Sorry, Bill...

...Apple is now the most evil computer company out there (with the demise of SCO, anyway). Microsoft dropping into second place yet again.

Seriously, why are all the shills anonymous?

It annoys me. We have a number of people (or maybe a single very insistent individual) who don't have the guts to reveal who they are, crying that we should all ignore our legal rights and allow Sony to set anti-consumer precedents. They're also relying on feeble ad hominem arguments.

To these people I say this:

Screw you. You have no right to make assumptions about me and my use of or interest in Other OS. You have no right to tell me that I shouldn't be worried about the erosion of consumer rights. You ignore the legal aspects of this case (hell, we're discussing it in an article where people who *are* lawyers are expressing the opinion that the retailers are on the hook for this illegal activity and you're still coming out with the same tired bad analogies and excuses) and try to put the blame for Sony's actions in places where it doesn't belong - Sony are the ones changing the product that I've bought in a way that reduces functionality. Not GeoHot. Not Microsoft. Sony.

They're hoping the problem will go away. If it does go away, then as consumers we're accepting that manufacturers get to change the functionality of the devices they sell us without any good reason and without any form of compensation. It's that simple.

More anonymous shills?

Let's put the "but it was optional!" lie to bed, shall we? Sony removed functionality from the PS3. Either it was the ability to run other operating systems, or it was the ability to connect to the PSN, play your purchased media, download game updates and play future games that require firmware > 3.2.1. That they give you the choice of how they cripple your console is entirely irrelevant to the fact that they're doing it.

It needs two updates because...

...one for each eye?

...one to add it, the other to remove the ability to play music files 'for security reasons'?

...they thought they'd accidentally left some consumer rights in the EULA in the first update, and hope to remove them all in the second?

@Anonymous Sony Shill

A games console that, among other features, allows you to install a secondary OS, this being one of its most powerful features according to one of Sony's own vice presidents.

An e-mail from one Sony employee isn't a commitment.

Publicising the console based on the feature, including it as a selling point in the documentation and claiming it as evidence of the power of the console, that's a commitment.

So, isn't bait and switch illegal?

Surely selling a product on the basis that it has certain functionality and then removing that functionality counts as a form of bait and switch?

X10 upgrade

No date confirmed yet, but Sony have announced that there will be an upgrade.

As for whether it's a better bet than a Desire, I'd say it comes down to whether you like the whizzy social networking integration and superior camera of the X10 more than the slightly more vanilla look of the Desire.

Won't ever happen

China is an oppressive regime that dictates every last detail of what its citizens can do, while a huge government-owned PR machine tries to tell us all that it's for their own good and everyone is happy with the way things are. They want control over every bit of technology used in their country, and to be able to mandate exactly how everything works and what it does with your data.

It's not that Apple's morally opposed to that - they just don't want the competition. ;)

"This is a straight run thing - should this device of the future have Symbian or MeeGo?"

No. :D

What exactly is a contanst?

And how would I manage one?

If there's anyone who thinks this might be a good idea...

All we need to do to fix them is get them to read the BBC 'Have Your Say' page for a couple of days. Pretty soon they'll be as violently against the 'wisdom of the masses' as the rest of us.

I mean, I thought I was *joking* when I said I was looking at it to see how many posts it took for someone to try and blame Gordon Brown for the snow (it was two, as it happens...)

Re: Woman agrees to customers unrealistic demands without even arguing

Strange. It's almost always male sales staff who do that in my experience, then pocket their commission as the *real* workers get down to delivering on the impossible.

How about firing people based on their ability and value to the company?

Or is that too simplistic a view?

@Sarah Bee

Quoth the Sarah: "Do you work in US military IT, or something?"

Don't be silly. If this story has shown us anything, it's that *nobody* works in US military IT, or they'd have thought about complex security measures like 'passwords'.

Nice to see the Apple at the bottom of the list.

Not entirely convinced I'd have had it there at all, to be honest. Because for all its neat features, it's just not that great at playing MP3s, and I have this irrational preference for devices that are good at their core functionality. Substance over style sort of thing. I'm currently a very happy owner of a Sansa Fuze with a nice (cheap) hefty memory card to flesh out the storage capacity. Meets all my music-playing needs, and with the addition of a decent set of headphones does it at very high quality - and at a quarter of the price of the equivalently-sized Apple product...

Do we really need to vote?

Blogosphere.

<shudder>

Why so sceptical? God made him put the phone in his pocket.

It was the least the bastard could do after arranging for a bullet to be miraculously fired directly at his heart.

The world's most dangerous hacker

Only in America could someone be seen as the world's most dangerous hacker for trying default/empty passwords for administrator accounts. Why aren't they trying the world's most dangerous *administrators* who set these up instead?

New experience not particularly pleasant so far...

It's probably the load of everyone trying it out at once, but from the brief play I had with it yesterday, I found a lot of content painfully slow or failing to load altogether. Found the navigation slightly unintuitive as well, though I suspect that's at least partly a question of getting used to it.

Installing games to HD seems to work well, though. Nice not to have to put up with the constant sound of the drive while playing, and to reduce the risk of the 360 deciding to scratch the disc. Should boost the life expectancy of the hardware quite considerably.

Oh, and creating a Mi^H^H^Hn avatar was, as expected, quite fun. And almost entirely worthless. :D

Re: "They are not racist"

That would explain why members on one board I saw as a result of this leak were worried about 'coons' getting hold of their personal details, would it? Or was that just a cheery expression of their nationalist zeal that I took out of context as a racist slur?

I have been reliably informed...

...that the acronym FHUTA should be the inevitable winner in any net neologism poll.

Entertaining swears from the internet era...

Well, they're all going to be popular choices, aren't they? The only two I could possibly vote for are fucknuggets and asshat, though, with a slight preference for the latter.

As far as more internetty words go, I like 'blogosphere'. Using it in polite conversation is the perfect way for someone to indicate to me that they are desirous of being punched in the face.

To be fair to 'meh'...

It's been around for quite some time and is widely and regularly used (unlike 'frenemy' or 'jargonaut') and doesn't cause violent vomiting in 48% of the population (unlike 'huggles'). It probably meh-rits a place in the dictionary.

@Paul Murphy

You seem to forget - we have *time machines*. Allowing us to freely go back in time to the revolutionary war and engage in whatever activities we desire with alternate timeline versions of our selves.

It's a wonder they managed to get any fighting done at all, frankly, with all the time-hopping onanists lying around the place.

Sarah's position moderating comments on this thread

screw you for using your comments to talk shit about trolls, I would rather have a muslim moderator than a woman-- any day of the week. Why don't your stick your attitude problem back in a time machine and go back to read the fotw and kill off some more brain sells.

Or something like that.

Too little, too late from McCain

His concession speech hit the tone he should have gone for throughout the campaign. Respectful, patriotic, and of course "Palin stood beside him, but did not speak". If he'd managed those throughout the campaign things might have been a lot closer.

@h4rmony: "US$40 budgeted to "win Florida""

Damn. If I'd known it was so cheap, I'd have run for president myself!

@Anonymous Coward: "Apart from, that is, the millions of babies killed for being inconvenient."

Nice to see the single-issue fundamentalists are still trying to change the English language for their cause and pull made-up and unsupportable statistics out of their rear ends. Proof that *some* things won't change with an Obama victory.

@ChrisG: "@ 1# AC Bye Bye have a nice day, now you wont be reading El Reg you can concentrate on Genesis."

Now did you read the news today? They say the danger's gone away - but I can see the fire's still alight, burning into the night. Too many men, too many people making too many problems and there's not much love to go round.

Hold out, just keep on hoping against hope it's gonna get better. Don't worry, there's no hurry for you, for me everything's gonna come around. Shout out, someone will listen to you, to me, someone's gonna see.

I just bought a PSP-3000

And I'm perfectly happy with the screen so far. It's not a hideous artifacted mess, nor is it a massive improvement over the launch models. It *is* perfectly serviceable and displays the games nicely, including a variety of 2D and 3D titles.

But by all means let's carry on judging it from screen shots. That's a fine tradition in the world of gaming, after all.

@Mark

PS: Have you checked behind the sofa?

Re: They had a choice to not read the thing

Actually, most of them exercised that right. Was reading recently that the majority of the crazy embassy-burning types hadn't actually seen the cartoon at all, but had just been *told* that the Danes had insulted Mohammed.

@Gilbert Gosseyn

Thanks for calling various of my friends and members of my family '*nasty*' from your position of arrogant ignorance. It only helps to make the point that anyone who takes an insular viewpoint and condemns other people based solely on the fact that they belong to some wide-ranging group quickly becomes an obnoxious bigot, whether they're religious or atheist.

If your occasional blog entries are as filled with such weak trolling as your post here, then you can hardly be surprised that some of the more extreme religious idiots write in to have a go at you. Would you be shocked to learn that people who write blogs that occasionally criticise atheism also receive hateful bile-filled emails from... you guessed it, *atheists*?

Some people are asshats. This is hardly news. Some religious people are asshats, some non-religious people are asshats. Trying to assert that there's a direct correlation between being a credulous god-botherer and being an asshat or a godless heathen and being an asshat just puts you firmly in the asshat category in my book, whatever your belief system.

<sigh> I guess the research was right - people really *do* lose their capacity for rational thought when it comes to religion and politics.

Faith and terminology

@Michael: The thing is, some of the views held by people are based on faith. Some of them are not.

A definitive belief in God is based on faith. Strong atheism (God does not exist) is based on faith. Weak atheism and agnosticism *are not faith based* because they don't make definitive statements that go beyond the actual evidence available to us and what we actually observe. Which is why they're (in my opinion) the only sensible position for a rational person or one who claims to respect logic and the scientific method.

Also @Dan Cooke: Can we *please* stop misrepresenting agnosticism? No it isn't a case of just saying "I dunno", and it isn't weaker than or incompatible with the more rational forms of atheism. You might want to take a look at the Wikipedia page on the subject, particularly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism#Types_of_agnosticism and if you're genuinely interested follow up some of the sources. It just annoys the hell out of me (pun possibly intended) that people who claim to be representing the rational (SCIENCE LOL!!1) against the irrational (RELIGION LOL!!1) have a worrying tendency to not only be painfully wrong with the basic definitions of the things they're discussing, but also to exhibit a wilful disregard for the fundamental rules of logic. Makes me ashamed to be an atheist at times, just as many reasonable religious people are ashamed by the behaviour of the fundamentalist nutcases who make up the majority of the anecdotal evidence in discussions like this.

@B B Beyer

What a horrible analogy. No, it's like claiming that being anti-Nazi is a *political* belief, even if you don't espouse any particular political cause yourself.

And I don't see that most people would argue with *that* definition.

Now, if I'd claimed that a stated lack of belief in the Abrahamic God was a *Christian* belief, your point might hold water. But that would be silly.

@DirkGently

> If it were an agnostic slogan, it would read "THERE'S POSSIBLY NO GOD..."

If it were truly an agnostic slogan, it would read "I DON'T KNOW WHETHER THERE'S A GOD, AND NOR DO YOU."

If it were a weak atheist slogan, it would read "I DON'T BELIEVE THERE'S A GOD."

If it were a strong atheist slogan, it would read "THERE IS NO GOD."

If it were a deist slogan, it would read "GOD IS."

If it were a theist slogan, it would read "THERE IS A GOD!"

If it were a baptist slogan, it would read "THERE IS A GOD, AND HE LOVES YOU!"

If it were a Russian Orthodox slogan, it would read "THERE IS A GOD, AND HE HATES YOU!"

If it were a Catholic slogan, it would read "THERE IS A GOD, AND HE HATES US ALL." followed by an elaborate sad Virgin Mary smiley.

If it were a C of E slogan it would read "I JUST GO FOR THE HYMNS. ANYONE FOR A NICE CUP OF TEA?"

If it were a Muslim slogan, it would have been defaced by a barely-literate Daily Mail reader.

I'd get my coat, but I can't be sure whether it exists.

Re: Where's the IT angle?!?!

IT practically invented the religious flame war. Dawkins vs Jesus is *nothing* compared to vi vs emacs.