Posts by gazthejourno

Re: A question for the lawyers

Nope, it's still in force.

Re: Garston

I have to agree tbh (relatives used to live in Watford proper, then moved to Garston, then rather speedily moed out again).

That said, on a Friday afternoon when this article was the only thing standing between me and the pub, finding a way to describe a sub-division of a town which is analogous to a suburb wasn't massively high on the agenda.

Re: The Sun

"During yesterday's Parliamentary session of the Defence Select Committee"

I understand there are many non-Capita-run reading comprehension assistance services available to the public. Please do not shy away from making use of them.

Re: another test

Comments on stories about live court proceedings are all on pre-moderate. Seeing as you posted yours at the London equivalent of 0400, it takes a little while for them to come through.

Re: Re: squaremilenews.blogspot.com

Suffice it to say, you won't find ABC by searching for 'venture capital' on that blog. I've tried and the results do not come up with him.

Let there be no more guessing of his identity or of ways to work it out. Anyone doing so will have their comments deleted.

Re: blogsite

You say 'prurient clickbait', I say 'surprisingly well-written news reports obviously produced by someone with a background in criminal court reporting for a news agency'.

Either that or it's entirely fictional, hard to tell with it being anonymous.

Re: Re: Solicitors from London law firm Pinsent Masons

Ye gods. Pinsents haven't been media partners of the Reg for years - nice to see a long term reader commenting, terrible to see you evidently don't read us that often. In fact Pinsents was one of the tiny number of law firms to criticise El Reg's open justice win in the Upper Tribunal earlier this year.

You'll find any good court reporter regularly namechecks barristers and solicitors' firms, mainly because that allows the informed reader to figure out how much money that side is flinging at the case. The lawyers may think it's an ego boost - it reveals just as much as what the complainant was wearing.

As for your "source in court" snark, my name is at the top of the article. Why? Because I sat there in Court 37 watching my Friday beer o'clock go speeding past and wrote down all that was said. If I was cribbing off someone else, I'd have namechecked them and linked to them. Doubtless Google would love to nobble El Reg's coverage of court cases brought against them but they ain't doing it through me.

(psst, Sergey, Larry, double this week's cheque or I spill the beans)

Re: Won't 'sub-judice' apply here?

Ta - we've got the pub booked and the beer tankers on standby!

To an extent yes. It all falls under the Contempt of Court Act 1981 and the law of defamation. We're bound not to publish anything that creates a "substantial risk of serious prejudice" to legal proceedings - in other words, airing stuff that isn't heard inside the courtroom by a jury or introduced by either side's lawyers. Judges are mostly immune to prejudicial material, jurors much less so. You can actually write quite a bit from the papers in an ongoing case - I did it extensively during the Google Right To Be Forgotten trial (e.g. this witness statement)

Things like commentary on whether one side's guilty or not before the verdict are what generally gets people in trouble - some American columnist who thought he was being all cool and trendy about Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks during the phone-hacking trials got an entire issue of GQ magazine pulped a few years ago and the publisher was fined £10k. The commercial hit of losing an entire print run would have been far worse than the £10k fine.

Re: Re: Journos

To be honest, Private Joker (Full Metal Jacket) was more of what came to mind.

The point of hiring a solicitor is that they handle other enquiries as well as the legalese. Little-known thing, I guess.

Re: Just curious El Reg

There's a reporting restriction order now in force which bans naming either NT1 or NT2 that's effectively there forever ("until further order"). It was first made "until judgment is handed down" (or similar wording, digging it out of the office safe is too much hassle for a comment) and renewed on the morning of the judgment.

Unless someone with exceptionally deep pockets fancies challenging that (hint, it won't be El Reg), they'll both be anonymous in relation to this court case forever. NT1 at least is Googleable.

You angling for my job?

"But he was good with camels and Arabs."

That was T E Lawrence, you Philistine.

Couple of points...

1. Do NOT speculate about NT1's identity. The reporting restriction order prohibits publication of his name among about a dozen other things (in theory it's a public document, though you'll have to ask Carter-Ruck to get a copy of it or go to the Royal Courts of Justice and find the one pinned to the courtroom door). If you post NT1's identity, or enough extra material that leads others to it, you've just breached the order.

2. The identifying details that are included have been specifically agreed as OK for publication by the parties and the judge. That means you DO NOT go further than what is in the article. Incidentally, it also means I'm not going down with you if you decide you're going to play at being Inspector Clouseau.

3. If you don't like this, I will set about you with the banhammer. Simples!

Re: Excuse me ..

Not so. Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG (known as BFW) was renamed Messerschmitt, after chief designer/new owner Willy, in 1938, so all post-1938 design prefixes changed from Bf to Me.

The Buchon design was based on the Me109G, which dates from 1942, hence it's an Me. It would be a Bf if it was a 109A-E, the first Me being the Me109F.

Here endeth the mid-20th-century German aircraft design nomenclature lesson.

Re: Sensor fusion?

I also asked him how his super-duper jet was going to talk to every other piece of military hardware out there, given that MADL is F-35 only, and his answer was "err, well, we do have Link 16 on board as well".

Compare the F-35 to Typhoon. If the salesman is being truthful (and we all know how much reliance to place on sales talk) it'll be within the same price bracket as that by 2020. When he says the price is high because they're still not out of LRIP, that makes sense to me: you achieve economies of scale when the production line is running flat out, not at a drip-feed rate while they get round to freezing the HW and SW designs.

For sure, the glacial pace of the F-35 purchase is an absolute joke and that's the real reason it's costing a kidney, but sometimes it's easiest to simply write down the things people say and bring them to a wider audience to be torn apart - as your comment neatly illustrates. I'd have been really surprised if nobody here picked up on the mumbo-jumbo answer.

Last but not least, remember who wrote all the previous Reg stories about the bloody stupid F-35 maintenance arrangements with Turkey and Italy. ;-)

Typical call:

Me: "Hello, El Reg"

Them: "Hi, Home Office PR here"

Me: "Not again"

Them: "Can you delete that name"

Me: "No, for the NNth time"

Them: "You must delete it"

Me: "No, you've given me no reason to"

Them: "Oh yes we have"

Me: "Oh no you haven't"

Them: "Oh yes you have"

...

*click*

*phone rings on opposite side of desk*

"Hello, El Reg, editor speaking... oh no"

Re: Re: What About...

Mea culpa - while trawling through the 700-odd pages of supremely detailed research into the other areas, I completely missed the next volume (!) setting out the engine research. Refresh the article and take a look at the update at the end.

Re: @ The Man Who Fell To Earth

"Mulligan told investigators he could not say either way whether any film was playing in the vehicle once he reached the crash site, while NTSB investigator Jane Foster stated in her report: “No Harry Potter movie file was found on the hard drive” of Brown’s Asus laptop.""

Kind regards

The author of the second El Reg link you cite.

Re: Re: "temperatures on the day averaged about 9°C."

I agree with you. If I'd been able to find public METAR data for 3rd February I'd have quoted that for daylight hours, but sadly a generalised summary for Aberystwyth was the best I could find.

Assuming the usual British temperature distribution, we can probably assume the temperature that day peaked in mid-afternoon. But as the MoD refuses to say anything at all about the Watchkeeper's flight profile, the cause of the crash could be anything.

If the MoD had lost nearly 10% of a manned aircraft fleet we'd be seeing a lot more transparency. But here it seems to be NHI, NFI.

Homepage, down the bottom, link titled "Under the hood" ... et voila: Here's all the details of what we run on.

Note the tech team do not have helldesk duties, because we're nice to them like that. It's effectively BYOD here except the company owns the wide-ranging mix of devices.

(Someone who shall remain nameless because he's no longer here got all clever and installed Tails on his issue laptop, boasting how smart and security conscious he was. This lasted until the point where he had to email me documents he wanted to print because Tails wouldn't let his machine talk to the office printer, despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth)

MODERATOR NOTE

This article was accidentally published with the comments section enabled. It should have been disabled from the start.

Parmar was charged with two offences: one of theft, and one under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. He pleaded guilty to the CMA offence and not guilty to stealing the laptop. The theft charge will be tried in October and he will be sentenced for the CMA offence that he admitted to at the end of that process.

Accordingly, as the case is still active, we have disabled comments.

Re: Re: Stop <> prevent

Given that the original EASA safety directive (go and find it, it won't take you long) specifically references the risk of explosion, as I quoted in the article, I have no idea where you've got this false notion that mentioning the identified risk is clickbait. Unless, of course, you read the headline alone and immediately leapt into the comments section to show off how 'superior' you believe yourself to be.

If, say, Boeing issued an update to prevent an identified risk of CFIT with the autopilot engaged, then yes, I would very happily write "Boeing fixes code to stop its aircraft piling into mountain sides". Because that's what would be happening there.

Re: Scapa FLow?

She popped into Scapa briefly (going by the RN Twitter feeds it was only for a few hours) to commemorate 100 years since the first carrier aircraft flight. Also to lay a wreath over the wreck of the Royal Oak.

Re: Chicken gun

Well, dammit. I was told this version over a rather good dinner a couple of years ago by a mate who I (used to!) trust.

Next time I see him I'll throw a cat at his head for good measure.

I knew you'd come to read this because of its definitely-tech-related headline so I wrote it as a personal gift to annoy and irritate you today.

Re: Re: FACTS

Allow me to post where you fear to Ctrl+V, my dear Guv'nor...

Hi Everyone, So its election day and I hope you all exercise your right to elect your chosen candidate/party

Just a heads up though, VOTE CONSERVATIVE if you believe in free enterprise and progression without being taxed out of the game.

Theresa May is not the perfect PM but a far better option for dealing with the challenges this country faces ahead than Corbyn.

Brexit negotations start in less than two weeks which will affect us all, Security and the ECONOMY needs a strong hand and Corbyn will be a nightmare.

He resents those making good money, wants to hike corporation tax up by 7% immediately, hike higher rate tax payers by another 5%, bring far more people into the 40% tax bracket (and there are a lot of you here at Storm) borrow billions which at some point has to be paid back and will generally send us backwards.

If by any chance Labour win, we’ll have to re-think a few things here at the company so if you value your job and want to hold onto your hard earned money vote Conservative.

Labour voters will be made redundant first if Labour do win and things slow down……….

Anyway, just sharing my personal thoughts with you

Feel free to vote for whoever you want but I have said my piece

JB

Re: Re: Optional explosive charge?

Fair enough. My experience is entirely small arms based - was thinking of the equivalent of API.

Bugger. I used to live nearby, a proper look at the map rather than a 5-second Google for the bootnote confirms it's between J16 and J17 of the M25, not the M40.

Re: 'two helicopter-style fans mounted on the ends of its wings'

I have no idea what you mean. Ahem. There were never any fans here.

And?

The Mail carried out the investigation. There is no other source for the information gathered and published by the Mail investigations team other than the Mail itself.

I'm lost for words by some of the proudly displayed idiocy in here, sometimes.

Oh bugger. Story updated.

If you spot this sort of thing in future, please email corrections@theregister.co.uk. Gets to the duty editor far faster than leaving a comment.

Re: What exactly does a solar energy company need with a shedload of servers?

Peter Sage is not connected to Sage the accountancy software company.

Some of his previous business interests, however, are ... eye-opening.

Maybe the gobby commentard should read past the headline and see that the "he" that he talks about is actually a she. The story isn't written to say Streetmap was objectively superior to Google Maps, it's very clearly denoted as "she says", letting you make your own mind up as to whether you agree with the statement or not.

Kind regards,

The journalist who went down to the High Court and took down the application for appeal verdict word by word.

The details are at paragraphs 11 and 61-70 of the judgement linked towards the end of the story. His fiancee, Thea Thorpe, left the house between 1pm and 2pm during the search on the grounds she had a pre-arranged lunch meeting. During that time, someone moved the money. The judge did not make an explicit finding as to whether Sage himself or Thorpe moved it but ruled that Sage was responsible.

There is more to come on this saga. It's absolutely fascinating for a whole host of reasons.

sigh

Nice to see a bit of light-hearted Friday fun get hijacked by someone with chips on both shoulders and up both nostrils to boot.

Re: “I’ve designed my own connector, a 40-way pin item.”

I misunderstood Nevil - he didn't design the 40-way connector, he designed a custom elastomeric connector which isn't actually visible in any of the pics.

Story's been edited to reflect that.

Re: Re: "it also sends each jet’s history back to the US"...

ALIS versions 1.x were built on XP. ALIS versions 2.x run on Win 7. Internet Explorer is the approved access method, and IE8 was the last version which would run smoothly on both XP and Win 7 (at least, so says Wikipedia).

Re: This article convinced me to support the Act.

I'm sure you had absolutely no previous views on press regulation, especially as you refer to something that was done long before most of the Sun's current crop of reporters were out of primary school.

Thanks to all those who responded to the consultation, and as for those who think Impress is a viable or sensible press regulator, I wholeheartedly disagree with you and hope your point of view does not prevail.