Posts by RW

@ E and Phlip Perry

E: "Either Vista is not working very smart, or MS is offering stuff that a lot of people don't want."

Of course they're offering stuff people don't want. A long time ago I had a conversation with a guy who did contract programming for MS. He used a word to describe MS that explains a great deal: "arrogant."

Microsoft is arrogant in thinking they know what the user wants and/or needs better than the user does, so they foist all these kewl bright ideas on the suffering world. Unfortunately, they are dead wrong about a lot of the things they are so sure about.

Every office at MS needs a framed copy of Crowell's famous plea: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

They're also arrogant in depending on their monopoly for force their latest bright idea down everyone's throats. This is not news, of course. Too bad the governments of the world (possibly excepting the EU) roll over and play dead at MS's command.

But besides being arrogant, they seem to use an extremely pernicious form of group think internally, where no one is able and willing to stand up and say "the emperor has no clothes" when the group hive mind veers off in yet another wrong direction,

Philip Perry: "...Microsoft thought they could blow kisses at computer manufacturers by deliberately building in ridiculously resource-intensive services that are difficult for naive users to disable. There's absolutely NO NEED WHATSOEVER for a modern operating system to be this resource-hungry. The only motivation I can imagine for it is some kind of sweetheart deal with hardware manufacturers."

I wouldn't doubt for a second tha MS got in bed with hardware manufacturers, writing an OS that simply cannot run on older hardware in order to force sales of new. (Why has no one pointed the Green Finger at Microsoft for causing premature obsolescence of perfectly functional machines? What is the environmental cost of all that hardware discarded well before the end of its service life?)

But it's the movie & music companies they *really* got into bed with, if the descriptions I've read of Vista DRM are at all accurate. This just exemplifies MS's arrogance again: their customers do not want DRM, but MS doesn't hesitate to force it down their throats. Worse, it's an over-engineered version cooked up by paranoiacs at the MPAA that eats resources like a cop eating donuts. MS should have told the MPAA to shove it up their nether orifices.

(Microsoft-watching is just about as much fun as China-watching in the good old days of seriously Red China, where every word emanating form Peking was analyzed to death for clues. In MS's cases, it's really a matter of trying to diagnose organizational pathologies rather than political winds, but plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.)

"Consistency and commitment needed"

Please, dear Register, do not use such headlines. I am sitting in a puddle of urine having pissed myself laughing.

Speaking of puddles of urine, alistair millington wrote: "Be honest. If M$ do a linux distro (for example) it would either urinate all over your hardware before passing away. (like vista)"

If you are going to engage in this style of dialectic, the right quote is from Edgar Lee Masters' immortal Spoon River Anthology:

"She was some ind of a crying thing

One takes in one's arms, and all at once

It slimes your face with its running nose

And voids its essence all over you;

Then bites your hand and springs away,

And there you stand bleeding and smelling to heaven!"

Why is there no poet icon? Paris will have to do, poetic girl that she is.

Deja vu

These prognostications remind me of nothing so much as some tag lines of the past:

"Better living through chemistry!"

"Nuclear power will be so cheap it won't have to be metered."

"Our experimental atomic fusion apparatus will generate more energy than it consumes within 12 months."

"Nuclear powered automobiles"

"You'll fly to work in your own <whatever>."

Need I say more?

Special message to El Moderatrix: <smooch>

Gotta run now!

What's the real crime?

If a would-be suicide is standing on a window ledge and we are all chanting "jump, jump, jump!", are we guilty of a crime? Seems to me that such a situation most closely parallels the case at hand.

And then there's the old children's jingle "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." That alone, well-known to every child and every adult, is prima facie evidence that verbal hostility is an accepted fact of life you just have to suck up to. Arguing a little further, it seems to me that if a certain verbal exchange is okay when spoken, it has to be okay when keyed, no?

I really wonder if this is a situation where social penalties such as shunning would be far more effective than dragging things into the courts.

What a mess.

Mostly IE Languages, I notice

Of the languages that can be google-lated (or transgoogled), only five are non-Indo-European: Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, & Korean. One Semitic, one Sino-Tibetan, one Uralic, and two that may, or may not, be related to the Altaic languages and thence to the Uralics.

They really ought to add Georgian, one of the widely spoken Bantu tongues, and for good measure an Australian Aboriginal or Amerindian tongue to see how well their approach works when put to the acid test. Oh, yes, Basque would be a good trial too.

What's not obvious unless you look into it is that IE languages all have a strong family resemblance that goes a lot deeper than just vocabulary and some (nearly trivial) grammatical details. I've lately been entranced by Georgian and its gorgeous alphabet, and found some excellent web sites devoted to its grammar; the Wikipedia is quite good in fact

My head was spinning thanks to the concepts of "shreeves", and a highly agglutinative approach to verb forms, among other features of Georgian. When I woke up, it was with the insight that all IE languages are, in fact, much the same in their worldview, but other languages use totally different strategies to get the point across.

Regrettably, Georgian is not a very important language, but if any Google engineer is reading this, go ahead, give it a try. It really well test the basic concepts underly Google-lation.

They're idiots

And all an ISP has to do is use some arcane encoding followed by an even arcaner compression algorithm, and just hand the tapes over in that form. The law says (or will say) they have to provide the info, but probably not in what form, nor that the ISP is required to disentangle encoding and compression. "But Sergeant Plod of the Thought Police, the methods we use are widely understood and employed world-wide. We're not responsible for your underpaid drones' inability to suss them."

Maybe.

Penguins can dream, after all.

Why is there no screwball icon??? Ballmer will have to do.

The Truth

Chris Miller: "what have they been smoking?"

They haven't been smoking anything. They are just an especially stupid ideologues. The ideology is so half-baked that it must have been found on the back of a box of Weetabix. The only guiding principle I can perceive in all this nonsense is a touching, but totally unrealistic, faith in mankind's essential goodness. Talk about Pollyanna!

Current example: The Brown entity babbling about "people power." Does it ever cross his dim little mind that if the people have less power after 11 years of NuLabour, maybe the problem is with NuLabour?

At the same time, NL keeps foisting ever more intrusive nonsense on the long-suffering electorate!

"Community tension monitoring" reminds me, not of Nazi Germany, but of post-1948 Czechoslovakia where the citizenry were expected to cohesively join in maintenance of public spaces on weekends and those who didn't join in in a spirit of true socialist solidarity were noted as possible opponents to the regime.

I'm awfully glad I live in Canada where the main interest of national politicians is lining their pockets with cash, legislation being mainly window dressing to distract the press.

Eric Partridge, Usage and Abusage, p. 65

Teen IM-language (also grandparents') is probably best categorized as a "cant", though teens, grannies, and grampses don't quite qualify as "the underworld" that Partridge associates with the use of cant.

Not a slang, not a jargon, not an argot.

The reference is to the 1970 Penguin edition.

Boffins

Please engage your sense of humor before reading El Reg's comments re boffins and boffinry.

Thank you.

A fundamental function of government...

...is to interfere, to say "no, you can't do that, and you'd better stop it right now." Other times it's "you must do this, and no backtalk or bitching about it."

Mr. Brueggeman seems to have forgotten that government is in principle an expression of society's consensus about how things should be, society meaning the entire citizenry. He's being stupid because large corporations have by and large suborned governments all over the world at the present time, but sooner or later the pendulum will swing the other way. *Then* he'll have cause for complaints about "government interference."

Or maybe he thinks "what's good for AT&T is good for America."

Poor confused baby; maybe a night with Paris would sort him out.

The problem with Linux: nobody's in charge

This leads to two irritating characteristics of Linux:

1. The user interface varies arbitrarily from app to app. If you want to open the "file" menu, some apps want "press alt, release, then press F". Others want "press alt, hold it down, and press F".

Linux may be more robust and secure under the hood, but Windows unquestionably has the more polished UI.

2. The developers seem to be fixated on adding bells and whistles, resulting in bloat. If the Linux community really wants to differentiate Linux from Windows, it wouldn't hurt to actively attack bloat.

Many, many years ago when I worked in "large systems support" for Burroughs (B6700 days), releases of the MCP alternated between new features and improved efficiency. One release would add bells and whistles, and the machine would slow down. Next release would add few new features, but everything got faster and more responsive.

Not a bad model for an OS release cycle, no?

I imagine trying to direct the Linux development community in one direction is much like trying to herd cats, but can't a good border collie manage the latter?

Or am I a hopeless dreamer?

Heart, because at my advanced age one hopelessly dreams of love. [N.B. I *did* *not* use the Paris icon this time. Paris may be for lovers, but Paris herself and the emotion "love" seem to live on different planets.]

Gilbert & Sullivan: "make the punishment fit the crime"

The thing that's troubling in this case and, sadly, many other prosecutions in the IP field, is that the punishments meted out are wholly disproportionate to the actual effect of the crime.

As when MS screams that umpty-billions of dollars are lost to east Asian piracy. Reality is that those using the pirated software are unable and unwilling to pay the going rate. There is little or no lost profit, the retail price of the stolen IP notwithstanding.

As when someone is jailed, even for just a few hours, for dropping an apple core in the street.

Has the world gone mad?

[Answer: yes.]

@ ZM

"Create an exploit that disables their network drivers and puts a message up on the screen saying "Hello, numbnuts, your computer's been hacked, please fix it." Or, heck, even just patch the exploit itself."

Why not just install one of the friendlier flavors of Linux and be done with the vulnerabilities inherent in Windows?

You get what you pay for

Somewhere I've read that once upon a time, a UK govt minister stated that they wanted the government to be "in the first rank of employers."

Obviously not any more. Instead of hiring a relatively small number of intelligent individuals, they've opted for quantity over quality, pay slave wages so as to hire the requisite number of drones while staying within budget, and...

...get what they've paid for. People who can't find a real job that pays decent money.

It's not the drones' fault; it's management's (and that includes the ministers on whose desks the bucks theoretically stop).

When you're dealing with intellectual retards, you can't expect any performance better than you'd get from children playing in a sandbox.

Whatever Paris's faults and virtues, at least that girl knows how to get paid well.

But no USB port on the front :(

Boo hoo hoo.

I h_a_t_e having to fumble around at the back of a machine to plug in this or that portable device. Esp the cable-free infernalPod.

I wonder if Paris gets plugged in the back?

Is "climate" or "average weather" a myth?

Chaos theorists have suggested that there is no stable long-term average weather; that the weather, being a chaotic phenomenon, is therefore subject to arbitrarily wide swings "on average", both long- and short-term. (I'm too lazy to go dig out the exact reference.)

In a word, there is no "climate".

Seems to me that this makes flood planning rather more difficult.

Next week, icebergs in the Bay of Bengal and tropical jellyfish in the North Sea.

The Canadian Index

has been in existence for years. In Canada, formal censorship is imposed only on imports, which are held to a stricter standard than home-brew material. (The main reason for this is to stroke the homophobic attitudes of some eminence grise whose identity remains a mystery.)

I kid you not.

If you snoop around on the Canadian customs website, you will find a lovingly detailed list of the prohibited items, this book, that issue of that magazine, etc.

Indeed, I once had friends in Sodom-by-the-Bay who delighted to send me porn magazines. One was seized and I discovered to my amusement that the Canadian gubmint has a form with a tick box labelled "bestiality." (One can pose the question, but what if the sheep likes it?)

There are two serious objections to this kind of nonsensical legislation:

First, when you criminalize a very wide swath of the population (as with both the anti-porn and anti-grass moves of the Brown faction), the laws simply cannot be uniformly enforced. Mr. Plod Constable therefore enforces them selectively, and, what's worse, arbitrarily. I believe the cry "no arbitrary government" historically has been a call to the barricades in the UK in the past, no?

Second, with the porn bill you end up with the ludicrous situation that depictions of legal acts are illegal, while depictions of illegal acts (murder, high speed chases, etc in movies) are legal. Cognitive dissonance anyone?

Time to STOP this nonsense, this pandering to the bluenose contingent in the electorate. Perhaps it's time to get pictures of Comrade Brown in bra and fishnet stockings and Comradess Jacqui wielding the whip? Now *that* would be truly disgusting.

And the reason for the high speed copter chase?

Someone threw a toffee wrapper out the window.

Funny, isn't it, that when British coppers had nothing but nightsticks the place was generally peaceful and placid, but now that they've been thoroughly militarized along US lines, the UK is a criminal's paradise and an ordinary citizen's nightmare.

If Ebay grabs CL, that's the end of CL

Just like if MS grabs Yahoo, they'll fubar it. Big corporations just don't get the point about some things. (Well, yeah, I know, Yahoo is a big corporation itself, but it's such a ramshackle agglomeration of bits and pieces that I wonder why anybody wants it; Yahoo doesn't even get the point of Yahoo anymore.)

First there'll be "targeted ads." Then they'll impose small fees across the board instead of keeping it free except for a handful of big-dollar categories. Then they'll start censoring it lest the fundies on the Ebay board object to the more salacious ads, to say nothing of the word "fuck", perhaps outsourcing this detail to Walmart, which is already expert in imposing Arkansan morality on recorded music lyrics.

And before you know it, CL will be a dismal failure instead of the shining success it is today.

Maybe they need to set up a CL foundation and transfer all rights to software and the CL name to it, with leaseback provisions. A foundation with VERY strict objectives that can't be subverted by the greedy...

Where's my coat before it begins to rain?

The Pope of Scotland?

Anybody notice how ol' what's-his-face thinks he speaks for Christians in general? The thing that's really odd about doing so is that the Church of Scotland, being a good, sound Calvinist institution that believes, inter alia, in predestination, as a Protestant church allows every communicant to think for themselves.

Is the Church of Scotland infested with wannabe popes?

As for a law forbidding cross-insemination, the man displays a touching, and totally unrealistic, faith in the power of the law. Besides, he forgets that Herr Hitler's minions tried gorilla sperm in women with nil results, a strong indication that (as another reply indicated) we primates are not sufficiently compatible to hybridize.

Another point: it's well known in gay circles that the more hysterical someone's condemnation of the love that dare not speak its name, the stronger the homosexual drive they're repressing. Arguing by analogy, I conclude that what's-his-face has a burning, nearly uncontrollable urge to screw a chimp. Someone really ought to kidnap him, dose him well with suitable disinhibitors, and shove him into a cage full of the objects of his lust, then put the video on YouTube.

Is there an IT connection to all this? I wish there was, but there isn't, but thank God (assuming she/it/he exists) that El Reg feels free to wander off its own turf and give its readers other news from time to time.

Windows LIfe Support

It may be an urban legend but it sounded authentic when I heard it:

Patient undergoing operation. Important apparatus controlled by Windows, anesthesia, ventilation, blood pump, something important. Windows decides it's time for an update, calls home, downloads update, installs it, reboots, and kerplunk, a patient in very bad shape thanks to Windows going off duty at a critical time.

True? False? Anti-MS propaganda? Anybody know?

Maybe our poor vulture was on Windows-run life support?

"Just works"

Well maybe. but as someone who's been trying Linux (Ubuntu at that) since last fall, I've gotten real tired of several doesn't-just-work aspects:

1. The endless necessity to edit config files.

2. The endless necessity to issue terminal commands.

Points (1) and (2) are facets of the pervasive lack of GUI interfaces to many configuration options.

3. That technical and how-to-fix info is scattered over an infinity of blogs, forums, and such, so trying to fix *my* issue involves looking for a needle in a haystack. In particular, so far I have not found any site that gives a reasonbly detailed overview of how Linux's parts all fit together. I have to look in ancient Linux bibles to find some of that out, the rest I remain in ignorance of. Example: spelling dictionaries: where are they? Are they user specific, app specific, or system-wide? The answer doesn't matter, but one's inability to easily find the answer is a serious drawback. Sadly such Ubuntu books as I've looked at assume you've never seen a word processor before so they waste time on "and here's how to embolden your text ."

4. Complete lack of uniformity in UI specifications. E.g. some apps require that you hold down the ALT key while pressing "F" to get at a file menu, other do the Windows thing of press and release, then key "F". There's nobody in control. Say what you will about MS, at least Windows' surface is well-polished for the most part.

5. Bugs! Wine is particularly bad, though it's understandable. After a while, you just get fed up with malfunctions and keep using Win98 on an old junker for those programs that require it.

Paris, just because I like using the Paris icon.

@ratfox

"as far as I know, it's not illegal to be a bum."

But it used to be. Vagrancy laws, the crime of being "without a visible means of support", laws against panhandling & begging.

I predict those will come back. Here in Canada, the human rights guarantees of our constitution prevents this, but sooner or later some Cdn government is going to invoke the "notwithstanding" clause and pass them.

The problem will be to then house all the new criminals.

None of which remarks come any where near proposing a sensible solution to the problems of homelessness, drug addictions, and downtowns turned into no-go zones thanks to the lowlifes prowling around.

Ha ha ha

Let's see, who's the real sucker in this scam?

Customers? No, they're having this intrusive snooping involuntarily foisted on them.

The ISP's? Prolly no; I think (but am not sure) that Phorm et cie pay the ISP's.

Who else <thinks> Aha! It's the advertisers, who as usual have swallowed the marketers' lies hook, line, and sinker.

Guess what? Targeted ads are not effective advertising. I hope some business that contracted with Phorm holds them to their lying promises and sues the pants off Phorm when this whole snoopathon turns out to have no effect on sales.

Incidentally, while I'm on a roll, here's something amusing: google "sumerian cuneiform" (no quotes) and take a look at the amusing ads offering best prices on cuneiform that pop up on the results page. Ha ha ha. So much for targeted ads!

@ Dafydd Lawrence

"I never thought I would see actual SQL statements written in full in a query string. What reason could they possibly have for doing that?"

Assertion: the supply of competent programmers and IT analysts falls far short of what's needed, given the complexity and sensitivity of many applications.

Assertion: The State of Oklahoma either (a) doesn't pay its IT people what they're worth, hence ends up hiring incompetents or (b) farms out this work to the lowest bidder, which itself doesn't pay it's IT people what they're worth, etc.

Consequence: Incompetents programming sensitive systems. These incompetents simply don't know any better.

Simple application of the law of supply and demand and the adage "you get what you pay for."

QED and all that.

An alternative explanation

First of all, remember the adage "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

Second, consider one of the great management vices of the late 20th century, continuing into the third millenium: a profound distaste for ever being seen to have made a mistake, large or small. Institutional paralysis results, as the only criticism that can then result is that of indecisiveness -- but never the feared "made a mistake."

This is a form of incompetence, as any intelligent person knows that anyone or any organization that actually does anything, that actually makes decisions, is going to make mistakes reasonably often.

I offer this up as an explanation (in part or in whole, I dunno!) of the incredible misbehavior of that cow of a home secretary and her boss the blithering idiot.

Gee, I'm glad I don't live in Britain!

An alien couldn't think this up even if he was stoned on skunk.

Wondering

Has any El Reg reader tried the tactic of joining in the conversation going on next to them on a cellphone, making witty suggestions, and offering astute advice? "Don't believe him, he's a lying scumbag, tell him so!"

or "No, no, not rutabagas, they're radioactive these days."

I'm wondering just what ensues when you try this.

First hand reports, please.

There's an orange in my coat pocket, gotta run now!

@ Franklin

"The ultimate problem is gullibility"

After all, these are the same people who think marketing types and spin doctors are worth their pay.

I'm waiting for the day someone discovers a corporation largely in the public eye that turns out to be nothing but an executive suite, a marketing & lying department, and naught else. No manufacturing, no research, no nothing but spin, spin, spin with periodic episodes of hot air, bullshit, and self-aggrandizement. Remember, you read it here first.

Outlaw "working at home"

Took work home in order to brown nose the higher ups? Bang! you're fired.

Allowed or encouraged an employee to take work home? Bang! you're fired, and the employee is owed serious overtime payments before leaving.

Turned a blind eye to an employee taking work home? Bang! you're fired.

I'm quite serious. Not only would this help with security of data, but would also help reverse the rising tide of "all your waking hours are belong to the company."

What I really wonder is how much work is actually done at home?

Paris, because that girl makes sure she gets paid even for attending parties. Must be a nice job if you can get it.

Usage and Abusage (with apologies to Eric Partridge)

Those who "happily turn down the corner of the page as they chuck a paperback into their satchel" also tend to read while lounging indulgently in a bathtub full of bubblebath, into which said paperbacks are accidentally immersed from time to time.

E-books in the bathtub? I think not. <blows bubble>

The Gates icon because he (a) probably can't read and (b) needs to spend more time in the bathtub.

The Night of the Living Dead

ha ha ha

The fact that HM Govt resists pressure to release these reports is a sure sign that said reports do not toe the party line on ID cards.

I can imagine some of the remarks:

"Technologically infeasible"

"Can be expected to run significantly over budget and over schedule"

"Will not work"

"Will not help the anti-terrorism cause one iota"

"Will result in frequent mis-identifications leading to loss of life, property, and freedom"

"Does not include any mechanism for correcting mistakes"

"Can be expected to have error rates approaching 100%"

"Captures far too much irrelevant data"

"Won't work"

"Institutes a Stasi-like police state"

"Will cause further emigration of the intelligentsia"

"Won't work"

"Will never be finished"

"Can be expected to damage the political process irremediably"

"Looks like pork barrel to me"

"Why is it being programmed in the Labour strongholds of the north where there is a chronic, severe shortage of skilled IT workers?"

"A pie in the sky project, doomed to abject failure"

"Biting off more than the government can chew"

"Nothing but a cash cow for large IT consulting firms"

"Won't work"

"Will kill people"

etc etc etc

Who is going to drive an oak stake through the heart of The Project That Will Not Die?

DHCP: Bang! You're dead!

Seems to me that it's a Good Idea to relinquish one's DHCP reservation before going to bed. Leave the IP address unused overnight and you have a better chance of getting a different one in the morning, no?

That should frustrate the snoops who depend on IP address to tie your browsing habits together.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

Leaning back and meditating on the why, I realized there's a Big Lie behind all this. To wit, that all this snooping on web browsing habits and nosing around, contrary to marketers' claims, doesn't do a damned thing to increase sales of ANYTHING.

To claim that targeted advertising online makes a difference is just a ploy by the marketers to suck more money out of the pockets of advertisers and thereby keep themselves in a job.

Disbelief? Did I just hear a snort of disbelief from one of the El Reg readers? Well just stop and consider: how many times have you bought something because of online advertising? About the only exception I can think of is Amazon's (and other sites') "other customers who bought this also bought X, Y, and Z" suggestions.

So in the end we have yet another confirmation that marketers are professional liars. Not only do they lie in the advertisements they create, they lie to their own customers about the efficacy of advertising.

Liars! Do your mothers know what you do for a living?

Tony Blair

A legend in his own mind, and unhesitating in letting the world know this. And *seriously* disconnected from reality.

If I were Pope, I'd have rejected his application as "not suitable".

I may be a muppet, alas!

But at least I'm not a professional liar.

TCP/IP specification. . .

How many pages does the specification of TCP/IP take?

Maybe I'm just an ignorant innocent, but a 14,000 page specification strongly suggests that the documented protocols are not *designed* but, rather, have been allowed to evolve autonomously as feature after feature was glued on to them.

Just like Windows.

Grammar Police Citation...

...against the Register.

That headline should read "EU Demand Google Slash Cookie Retention Times."

There's an implicit "that" betw. "demand" and "google".

My instruction in English language grammar was afflicted with Latinisms like indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and infinite moods, so I regret I am unable to give a clear explanation other than "that's the correct idiom."

Bad vulture!

Reading the Entrails

Microsoft has bitten off more than it can chew with Vista. Or, to put it more charmingly, has tried to eat something bigger than its head.

I really have to wonder if all the people who understood how an OS operates at the deepest level have left Redmond. Or to put it less charmingly, I wonder if it's simply that Microsoft doesn't know what it's doing.

Paris because ... well, just because.

@ BigYin

"I haven't seen these documents yet, maybe I'll go and download them before they're gone."

Don't bother unless you have something in mind more than merely satisfying your curiosity or being able to crow about the Top Sekreet Scientology Documents on your hard drive.

They are beyond dreary. They're not even bad science fiction. They make no sense, no matter which way you turn the page. I used to have the entire NOTS series I'd downloaded from somewhere, but finally decided to junk them because they were of no earthly use to anybody (except CoS bigwigs who use them to rake in the cash).

Haven't missed them for a minute.

But if you don't believe, go ahead. You won't be sorry, but you''ll agree with my assessment once you've read this trash.

Paris because tho' she's trashy, at least she makes sense.

Re: Terminology

"There is nothing in the way to attenuate the signal other than air."

Inverse square law.

For those of you already practicing your air rage in anticipation of a jerk in the next seat yammering pointlessly on his cell phone, a reminder that it is considered good manners to join in the conversation. After all it is in a public space and loud enough to be heard with no effort at all, hence bystanders' participation must be welcome:

"Oh, go on, tell him what you *really* think."

"No, that's not right, it should be *three* teaspoons of vanilla, and one hour at 325 Fahrenheit."

"What did you say your underwear size is?"

"Hey, tell 'em about the flock of dinosaurs we're going through right now."

And for those whose employers expect 24/7 connectivity: just turn the damned thing off anyway unless you've been given on-call pay. In the old days, I worked at a couple of jobs where the guys with pagers for the weekend got quarter time pay for every hour they were on call. Surely, if your services are so valuable, what's a little money between friends?

@ Kwac

It's worse than that. A friend who is a prison guard tells me that pedophiles, if deprived of their little girl porn, will simply make collages of innocuous pictures of little girls clipped out of catalogs and advertisements, and use that instead as a focussing aid.

He also tells me that pedophiles generally know exactly what they are up to, and will take considerable time (and patience) to "groom" a child so their sexual advances on the kid are not rejected out of hand.

I'd be all for cutting their balls off (sorry, Mr. Moderator, but plain talk is in order), but for the problem of miscarriages of justice. Heavens knows that there have been enough witchhunts under the banner of combating pedophilia to make miscarriages a very real problem.

Sad face because this is not a pleasant topic.

Maximization of shareholder value

But, aha, does that pernicious legal doctrine stipulate a time frame? If not, then all Mr. Yang has to do is say "we believe that in the long run, staying out of MS's hands increases shareholder value far more than falling into the hands of the Balmerzilla."

I really think it's time that shareholder value be put in the backseat and the first duties of corporations be toward society as a whole, customers, and employees. IOW, yes, you can maximize shareholder value, but only in a framework of behaving honorably, honestly, and openly, in the broadest possible senses. If doing so affects the bottom line, it's just a cost of doing business.

After all, corporations benefit enormously from the legal fiction of being a person, and that fiction could be made null and void with the stroke of a pen.

Of course, insisting that honor, honesty, and openness be the order of the day disqualifies a great many of the psycho- and sociopaths who infest the higher levels of management these days. Ditto for marketing types and spin doctors. I guess they can get new jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds.

PS: MS seems to have overlooked a minor detail. Of all Yahoo's customers, some are also signed on to the MS equivalent and some are not. Of those who are, grabbing Yahoo will not increase the MS online customer base, while those who aren't on MS already are so by choice and are quite likely to jump ship. MS also needs to look in the mirror and admit that they have a proven track record of incompetence when it comes to providing content. Buying Yahoo and then attempting to Redmondize it is a guarantee that whatever is good about Yahoo now will become bad.

@ StillNoCouch: Oxymoron Alert!

"a thinking advertiser"

I rest my case.

What's needed is canonical intelligence

So this botnet exists thanks to listings of img.jpg.exe not showing the extensions. Now, let's see...what large software company thought that one up? And how long ago? And now that it's proven to be a source of problems over and over and over again, why haven't they changed their sinful ways?

Ditto for doing the user a favor by auto-executing program files such as the concealed img.jpg.exe.

Admitting the error of one's ways is "canonical intelligence", a commodity that seems to be in short supply in a certain Seattle suburb. Hubris is the speciality there, it seems.

Heart, because AV & security companies *love* Redmond for giving them so much lucrative work! Ditto for the spammers; without MS, they'd have to go earn an honest living, I guess.

@ Paul Gray

"a [sic] attack upon the UK goverment [sic] and UK security as a whole"

Minor problem: it isn't at all clear that biometric ID works. Many knowledgeable, thoughtful people have pointed out defects in the scheme. Meanwhile, only simpletons like NuLabour fall for the sales spiel of the companies who want to suck at the public titty while building this useless, privacy-destroying, ineffective system. NuLabour (and their ilk) need to stop looking for magic and/or silver bullets for society's woes.

Moreover, even supposing that biometric ID "works", it's highly doubtful that it enhances security in any useful way. Don't forget that the airplane hijackers of 9/11 were all in the US legally, and all had valid ID.

The whole point of this amusing scheme is to make the unworkability of biometric ID so obvious that even the dimwitted Mr. Brown will have to back away from it.

Ring ring: two real-life incidents

Incident One:

One delightful day I got a mail from my bank (Royal Bank of Canada) informing me that online banking was now enabled on my accounts. I immediately phoned them and told them to disable online banking on my accounts.

"But why, sir?"

"It's insecure."

"Oh, no, it's completely secure."

"No, it isn't; one of your marketing wonks enabled online banking on my accounts without my permission."

<silence>

Incident Two:

ring ring

"Hello, this is Statistics Canada, we have some questions about your census return."

"That's nice but how do I know you are who you say you are? Is there a telephone number that is listed in the telephone book whereby I can validate your identity? We live in a world full of scams, phishing, identity theft and so on, and I would be irresponsible to simply believe you without verification."

"Yes, phone 1-800-555-1212."

"Sorry, but that's not in the telephone book under Stats Canada."

Ultimately he gave up and marked the form as not answered due to concerns about confidentiality. I pointed out that the real reason was that his identity could not be validated, but alas! the form he had evidently had no such box on it to tick.

I once took a course in survey methods from Stats Canada, and in those days they did have verification phone numbers that were listed in the telephone book. No more, evidently.

Truth is stranger than -- or as amusing as -- fiction

Many many years ago when I was a wee lad studying at Caltech, one of the guys in the student residence (a native of Texas) was fond of playing obnoxious country music on his radio at top volume with the door to his room open.

Another denizen was something of an electronics whiz and was using a nearby storeroom to build an RF induction heater for some company in the LA area. About a kilowatt, iirc. Old school electronics with *big* vacuum tubes and a largish induction coil.

Eventually the scenario arose where the music lover would do his thing and the electronic whiz kid would simply tune his induction heater until the radio was jammed. Music lover would retune to another station, shortly to be followed by the jammer.

Highly illegal, I s'pose, but I don't know the range of the jammer. We all had a good laugh at Mr. Music.

There is nothing new under the sun.

$240 million? Is that all?

That's less than $1 per head on average. Equivalent to 1% of the population losing $100 once a year to "cybercrime." Or one out of a thousand citizens losing $1000 annually.

Sounds like chickenfeed to me.

Somebody refresh my memory: what's the aggregate cost so far of the Iraq and Afghanistan incursions?

Re: Keep them off the Net

If our esteemed moderator (moderatrix?) will forgive me posting a second comment...

Isn't it time to turn the whole thing about children and the net on its head and stipulate that no part of the net is safe for children unless specifically so classified? And then bar under-18s from all but the kiddies' sections. (Somehow this reminds me of the Howdy Doody show from ancient US television.)

After all, the net was built by adults for adults and only limited portions are intentionally aimed at youngsters. Why are youngsters given free run of an adult institution?

No, I'm not so foolish as to think that kids wouldn't know to fake their ages if they wanted to get into the adult areas.