Clever

A good way to avoid a media scrum and annoying paparazzi. He's managed to get a quiet romantic wedding after all. Had the media known, he'd have been deluged by unpleasant reporters...

Also clever of her - had the sale of FB not generated sufficient $, she could have lef thim at the altar! (Just kidding, Im sure she loves him for his wonderful personality...)

Is this just a rumour?

Has anyone (here) actually been asked for a password at an interview, personally, themselves? Not a friend-of-a-friend, or a story you heard, or something you read on the internet. Anyone have actual first-hand knowledge? Otherwise, I'll assume it is just another one of those pesky internet rumour nonsenses. Surely very, very few interviewers would be foolish as to ask for login details and expect there not to be trouble.

I'd pay the license fee...

Here in New Zealand, I'd gladly pay the NZ$250/year BBC license fee in order to get unrestricted access to all the advertising-free UK BBC channels -- the alternative is to pay >$1000 per year for the Sky crap, with up to 25% of time advertising, and only recycled US rubbish.

I'm always amazed how much UK people complain about the license fee, when I've seen what happens when you don't have one...

I love my TiVo

And they're going for NZ$200 (thats about US$170) here in New Zealand, including 'lifetime' subscription. I have 3 now, all networked together...

Strangely, though, their marketing sucks. They lose out to Sky+ simply because they never advertise and Sky is being pushed in all the stores.

Why can't she be a media in her own right?

She publishes a blog, surely that makes her blog a periodical publication. Why the need to be employed by a newspaper? Did they not consider that her blog is a publication in its own right?

True

Internet in NZ does suck. Expensive, metered, and 20GB/month is seen as 'very large' and charged accordingly. If that were not enough, the latency to places like the US and Asia is also problematic for things like video and so on.

Its a shame since the TV here also sucks (Sky have a near monopoly on decent broadcasting, and charge as you would expect) and so an affordable video-on-demand would be great. TiVo do it, but the broadband traffic caps make it cost an extra $3 for each film you rent so no real gain.

However, on the positive side, we get to live in New Zealand. That more than makes up for the crappy Internet and crappy TV. Sucks to be you! :)

As a parent...

... I would far rather my impressionable children saw a picture of two girls kissing than a picture of people being blown up by soldiers with blood flying everywhere.

But then, I'm not american...

Religious people. They're all nuts.

If Osama bin Laden can (could) claim to be a Muslim despite all he's done, then these nutjobs can claim to be Christians despite their behaviour. Once people suspend their logic in order to believe in a sky-fairy, then its only a little jump to suspending all other logic as well.

(Hello to the NSA people who are reading this because of the trigger words!)

Not even in the US can you legally copyright a list of facts.

So... I can get a list of the dates of the Kings and Queens of Engliand, put it in a book, and copyright it. Now anyone else publishing such a list has to pay me money!

Obviously not. This is a small company looking to make money by suing an individual who cannot afford to defend themselves -- simple bullying.

Had the defendant published a large section of their document verbatim, it would be different. He didn't. He read another source to get some public-domain facts, and then restated them in another way (ie, his database format).

Why so much of the internet depends on a free source is another matter.

That'll be useful

... for anyone planning to commit crimes. Planning to do a bit of twoccing this evening? Check no plod nearby... yeah good to go!

The management dont understand the value of tech knowledge

They have no problem with paying 6-figure sums to senior management in order to 'get the best'.

However, when it comes to getting decent techs, then they seem to think one's as good as another and you can pay peanuts. Unsurprisingly, said techs all bugger off to work for a company that knows the current market value and can simply take all the cream.

In that situation, I'd go and work for Google, too. But maybe not Mircrosoft... I still have SOME scruples, after all...

So we go back to +-10m rather than +-4m?

Looks like it will screw the US geocaching community as well...

I have doubts

Considering the old goat was >60 years old, plus had three wives there (one of whom was only 29), I doubt he'd have any need for pr0n. Sounds to me like a clumsy attempt as a bit of propoganda.

PH because, well, it's pr0n.

Microsoft claims "App store" is a generic...

... while of course, "Word" and "Windows" and not generic at all, no no...

I wonder if...

I wonder if this means they will finall credit me with my Open Source software that they stole for their 'supplementary' disk? I was pleased to see it included there, until I found out that (a) they had stripped out the Credits file, in violation of the license agreement, and (b) they hadn't notified me, and turned me down for an interview when I applied to work there (although that turned out to be lucky after all)

The software was 'Wanderer', a text/graphics Boulderdash clone, if anyone wonders, and was my first C program of any size written in my first year at uni.

You get what you pay for...

I suppose that, for $12/year, you shouldnt really be expecting much in the way of data security and backups. If you want to have a full SLA and so on then it will cost you more -- maybe Flickr should look at a premium service with this additional backup support...

He of course has his own backups of the photos themselves, but the metadata on Flickr has gone. They've offered compensation for the messup but when it comes down to it, you shouldnt rely too much on services which are free or cost pennies.

The higher the population density...

... the better the network connectivity. For countries such as Oz and NZ, where the population is very spread out, you're not going to be able to get the high-speed connections that (eg) Singapore or Hong Kong can manage without having to pay substantially more $ per user. So, the ISPs claw the cost back by using high contention ratios and traffic shaping, and market 20Mbps connections that in reality you can only just squeeze 1Mbps out of.

Even simpler...

Why don't the ISPs simply block the port (tcp/25) outbound from clients to anything but their own mail gateway? Maybe grant exceptions when specifically asked. This would at a stroke stop most of the spam flood, and be unlikely to affect 99.9% of normal users who will be using gmail or the ISP's own mail server.

But this would require work by the ISP for no financial gain, so that's out, then.

Doesnt seem to work both ways, though

And yet, strangely, the same bug is not affecting my ad revenue form my website -- ie, I'm not getting paid more per click, though the advertisers are being charged more. I'm sure Google are still working as hard to fix it as they would have done had the problem been reversed, though...

You can opt out?

I went to the USA last week, and was sent through one of these on the way home (all the yanks got to go through the normal archway, but not the Evil Foreigners). Noone mentioned anything about being able to object. I asked if it was the 'see you naked' scanner and they said 'no, this just shows weapons, like the others'. Obviously lies but you don't dare argue with the agents as they could cart you off to gitmo for a quick waterboarding session at the drop of a hat...

Unbelieveable

This is as stupid a prosecution as the one about the airport. Well, a bit less stupid, as there was one specific person referred to and insulted, but its not a 'threat'

If this guy gets off, but the airport tweeter is strung up, then it all goes to show how rotten the US system is these days.

Glad I got out of the country as few years back...

They're not the first

IBM trademarked the number 400 (as in AS/400) and Intel tried extremely hard to get exclusive rights to the number 386.

Easyjet have a history of trying to own anything with 'Easy' in it, regardless of their current business. I think Apple want to own anything starting 'i'.

I think companies need to take a step back and ask if the product in question has any liklihood at all of being associated with their company, and if there is any clear evidence that the product is being implied to be created by their company. If the answer is no, then any competent judge should throw it out. However in the US the judgements normally go to them as has the most money to hire lawyers....

NZ plates

For the benefit of non-NZ people, license plates here are 6 characters or less (including Q,O,I,Z which are omitted in UK) and 5 characters or less for motorcycles and trailers (yes, trailers have their own license plates separate from the towing vehicle).

The 'ACC' mentioned is the NZ scheme which pays for medical treatment in an accident, and for compensation claims. A bit like National Insurance payments without the pension.

I don't follow the logic behind a lot of the banned plates, either. Recently there was a bit of a fuss when it was discovered that some license plates (deliberately) contained very rude words in Afrikaans (we have a lot of S Africans out here) so they might be tx-speak rude words in other languages.

I wanted 'HEI MAO' (black cat in mandarin) but the wife won't let me pay the $400 to buy it :)

I should have patented...

I invented a design for a anti-tailgating camera system (based on speed sensors and inter-vehicle time delay) several years ago as a curiosity, and never did anything more about it. Probably should have patented it...

Shame noone can invent a 'stupid idiot camera' though, it would be constantly busy on the roads out here

Its all cost efficiency...

You used to get a decent manual with computers, and clueful tech support.

Then the bosses realised that (a) only about 1% of people even bother to unwrap the manual, and (b) 99% of support calls are 'I cant print' 'turn the printer on' 'Oh wow, it works now!'.

They realised that they could save money by (a) not providing manuals and (b) employing monkeys (how much knowledge does it take to tell people to switch a printer on?)

Of course, the downside for clueful users is that they no longer have a manual, and they cannot get knowledgeable tech support, but hey - they only make up 1% of the customers!

any ORIGINAL ideas, Hollywood??

So yet another rehash of an old success because they cant think up anything new.

Is anyone surprised that, yet again, they change it all and make the main protagonist American (since as we all know, nothing exists outside the borders of the USA other than evil terrorists and backwards natives...)

What's the betting that they will take out everything that made the original a success the first time round - the mystery, the struggle against faceless and untrustworthy government...

But hey - we get a "love triangle" instead! Hooray!

SORBS is too over-inclusive

We only give SORBS a very low score in our anti-spam here.

They even listed us on there a couple of weeks ago when a user's exchange out-of-office autoreply replied to a spam message... and getting off it is not so simple.

In cantonese..

Apparently, in Cantonese chinese, the 'Hi ho, hiho..' song has the correct tonal qualities to mean "Do I have a good c*** or not?" although I might be inaccurate there. Amusing pic, though, and I'm sure the marketroids are aiming for a Streisand Effect here.

Check his job contract

Unless his job contract explicitly forbids part-time work in such an establishment, I should think that his employers will not have a leg to stand on in an unfair dismissal case.

All a publicity stunt

Noone would have seriously chosen iSnack2 ffs. It's all a publicity stunt, and worked very well.

Of course, vegemite is still a poor imitation of the Original Marmite form the UK (take that Ozzies! You never invented the stuff, you merely copied the Poms!)

Nice devices

We have Ricoh MFDs here; they can scan documents and then email the (huge) scans to your email address.

Since our email system was becoming clogged with scans, I have a rather neat hack - a fake SMTP server that the MFDs point to that receives the email, strips off the scan attachment, and sticks it into our web dropoff system before emailing the original recipient with a URL to pick it up from. If they dont pick it up within a few days, its auto deleted.

If anyone wants a (free of course) copy of this, email me or seek out my website.

Steve

Was probably dormant

Since they nuked the account, it was almost certainly a dead/dormant account and so zapping it was a non-issue. Were it active, they would most likely have just killed the email (as other mail contents would most likely have be sufficient to identify the user)

Google have protected their users to the extent permitted by law. No fault there.

Of course the bank idiot who sent it should be fired...

Unbelieveable

I still have difficulty accepting that there are people with this level of utter stupidity - and I've worked in IT for almost 20 years. You'd think by now I'd have lost faith in the average person's intelligence entirely.

Clearly political

All this effort for a tiny fine over something so insignificant?

Clearly someone in the US is scared that Cuba might discover oil and suddenly be able to do even better, despite the USA's best efforts to economically cripple them...

The USA's foreign policy towards Cuba seems very similar to pre-pubescent girls squabbling in the playground ('Im not your friend any more and I'm going to stop anyone else playing with you.. EVER!')

What was that he said?

"We shall never allow a crooked stick to have a crooked shadow"

Surely this means "We shall always conceal anything wrong"? Or is it just one of those strange effects of attempting to translate an idiom between English and Chinese?

This doesnt make sense...

Is bullying a child to the extent that they commit suicide not illegal in the USA then? What are they playing at? If the police have to resort to charging her with something stupid like 'violating website T&Cs' then there is something seriously wrong in the law. Can't they charge her with 'child (emotional) abuse' or similar?

Serves him right, but...

This sort of person, who is making money from stealing the market, has no sympathy from me at all. He's the one who should be locked up with a huge fine - yet they just give him a relatively small penalty.

The odd thing is that people who merely make available for free a couple of MP3s which can be bought for a fraction of this get given million-dollar fines and jail time. This is disproportionate and loses support for the real fight against the people making the illegal money - the real criminals.

Glad I escaped

The more I hear, the more glad I am that I escaped to New Zealand, home of the BOFH. Why do the loonies in the UK elect these people?

(OK, I know civil servants are not elected, but it all filters down from the top)