enthusiast for many years and have been looking forward to KDE4, but I'm sorry to say that it still lacks enough configurability to make it useful. There are more configuration options than in KDE4.0, but even the new release is only about as configurable as Gnome. One of the great things about KDE has been the ability to get my desktop working exactly how I want it, unlike Gnome where it seems to be "you've got to have it the way the developers like it."

What I learned from a dumb terminal

Tony Green

My favourite from when I was on the helpdesk

ICL's dumb terminals in the early 1980s displayed "protected fields", where you couldn't type anything, as half-intensity. The then equivalent of editable text fields were full intensity.

One day I got a call from a contractor who told me "It's odd, but all the protected fields have disappeared from my terminal."

"Ok," I said, "on the right-hand side of your terminal, you'll find a knob marked brightness."

"Yes, I can see that."

"Just push it up a little bit then."

"Fantastic, I've got my protected fields back."

SP1 drops, iPlayer falls over and Phorm is less than legal

Tony Green

A possible way to break Phorm

Here's an idea for people with websites. Once the IP address range of Phorm's servers is identified, add a RewriteRule in Apache's .htaccess file so that whatever page they request they just get a 404 (or even more fun, a porn page)

Of course this could be problematic if Phorm pass the page through their servers to the end-user, rather than making an extra request; if that's the case then how about we add a banner to each page served through Phorm warning the visitor that they're being spied on, with a link to an explanation?

US cruiser nails crippled spy-sat on first shot

Tony Green

But did they REALLY hit it?

GIven the US military's record for accurately hitting the target they're aiming at, can we really take their word for it that they hit it?

After all, this is the country that has trouble even hitting the right COUNTRY when they're dropping bombs (like the one that hit Sofia when they were trying to drop it on Belgrade.)

Any third-party verification?

Firefox 3 beta is live

Tony Green

Unstable & buggy???

Funny, I've been using it all day and it's been very stable and with no sign of obvious bugs.

Even the previous Betas have been remarkably stable.

Beer-drinking ladyboy fish can live out of water

Tony Green

Hot news?

Blimey fellas! You must be a bit short of news to be publishing this old story. It was published in New Scientist early last month and made it into Practical Fishkeeping not long after that.

I'm sure you can be more up-to-date than this.

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