* Posts by Graham Marsden

6899 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jan 2007

Astroboffins eyeball MONSTER GAS HALO hugging Andromeda Galaxy

Graham Marsden
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Re: A Trillian Stars in a galaxy

And Zaphod Beeblebrox whose ego is as big as one...

Theresa May: Right, THIS time we're getting the Snoopers' Charter in

Graham Marsden
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@Matt Bryant - Re: Willfully-dim Godfrey

> "....It's clear we all lost." Well, all except us Tory voters.

Did you notice how many more votes the Tories got this time compared to 2010? (Did you even bother to look?)

Let me help you. They got just over 600,000 more votes than last time. Yes, just 0.8% more of the electorate voted for them this time than in 2010, so how, exactly does that equate to them getting a whole load more seats and therefore a "majority"?

Of course the Tories love First Past the Post and desperately want to keep it because that's what means they'll be able to stay in power and stop smaller parties from getting a look in, despite several million people voting for them.

Graham Marsden
Boffin

@Matt Bryant - Re: Marsbarbrain now they have a "mandate to govern".

> UKIP actually got more individual votes than the SNP, do you want them to have 50-odd seats under proportional representation?

I have no love for UKIP, Matt, but if people voted for them, those votes should be represented.

To want a change in the voting system provided that [Party X] doesn't get any seats would be hypocritical, but perhaps you don't understand that.

Graham Marsden
Boffin

@Jamie Jones - Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear.

The OP may have *intended* their post to be sarcasm, unfortunately they then shot themselves massively in the foot with the closing comment "unfortunately, they're the only thing left between us and our beloved friends in Syria."

*That* is why all those people downvoted the post.

Graham Marsden
Big Brother

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear.

> I simply don't see what the problem is.

Evidently!

You stand more chance of being struck by lightning than you do of being the victim of a terrorist attack.

We have a principle of Presumed Innocent Unless Proven Guilty underpinning our laws.

We have also seen repeated examples of the Security Services *knowing* about potential terrorists and *failing* to act to stop them completing their attacks.

And their answer to finding a needle in a haystack? Make the haystack bigger and treat *everyone* as a suspect!

PS If you have nothing to hide, why do you have curtains?

Graham Marsden
WTF?

now they have a "mandate to govern".

Yes, with 36% of the votes...

Going up hills past blokes with coke-bottle legs: The Smart E-bike

Graham Marsden
Boffin

Re: Pointless limitations

Ignoring the Godwin, try factoring in the international shipping, insurance, VAT and Import Duty you'd pay on one of the US versions...

Red-faced Germans halt NSA cooperation after Euro spying revealed

Graham Marsden

@Matt Bryant - Re: Marsbarbrain @codejunky - Hmm

> It's also quite good for explaining how some sane and normal foreign people do what we Westerners consider evil yet claim they are doing good

And can it also explain how some allegedly sane people do blatantly evil acts that we DO NOT want them to do, whilst claming to "represent" us?

Graham Marsden

@codejunky - Re: Hmm

This is why http://politcalcompass.org/ is worth a look.

It doesn't just rely on a "Left/ Right" scale, but also "Authoritarian/ Libertarian" (that's Libertarianism which supports rights and liberties, not the American version which means "I should be allowed to have as many guns as I like!")

Both the East Germans and the Nazis score high on the Authoritarian scale despite whatever other factors they may differ on.

Facebook echo chamber: Or, the British media and the election

Graham Marsden

@Dave128 - Re: TW is right, but for the wrong reasons...

The purpose of our electoral system is *supposed* to be for us to elect people who represent *our* views in the running of the country.

We do not have that and we will not have that whilst FPTP is in place.

No, changing the electoral system is not a panacea, but it will at least *start* to treat the problem.

Graham Marsden
Boffin

TW is right, but for the wrong reasons...

We have a Tory Government which has a "majority" when only ONE THIRD of the people actually voted for it.

That's right, TWO THIRDS of the people voted for other parties, yet, because of our fundamentally broken electoral system, we don't get the government we want!

Of course we did have a referendum on this five years ago, but, TW, remind us, *which* media outlets were peddling scare stories and outright lies about what AV would mean? Which Party's rich supporters were paying for posters saying "Vote No to AV or the Baby Dies"?

Still, it's all the fault of the people, isn't it?

Traumatised Reg SPB team barely survives movie unwatchablathon

Graham Marsden
WTF?

WHY???

That is all.

Online pizza order saves woman and children from knife-wielding kidnapper

Graham Marsden
Coat

But...

... did she tip?

Choc Factory finds 84,000 ad injectors targeting Chrome

Graham Marsden
Devil

Re: Picture Grr!

Dear El Reg:

We all know what these bloody things look like, we DO NOT need a massive (and useless) reminder of them stuck at the top of the page, not even those of us who already use AdBlock!

Thank you...

Hey! Want a FREE TOASTER that makes BITCOIN? What? You DO?

Graham Marsden
Mushroom

"Would you like some toast?

"Some nice hot crisp brown buttered toast. No? How about a muffin then? Nothing? You know the last time you had toast. 18 days ago, 11.36, Tuesday 3rd, two rounds. I mean, what's the point in buying a toaster with artificial intelligence if you don't like toast. I mean, this is my job. This is cruel, just cruel."

EU Digital Single Market plan: We will compromise fast, and compromise early

Graham Marsden
Coat

Re: And the graphic?

I thought the red one was a failed attempt to draw a huge cock and balls across Europe...

Snowden scandal latest: NSA, GCHQ lingo-spies replaced by unstoppable RHINEHART robots

Graham Marsden
Facepalm

And once again...

... the Security Services' answer to finding a needle in a haystack is to make the haystack bigger...

French BIONIC EYE sits IN your peeper, feeds infrared light into nerves

Graham Marsden

> How long before we see misbehavior with television remote controls being flashed at people with the implants to overload them, or cause a DOS attack?

You mean, unlike those idiots who think it's clever to flash laser pointers at cars and aircraft...?

Cylon is golden: Backstabbing bank holiday board games

Graham Marsden

Re: Totally boring?

Sorry, x 7 I'm just going to have to trit-trot along.

Enjoy your "victory".

Graham Marsden
Boffin

Re: Totally boring?

x 7, I can't decide if you're just a sad troll or whether you're really that stupidly ignorant.

Modern board games are part of a tradition that dates back over three and a half thousand years. Some concepts in games may be new, but many (if not most) others are based on ancient types of games and if you'd actually bother to try looking at them instead of indulging in pathetic sneering, you would realise this.

FYI there are generally six types: Race games, War Games, Games of Position, Mancala Games, Calculation Games and Dice Games. If I wanted to waste my time in trying to educate you, I could find both ancient and modern examples of all those games, all of which you could play "with real history at your shoulder", but I'm sure you'd just find a way of trying to dodge the issue or weasel your way out of it.

As I've discovered in gaming, sometimes it's just not worth bothering to play with certain people, so please feel free to declare victory and go on enjoying your narrow little range of games whilst I, and everyone else, enjoy the vast universe of games which are out there.

Graham Marsden
Facepalm

Re: Totally boring?

> real games such as chess or crib. Or shove ha'ppeny.

"According to John Aubrey, cribbage was created by the English poet Sir John Suckling in the early 17th century, as a derivation of the game "noddy""

"Shove ha'penny (or shove halfpenny), also known in ancestral form as shoffe-grote ['shove-groat' in Modern English]"

And "Chess is believed to have originated in Eastern India, c. 280 – 550 CE in the Gupta Empire,"

- All from Wikipedia

And you think *board games* are "so 19th Century"?

Graham Marsden

Re: Totally boring?

So what board games *have* you tried? Amazingly enough there are more games than Monopoly, Cluedo and Trivial Pursuit out there these days.

Find out if there's a local board games club and go along and try a few, you might find they're a lot more entertaining than you think.

Graham Marsden
Facepalm

Totally boring?

Yes, because sitting on your own in front of a computer talking to others via a headset is *so* much more sociable than meeting up with a few mates and enjoying a game *with* other people...

Graham Marsden

Re: @Graham Marsden

The problem with Panic Station is the ridiculous mechanic where you have two characters which can be in different locations, but which are clearly Quantum Entangled because they *both* end up getting affected by the same event!

Graham Marsden
Boffin

Re: Fuck me:

You obviously have no idea about board game design these days.

Games like these will often be several *years* in the making as they are designed, revised, play tested, revised again, re-play tested, modified to improve the balance, blind play tested, revised again to clarify the rules or fix problems that experienced players didn't encounter but newbies did because it wasn't obvious that you could do X or you couldn't do Y...

Then there's the cost of artwork, printing, rulebooks etc etc.

And once you've actually *produced* the game, there's no guarantee it will sell, so for every Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne or Splendor, there are ten others which didn't make the grade, but you have still forked out all that money to make them...

Graham Marsden

@Tomislav

The problem with Shadows over Camelot is that you really have to have each player doing just one quest for most of the game to have a chance of winning and, frankly, that gets a bit tedious after a while.

Not only that, but you need to "game" the system such that, eg on the quests for the Grail and Excalibur, you don't actually complete them, just ensure that they don't fail because otherwise you end up with them just chucking up loads of catapaults which will inevitably wipe out Camelot.

As such, it's often very difficult to succeed as the Traitor because if you don't play this way, it rapidly becomes obvious who you are.

It's a shame, because apart from this it's a quite a good game.

NASA on track to triple Discover super's grunt

Graham Marsden
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Re: Off-topic

Unfortunately it's probably just an error or an oversight and we'll soon be back to having to scroll down past a ridiculous and often irrelevant "Hero Image" on an article before we actually get to the details...

Tattooed skin befuddles Apple Watch

Graham Marsden
Facepalm

Re: Dark skin?

> Why the joke alert?

Seriously??

Paging Constable Savage...

Graham Marsden
Joke

Re: Dark skin?

They can't afford to buy it and any of them seen wearing one must obviously have stolen it and is therefore a fair target...

'Just follow the damn Constitution!' FBI, DoJ skewered over demands for crypto backdoors

Graham Marsden
Childcatcher

It's good to see...

... that at least *some* politicians aren't suckered by the Paedos and Terrorists and Criminals, oh my! nonsense.

It's just a shame that so many of the others are trotting out the same tired old rhetoric and are willing to bend over backwards (and make everyone else bend over forward) on the altar of "security".

Strange alien-like life zones found beneath Antarctic glacier

Graham Marsden
Alert

What's that noise?

Sounds like Tekeli-li!

Grooveshark closes, blames 'serious mistake' of not paying for music

Graham Marsden

@AC - Re: Unless they're Google

You beat me to it. Grooveshark just weren't big enough to be able to get away with that argument.

Facebook serves up shaved, pierced, tattooed 'butterfly' as CAPTCHA

Graham Marsden
WTF?

Re: From the Notebook of Lazarus Long

Yeah, but he also says how much they look like orchids...

... that's a funny looking orchid!!

You can't keep a Secret and nor can anyone else: the app is closing

Graham Marsden
Mushroom

[Insert obligatory Straw Man argument claiming that you must therefore think that druggiepaedoterrorists should not be burned at the stake]

Rand Paul is trying to murder net neutrality. Is there a US presidential election, or something?

Graham Marsden
Boffin

@AC

"if you provide a service to people, with equipment and resources that you pay for, then why shouldn't you be able to control your own equipment?"

And again we go back to the analogy of a motor manufacturer eg Ford, buying control of the Motorway (Interstates) and designating a "Ford Only" lane which is only usable by their cars and these cars are allowed to drive at 100mph. Meanwhile all the other cars are stuck with a speed limit of 50mph in the other lanes which are highly congested.

Of course you could always get your vehicle in that Fast Lane if you were willing to pay Ford or whoever a "small consideration"...

France wants to make les citoyens' health data available to world+dog

Graham Marsden
Megaphone

Well...

... at least the French people have a *chance* of possibly stopping their data simply being flogged off to the rich mates of their Government.

Of course whether it *stays* that way...

PICTURE-TASTIC: Microsoft woos devs to HoloLens virtuo-goggs

Graham Marsden
Facepalm

"If he said "follow me" out loud...

"...he could walk around the room and the TV would float along with him at the same distance."

And then he tripped over the coffee table.

So how should we tax these BASTARD COMPANIES, then?

Graham Marsden

Re: @Tim Worstall - "The things that actually seem to work in making the poor richer."

> 6.88, -6.82.

RIght (pun not intended!), so whilst I am to the left of you, I'm certainly not a "Leftie".

> trade doesn't change the number of jobs in a country

I really don't see how that follows.

If there is trade, beyond that of basic barter, there is a need for money, so bankers and accountants. There's shops to sell the goods, so retail staff. There's tax on the money and wages, so tax collectors...The employees have more money, so they can buy more etc etc etc...

Therefore the more trade, the more demand, so the consequential higher need for these other jobs. Conversely, if trade diminishes (for instance if a supply starts becoming exhausted) the production costs will go up, the price will go up, the demand will remain the same (or fall as people look for alternatives) but the number of people selling the product will diminish, hence fewer associated jobs.

If the jobs move elsewhere in the world, because it's cheaper to employ people there, there will be fewer jobs in the original location, fewer people employed there, so less money to spend in that local economy, so they will be less well off even allowing for the (presumably) cheaper goods because the amount they save on the cheaper products is unlikely to equate to the amount of income they've lost.

Someone, somewhere else, might be better off, but that's pretty cold comfort for the newly unemployed.

Graham Marsden
WTF?

@Tom 13 - Re: @Graham Marsden

> You need to find a new philosophy

Even ignoring the massive Godwin, I think you need to first understand what Communism is because if you think I'm advocating it, you *really* haven't understood what I'm saying.

Try having a look at the Political Compass site and look at where Communism is and then see how far removed from its ideas I am...

Graham Marsden

@Tim Worstall - Re: "The things that actually seem to work in making the poor richer."

> And the answer to that is simple, stop bloody taxing poor people.

On that, at least, Tim, we can certainly agree.

But that does, of course, still depend on people actually *having* jobs which a) haven't been "globalised" to some other part of the world and b) pay at least the minimum wage not only per hour, but also for a enough hours a week for it to make a difference, instead of Zero Hours where you work (or not) at the whim of the business owners.

> Pretty good, eh? Especially for a neoliberal running dog lackey of the capitalist plutocrats like me, eh?

Just one thing: those are *your* words, not mine.

FYI on the Political Compass chart I come in at -0.3 on the Left/ Right scale and -7.75 on the Authoritarian/ Libertarian scale. Which means that whilst I might be "more left-wing than some", I'm certainly not "left wing" according to the usual definitions.

I'd be interested to know where you come out on those scales...

Graham Marsden
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@DavCrav - Re: "The things that actually seem to work in making the poor richer."

> Globalisation and international trade has done just that, vastly improving the lives of the billions of genuinely poor, at the expense of a few dozen million in the West who have a bit less good of a life. Surely that's a win?

Right! "Be happy that *you're* being fucked over, because at least that's helping out someone else!"

(But whatever you do, don't ask how many millions or billions the people on the top actually need to live on, just ignore the man behind the curtain...)

Graham Marsden

@Doctor Syntax - Re: "The things that actually seem to work in making the poor richer."

> Unless you're without these benefits then instead of saying "the ones who can afford to buy shares" or the like, say "me". When you do that, does it sound any different?

I'm sure it does "sound different", if you ignore the people who *don't* have a company or private pension or life insurance, after all, obviously they're not worth bothering about.

But, in any case, you are being incredibly naiive if you think that pension funds and life insurance companies are running their operations simply for the benefit of people who pay into them, because what they are really doing is thinking "ok, what's the bare minimum we can get away with giving out that will keep people paying in to these schemes whilst maximising our profits and bonuses?"

If I buy or sell shares *myself* then, apart from a brokerage fee and any taxes that may be liable, the rest of the money is *mine*. If I pay it into a pension or life insurance fund, that's certainly not the case and that needs to be repeated to people like you until it sinks in.

More importantly, as I already said, it also depends on me or anyone else having enough money to actually afford to take the risk of getting into the share markets *and* being willing to put it away as part of a long-term investment and there are a lot of people for whom this is simply not the case and *these* are the people who are not "getting richer".

Graham Marsden

Re: "The things that actually seem to work in making the poor richer."

> the people who have been getting rich out of globalisation have been the shit poor out there who now get three squares a day and the like.

Oh right! Great! So all the people in the UK who are now out of work and on benefits (let alone being forced to rely on food banks as they get sanctioned by a hypocritical government enforced scheme to somehow force them into jobs that have been "globalised") should be *happy* that there are people elsewhere in the world who now have *their* jobs and are churning out goods so much more cheaply that, if they had any money, they could buy... erm...

Meanwhile I note that you manage to completely ignore and avoid answering my suggestion about paying workers a reasonable living wage which they will then go out and spend which will increase the circulation of money.

Want to have another go and actually address that point, Tim?

Graham Marsden

"The things that actually seem to work in making the poor richer."

You mean the things that give us jobs being shunted to whatever part of the world gives the cheapest employees at the time (and screw the poor buggers who had that work previously)? The things that give us the Minimum Wage instead of a Living Wage? The things that give use Zero Hours contracts? Etc etc etc

Oh, sure, you can say "but look how cheap you're getting your goods, so that makes you better off!" but that rather relies on people enough money to spend on those goods, but, in the mean time, reduces much purchasing to the least expensive option because that's all many people can afford.

Of course *some* people are getting richer, however they're the ones who can afford to buy shares and the ones further up the ladder, but many of them are just saying "I'm alright Jack, keep your hands of off my stack".

So how about this, Tim: Don't tax profits more, just make companies pay their lower level workers a better wage than the bare minimum if there's sufficient profit to allow it. At the same time, stop rewarding those at the top with huge bonuses that will mostly not get spent, so there's the same amount of money, but it's going to those who will actually use it as liquid assets ensuring it goes back into the economy.

Smile! Brit transport plods turn bodycams on travelling public

Graham Marsden
Joke

Taser Axon body-worn cameras.

A combined Taser and camera?

What could possibly go wrong?!

"Watch the birdie..." Kzzzert!!!

MAYHEM in ORBIT: Russian cargo pod spins OUT OF CONTROL

Graham Marsden
Coat

"The Progress capsule is still in a low orbit, and doesn't pose a direct threat to the ISS"

Good job, this is too early for a remake even for Hollywood...

David Cameron 'guarantees' action on mobe not-spots. Honest

Graham Marsden
Facepalm

"You may be driving along an A-road and suddenly you lose your signal"

I hope, David, you mean "You may be in a car with someone else driving and suddenly lose your signal".

If not, PUT THE FUCKING PHONE DOWN AND CONCENTRATE ON THE ROAD!!!

EXTREME COUPONING zeros checkout carts in eBay's Magento

Graham Marsden
Coat

I blame...

... those pesky X-Men!

Hawking hologram comforts One Direction fans with Zayny parallel universe claim

Graham Marsden
Headmaster

@AC - Re: And on the flip side

> Justin Who?

The fact that you corrected the typo of "Justine" unfortunately proves that you *have* (regrettably) heard of him!

'Use 1 capital' password prompts make them too predictable – study

Graham Marsden