@ Beelzeebub
Not just the IT industry, sad to say. Several publishing companies are doing the same thing.
52 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Apr 2008
Why a DDoS attack on polling day? The great British public aren't so fickle as to vote for the only party with a working website on the day, are they? I haven't done door-to-door canvassing for years, so maybe someone with later experience can tell me if this comes up a lot.
And DDoS? Come on! An interesting hack subverting the message would be far more stylish....
Paris for a cheap 'putting something in the box' joke.
... shouldn't 'we' be bonking less and producing fewer humans? Maybe the money should be put into online pr0n, thus enabling more males to stay at home fiddling instead of going out and potentially breeding.
Paris, because the world is ready for another night in her.
".... is whether staff at the nursery involved actually followed the council's policies."
Which is the whole ID cards/personal data/medical data/whatever in a nutshell.
The Council policies are pretty good. They sound inspiring and comforting. My money's on someone cutting a corner or two, maybe even to save the Council some money, and inevitably the most junior person involved will be thrown out as a warning. It won't fix anything, any more than it did for the benefits fiasco, et al.
This is actually a very serious matter - albeit not IT related (but I saw it was in Bootnotes). Re-classifying dancing establishments as 'encounter' venues will allow local authorities to charge silly money for licences, and/or simply ban establishments on a whim. Another easy vote-winning target, but ultimately not so good in the long run.
More importantly, this is another sign of a creeping 'new morality' coming in. The arguments against the clubs tend to the moralistic and anecdotal, as opposed to factual. 'Extreme' pornography has already been outlawed for no good reason, and this is just another step.
Bottom (ahem) line - if you enjoy consensual adult nudity, you should be prepared to either fight for it or lose it.
Paris, because give it another 10 years this is all you'll be allowed to see of her on the 'net.
This isn't a 'she was wearing short skirt and asking for it' argument, this is an illustration of the tabloid press's double standards. Had Brand and Ross not made the call, Ms Baillie might have been the subject of an expose: 'Manuel's grand-daughter is sexy swinger!' sort of bollocks. No-one deserves to have their grandfather rung up and subjected to those idiots, but it's interesting to see the way the tabloids jumped.
I'm tempted to suggest that had Ms Baillie not had a well-loved grandad, the story would be 'Russel Brand's nights of love with bondage babe' or somethinge qually daft....
Our beloved government has been closing off all the advantages to being a temp/contractor over the years. Now the only thing in favour of it is some level of flexibilty, but that's two-edged. Extending legal protection to temp staff isn't going to harm the market - or if it does, it's only going to damage the companies playing the system.
Maybe it'll be a manifesto promise for the next General Election....
Is this part of a job creation scheme for out of work bankers? "You, too, can earn your old income doing Government Databases!" It'll cost a fortune, and be riddled with failures.
Cue a run of 'Daily Mail' stories of elderly paraplegics having their cars clamped because some numpty somewhere has put in the wrong data - and meanwhile anyone else gets one free with every five-figure donation to the Labour Party.
You don't need to be Mystic Meg to work all of that out....
(And those blue fibreglass invalid carriages were, unfortunately, death-traps. I can think of a lot of people I'd issue one to, but making them compulsory would be bad.)
Mine's the one with the blue badge, but it used to be orange.
Doubtless Mrs Palin will have deleted all the e-mails from every hooky account she has 'just as soon as I found out they weren't safe'.
The next challenge is going to be finding the new ones that have been set up.
(And why did she copy her husband into so many mails? Can the poor girl not think for herself?)
The 42 day bill will be held until something bad happens, and then brought in during the predictable 'foaming at the mouth' jingoism afterwards. Cue the press howling that any attempt to oppose the new terror laws being 'an insult to the victims', blah blah blah, and Ms Smith wins.
I'm amazed that this is a surprise to anyone. The Olympics marketing machine has been doing this sort of silliness for years, and whoever's in power when 2012 comes won't do anything to stop it. Labour haven't the backbone, and the Tories won't do anything to upset 'big business'. (If the Lib Dems are in power then by the time they've stopped bickering about it, the Olympics will have passed.)
Cheer up - in four years time it'll be someone else's problem.
Why haven't we done it in the UK? Bring back the compulsory dog licence and include DNA sampling as part of it - easy enough to check if the dog's licenced then. If and when Rover's poop turns up somewhere it shouldn't (inevitable 'prima faeces' joke...) it's easy enough to check the owner.
Don't see why it can't be cats too, to be honest.
Just looked at a pic of me and my face lines up through the glasses, so it could be a relatively weak prescription.
Back on topic, while it's a bad thing to do, it's worrying that the woman who could potentailly have her finger on the button is so naive when it comes to passwords.
(There again, bless her, she's found out how naive she is about abstinence education....)
... after all, we've got so many doctors it's OK to stop one working because he has robust opinions.
The Scottish side of the medical profession has become riddled with a culture of turning people in for trivial transgressions and generally buggering up things for them. This latest episode is really no surprise. While it's a matter of debate whether the esteemed Dame is indeed a 'sh!t', the actions of her acolytes in defending her from harsh words are undoubtedly 'sh!tty'.
Paris, because she's not too bright either.
else they'd have crowbarred the acronym into Icarus' father Daedalus.
That said, there's a historical parallel anyway - overly arrogant son gets powers thanks to his father and manages to fnck everything up despite warnings.
(Paris, like Icarus, is widely known for going down.)
Isn't there something very wrong here? If a teacher is tired of correcting the spelling mistakes made by his (or her) pupils, isn't that indicative of the standard of education they've had?
Surely the students should be getting tought how to spell, not having their common mistakes accepted as 'variants'. Or is this to allow exam marking to be outsourced more easily next time round?
In common with a lot of the above, I think the Reg has overstepped the mark on a couple of occasions in the past ('PC poor pop pops pills' springs to mind), it's never sunk to that depth.
None of us like spammers, but to be full of glee when someone is driven to such an act of despair is beyond wrong.
Didn't they learn anything from the whole Harry Potter debacle all those years ago? Admittedly, some of the facts here are different - there is no web site, for example, but there is still no commercial use nor any attempt at passing off. Even so, we're back in the same position of a young fan being rolled over by a company more interested in zealously protecting revenue than anything else.
It looks like the estate of CS Lewis has accepted the turkish delight from the film company lawyers. Any reader of the books will know what happens once you do that.
To ask if there are any 'legal' uses of file sharing assumes that everything being shared is automatically illegal - which is a bad start. If I sit on a torrent distributing ABC or uTorrent, that's perfectly legal.
Labelling P2P sharing of anything as itself illegal just holds back distribution of perfectly legal (but huge) files, such as scientific or government reports where there are no restrictions on copying them.
More worrying, though, is where the 'music industry' is getting these names from. I suspect it's going to be an approach along the lines of Mark Twain's suggestion to 'beat your son once a day - even if you don't know what for, he certainly will'. The RIAA are going to pull names (or rather, IP addresses) out of a hat and send off letters using the ISPs as their catspaw. The letters themselves will have a chilling effect on the recipients - whether or not they've ever been sharing files. They will now think they're being watched and change their behaviour.
Let's keep our fingers crossed for the first test case.
As any fule kno, file-sharing isn't just copyrighted material. If I decide to cane my bandwidth by distributing 'legitimate' files, how will my ISP tell? Are they really going to have an army of people taking a copy of whatever I choose to torrent?
Usual story - extremely crude solution from a government in thrall to big money. Even Paris could think of a better idea.
... aren't they all 'terrorists' now? It's probably a lot easier all round for the city authorities to lock up one bloke until he tells them the password, rather than prove that an outside hacker could get through their security.
Pretending that access to the system is impossible without the correct password gives the impression the system is, if nothing else, impregnable to unauthorised users. Getting someone else to hack in and set it right would have the US press howling in full-on 'Chicken Licken' mode that any 'terrorist' could have done the same - cue the banning of 'War Games' and every IT professional going on a 'no fly' list.
My money's on the mayor telling our man that they'd already got in, but the trial would go a lot easier if the fiction was maintained.
As any fule kno, it's not whether or not Plod is *allowed* to do it that matters, it whether or not he/she does it that counts. Unfortunately, in our new safer society, arguing the point with the police seems to get you clobbered with 'anti-terrorist' legislation. Telling Plod they can't do something only provokes them....
Surely there's already adequate legislation to cover the worst excesses that this new legislation is meant to prevent?
This is just another example of lawmakers going for easy targets. Of course it's a good idea to prevent 'sex pests' (TM Daily Mail) making people's lives miserable, but this iffy legislation seems to have been cobbled together so a bunch of politicians can say they've been tough on sex offenders - while not actually making anyone any safer. No-one's going to want to risk their political career by saying 'This is daft', but who's the law going to protect who isn't already covered? One or two idiots will be cautioned for sending ill-advised texts, and maybe some drunk will end up on page 22 of The Sun for sending a text to the wrong person, but that's likely to be it.
Black helicopter because this is all happening since Alec Salmond found out about my photoshops of him and me at it like pistons.... (i stll <3 u, Alec)
I think the fifth Doctor got rid of it when it leaked. Can't quote the episode, which may save me some credibility.
Back on topic - I'm terrified of a 'Jenny in Space' spin-off with the 'daughter'. If ever an episode had a rubbish ending that hinted at a ghastly misbegotten and malformed series coming from it, it was "The Doctor's Daughter".
This new law is a badly thought out piece of vote-grabbing legislation hanging on the coat tails of one family's tragic loss. It's unlikely to save a single life, but has the potential to create thousands upon thousands of new criminals and cost millions in enforcement.
As the (proud?) possessor of a mint copy of Madonna's masturpiece, it gladdens my heart to read that it's both illegal and worth a bit.