Posts by dreadful scathe

@Sarah Bee

Can you arrange to have Gerhardt executed for that joke? Its a reasonable request!

(if you dont have that power, then frankly, its about time you got it)

Its not Dells fault

She bought the wrong thing and turned down Dells offer of a change. Their futher advice that ubuntu could do what she needed it to was correct, how is Dell support supposed to know just how limited her knowledge is? Well done Dell is all I can say.

I don't think badly of this woman but I imagine that if she bought a car that took Diesel fuel rather than Petrol , we would be seeing a similar news story about her "not being able to drive to college due to her filling up her car with "regular gas" and it not working anymore".*

She really should have looked into using someone elses computer, or a library computer, or calling an engineer to get it to work like you would with a car, or your plumbing or, well, anything else. The "giving up" is entirely her fault.

*yes i know it was online and she wasnt driving, its an example ;)

@ Dave

""Street Value" is the cost of the item AS SOLD ON THE HIGH STREET!!!"

well thats just stupid - you can't buy pirated DVDs on the high street, you only get packaged originals. Hmm, basically you are suggesting that "street price" is the cost for items that do not actually exist. Why include such a figure ? It serves no purpose other than to make it sound like more money is at stake!

And this "street price", is it a pre-credit crunch "street price"? cos that'd be different to the now dicounted mid-credit crunch "street price" ;)

surely this article is a mild rant against wikipedia

an incredibly simplistic and biased view! Wikipedias policy for editing is up to wikipedia and is not in any way comparable to the IWFs blocking of certain pages on the internet based on some highly suspect persons view of indecency. The IWF and some ISPs are clearly closely linked so Wikipedia have a valid point (albeit one edged with unfounded argument for wikipedia openness), and I'm no fanboy for the "online encyclopedia of public opinion accountable to beer[sic] review".

oh dear

its rather a victorian attitude to assume "indecency" in simple nudity :( Censorship is bad enough, but stupid censorship based on someone else outdated views of decency is a big step toward the collapse of our free society. :(

valid law

i agree about the law being perfectly valid - it should be included in wikipedia as valid but humorous. However, there is one exception to this law from my own experience. When one famous university in scotland was updating their old client/server software to a web based front end, it was mainly in response to the increasingly slow reponses which the students and staff constantly complained about. But amusingly, the ONLY thing replaced was the interface now being thin client in a browser. Responses were the same as before as the back end had not changed. Users and staff loved the interface and its much faster response time. Speed expectations for web pages were so low in those dial-up days :)

aargh

trial by wikipedia? god help us all :( Its fictional programs like CSI , Law and Order and Criminal Minds that make your average person think they know something about crime and legality - they don't !! and i include me in this - I'm in IT for goodness sake. CSI makes you believe that when you find ANYTHING interesting at a crime scene it is automatically relevant to the crime at hand.

domainers

i didnt know that was what a "domainer" was, but going by that definition all domainers should be stung up *

* like "strung up" but in a room full of angry wasps

@greg

well said - 15 years is NOT the age of the internet - it is the age of the WWW.

Hey, its not a big deal - its just daft! If we use "internet" and "www" as synonymous terms - what term do we then use to collectively describe the many non-www bits; email, p2p, streaming video, IM etc... do we need a new name ? why not use "internet" :)

paris: because she isnt smart enough to know there is a difference between WWW and INTERNET either, in common with some replies here :)

scam messages

i have had 4 of these sent to me so far on facebook - i always reply to all with "this is not a legit message - do not download file" or words to that affect. I would hope that most of my friends are too mature to reply to ANY message that has LOL and far too many exclamation marks!!!!! in !! the !!!title!!

hmm are we sure yahoo!! are!!not!!responsible!?!!

bug?flaw?feature?bugeature?

is this a bug? surely, in all seriousness, this is a feature. Why else would it execute commands from what should simply be a large-never-executed-block-of-text-to-be-sent-somewhere. Are you suggesting that the programmers *accidently* enabled command execution in a text box? Is that like when shoplifters *accidently* drop things into their pockets in shops ? :) "Sorry, Officer. These big pockets are a design flaw of the coat I'm wearing...and I'm clumsy"

god and dolly parton

of course they are doing the right thing by getting two heavyweights behind their campaign...and god too

elementary my dear boss

why the spade? are we going treasure hunting ? :)

bring back Maggie?

Shes starting to look good. She called a spade a spade alright.

patent?

another patent on the bleeding obvious ? live tv has had to sort out this for years - isnt there a 5 second delay or something ? there has been text based censoring since there has been text based messaging! can we expect Father Ted episodes to filter out 'Fek 'as it sounds a bit like something else, thus making it appear far more sweary than it really is.

Bill would never swear!

prison?

so when we are living in a virtual prison camp with our every move watched and recorded - it will all be worth it because our civil liberty of "not being killed" is being protected. Its the only way to foster a happy nation where all terrorism will completely dissapear ! (probably overnight if they restrict us enough)

porn?

silly law aside - theres another thing at stake here ... ownership of your own image !

its surely up to her if she wants to take pics of herself , though there may be some sort of "harrassment" case if the recipients of this picture complain, but thats about it.

ooh

@paulm

"Do you live in a cave? We've had DRM-free music for a year now. You're just finding excuses not to pay."

Big assumption there. I'm no freetard. I pay for all my music. There is still DRM music out there, it is far from dead and what DRM free music there is, is not yet CD quality. But yes, I did word that badly and I am out of touch :)

@JohnB

"You mean like a CD? Or is the cost not "reasonable" enough for you?"

yes exactly like that, thats why i get all my music on CD. It would be hoped that the quality and "ownership" a CD gives you would not be compromised within new digitial music distribution channels. But so far, both have been.

Its certainly getting better but i would expect the huge distribution cost savings to be passed onto the consumer as well as the author.

web n00bs

For the web n00bs, who are happy to post in comments on el Reg :), have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocols and look at the Application layer protocols ;) There's more than just HTTP (and what gets me is the majority of you use POP3 every single day...sigh)

permission

>>that they consider any handset left in "discoverable" mode to be implicitly giving permission for pushed adverts <<

so by that token anyone with an open wireless router is implicitly giving permission for you to use their internet connection, and more than that even - you are allowed to send adverts to each of their machines on their network :)

@james

"Software pirates are parasites on society, no better than welfare scroungers. And you know the DRM that everyone is always bitching about? If you want that to go away then stop pirating the f-ing games!"

There will always be pirating, as there will always be people who would like a use something but not buy it. I'd liken it to borrowing a book from a friend, you COULD buy it, but with only a passing interest you are not likely to. In the case of a book though, your friend is deprived of that book while you have it. In this case of a digitial download, no one is deprived of anything. What we are arguing about here is copyright infringement and making people aware that it is not right to illegally download copyrighted material. Taking people to court while increasing prices and use of DRM to make life more and more difficult ... does this seem SENSIBLE to you ? :) Wouldn't lowering the price and making it easier to buy things be a good idea?

As for DRM - DRM exists purely to maximise profits. You can argue otherwise if you like, but show me where a DRM product is 100% free from piracy? You can even argue DRM lessens piracy, perhaps it does in some cases but at the expense of the consumer who just wants to buy something cheaply with no extra hassle. A cheaper product will simply not be worth pirating in the UK. Hey, didn't Radiohead make MORE money from their freely available last album ? :)

"As software developer, and someone who always buys games (and because I read reviews, almost never buy a dud) I have nothing but comtempt for pirates and those who support them, with the sole exception of those in developing countries who have literally no choice."

So piracy is bad except when you say it isn't. Nice of you :) I have noticed that poor software developers with poor products feel especially aggrieved by pirates, often because they are the only people that seem interested in their software. This suggests to me piracy is often more to do with simple distribution and less to do with ripping people off - after all, if there were people out there who were willing to pay for your software - they would. If you need an example, look at the donations some open source software projects get.

@Stan and Darwin Quoters

" definitely worthy of a darwin nomination but not funny enough to deserve one. "

in what way is he worthy of a darwin nomination ? did the red dot attempt to kill him ? If so, perhaps it IS worth the $1000 :)

no way thats a 12A

I was shocked to find it it was a 12a to be honest. Surely the BBFC are classifying films as advice to parents and a 12A means "probably ok for under 12's" what else do we take it to mean ? Its not about parental control as if you were to go by the BBFCs advice and take your mature 8 year old, they will have learnt that slamming a pencil through someones eyeball is a cool magic trick :( The suggestion that you pre-watch everything or rely on reviews defeats the point of having a classification system in the first place.

So spokeswoman Sue Clark says, "Younger teenagers would not have been able to see it, and they are the very people who are going to love it. We would have ended up with far more complaints from people who wanted to see the film and couldn't."

Is this a good argument ? What about selling alcohol to under 18's? there are lots of complaints from them that they can't get served in pubs, so best just let them in really as they are the people who are going to love it :)

The last Heath Ledger film I went to see years ago was the cheesy teen nonsense of "10 things I hate about you" that was a 12 and not a 12A. Now thats scary.

@ @ ALL THE TROLLERS

@ (I'm a Linux/Win admin by the way, I meet these people all the time and may well be a wanker myself).

You sound doubtful. Don't be.

here, have this hat - it will protect you

How far is this from thought policing ? Some people clearly like sexual cartoon manga and other "depravity" on the offical "depravity" list, and currently can look at it - BUT such thoughts are clearly wrong, according to our wonderful government, so it starts by banning the visual depiction of this "depravity" and work on getting at those "thoughts" in future.

The tinfoil won't protect you. And if it's a "government issue" tinfoil hat...be very, very afraid :(

@Michelle Knight

no, its not censorship - he said "obviate the need for any legislation to cover downloadable video " so its...er...downloadable isn't it. Wheres the censorship ?

paris hilton would have been able to figure this out

vista is an OS too

got to love

>First, we need to avoid comparing apples to oranges

Both XP and Vista are Operating Systems so a direct comparison is fair, and really, required seeing as new PC owners are forced to use Vista. For Microsoft to suggest you can't compare the two, must be because they think Vista will suffer by the comparison.

The fact that Vista does things differently is expected, if its not "better" in some way than XP, then what is the point of it? An OS is the simply the visual front end for the control of your hardware - Vista does it in a fancier way and uses more resources as a result - there's really no need to be shy about it if it is "worse" in someways but "better" overall.

The big issue of course is choice - why can't people still buy ,use and obtain support for XP if they consider it "better for them" ?

@levi and AC

"Evidence of Abusive Registration"

eh? did IQ's drop sharply while I was away ? They registered the Domain name 6 years before myspace.com. If they find they are no longer using it, they can offer to sell it to anyone for however much they like - including myspace.com who CHOSE to buy a domain that had a co.uk equivalent already registered.

taxi on a credit card?

Is this a London thing then? that you pay for a taxi up front with a credit card ? Not something I've ever come across, but you live and learn...

amiga 8bit

The Commodore Amiga was an 8bit machine? i wasn't aware of that :)

@steve roper

well put ...

the evidence for the damage caused by piracy is never really brought up - this has always made Microsoft appear evangelical, and who listens to the priesthood nowadays :)

its simple

I don't know what all the fuss is about - if someone physically BROADCASTS an OPEN and UNSECURED WIFI CONNECTION - thats an implicit invitation to connect. You can butter it up, put metaphorical wings on it then crowbar in all the burglary and theft related analogies you like, but it doesn't make it anything the police should be bothering themselves with.

@anonymous coward

he looked nothing whatsoever like the guy who they were looking for...have you even seen the pics ? They both looked male and had the right number of ears, eyes and noses...but there the similarity ends.

confused.com

i must admit i don't understand this story. If he was impossible to understand then how do we know he was trying to rob the place ? If he had a gun or some other threatening weapon the teller would understand it was a robbery even if he spoke no English at all. Sounds more like a disgruntled citizen wanting to sort out a banking issue which they totally failed to handle.

tsk Americans. :)

£200 a year

that could be expensive for the smoker, assuming of course the license is granted by all the people who will have to breath in the foul poison, being the affected parties and all. It wouldn't be the government that collected this or that'd be a stealth tax with no concern for others health at all - and they wouldn't do THAT...would they :)

@Nicholas Ettel

giles: "This is why we don't want media giants controlling any part of the Internet. It will be transformed into a huge money making tool if they have their way."

you: "Ummm... and just how do you get access to the internet? You pay the ISP to get access to the internet... it already sounds as if the internet is a money-making tool."

right, so if my garage door - when opened, gives me access to the road network...i "control" the road network do I? I'll use that excuse next time I'm stopped for speeding :) I hope you were being obtuse - either that or you truly didn't understand that Giles was talking about controlling more than just initial access.

poor list

paul: what part of "Anglo-American" didn't you understand ;)

Got to say though - wheres the end of apartheid and Nelsons release ? the falklands war, gulf wars 1 and 2 ? the many IRA bombings ?....all trumped by a character in an ok sitcom doing a stupid dance...even Elvis's death and the footage of The Beatles arriving in the US surely beat that ?