Posts by james hedley 14 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2008
Yes but you can't force the music industry to sue Google. That's the problem with letting sorting stuff out like this with private lawsuits - the law will be applied unevenly and certain unlucky sorts will be made examples of. It's not like the state is prosecuting someone for a crime, they aren't allowed to pick and choose who they put in court for real crimes (at least in theory).
Paris coz she loves a good torrent.
Most of the time the IWF is doing useful stuff then. But I'd feel a lot better if someone were actually going out to shut down the sites on the blacklist, rather than the "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" approach of filtering.
But then actually stopping commercial child abuse like this would cost more money.
"Tampering with people's PCs to illustrate the botnet risk is unethical in much the same way that breaking into homes to dramatise the risks of burglary is also a non-starter."
No it isn't!!! Lazy false analogies like this drive me up the flipping wall!
Clearly, everyone already knows that it's possible that a person could break into your house and steal your TV.
Not everyone is aware that someone can hijack your computer and use it in a money-making racket.
There. Think about it next, ok? Thanks!
To all you lot moaning about the Iraq war - can I just say; at least it turned out well. You've got a much better government, sanctions have been lifted, oil supply is better and regional tensions have been much reduced.
Sure, about a million Iraqis had to die, but it's not as if they're British or anything. You have to understand; people at the top are chosen, perhaps even born, to make decisions like this. People like you or I are simply too naive to understand the factors involved in such a decision making process. In that way, a few "bent truths" are perfectly acceptable.
Paris because she was busy distracting us with poor-quality pr0n while our country was going down the crapper.
It's just a shame that the Chinese government is so rife with corruption - prostitution is considered par for the course for local government officials. Posting this comment might not help with you being cleared through the great firewall but it has to be said!
Paris because her marketing strategy has now failed in China.
Yes I bought a DAB radio for my car - because it's an old vauxhall and so the stereo in it sounds like an angry bluebottle in a biscuit tin. Some observations:
- The reception is crap. Really crap. The stick on aerials are about £30 and only work in towns. That makes it even worse than Freeview! If they're waiting for 50% take up before switchover, it'll never, ever happen.
+ The sound quality is actually a big improvement over FM. I know there are loads of hi-fi prats that go on about how awful it is but they're idiots who spend a grand on a cd player because "it's got a lower bit error rate"...
- BBC broadcast different stations at different volume levels! So you have to set 1xtra to 6 on the dial, then if you want to listen to Radio 3 you have to crank it up to 25. Which is annoying, plus it makes you jump when you switch back.
- All the commercial stations on DAB are a) impossible to pick up because they're on a low-power mutliplex b) crap anyway.
- The kit is bloody stupidly expensive and really chunky. How comes I can buy a freeview box for the the fluff in my pocket whereas a mono dab radio that does nothing else costs £50??? Where are the personal DAB receivers?
So when I sold my car I let the dude have the DAB radio, not that he wanted it particularly.
Just go DAB+ or come up with some sort of standard that is low bandwidth enough to piggyback on the FM signal.
Wow, this website is really turning into the internet's Daily Mail. Certainly no points to the register for printing this blogodreck! Reading on a bit, it looks like bittorrent are writing a new protocol BASED ON UDP, rather than just dumping connectionless packets onto the net willy-nilly. Is it more likely that they're intent on melting the net because they're evil, or because they'd like to remove some of the inefficiencies you get using TCP to support an application it was never designed for? What the author doesn't seem to realise is that P2P torrent protocols are quite complicated and that the people who more or less invented them are somewhat better placed to decide how they work than some nobody blogger. Still, at least it generated a couple of interesting pages on /.
If carrier were bloody made out of bloody cardboard and ran on AA batteries it wouldn't make much difference providing it looks big and scary. The only time you'd ever actually use a carrier force is if you're a) going around starting wars with people because it makes it easier to bomb them or b) if WW3 starts. The main reason for ordering this great lump seems to be the economic stimulus it'd provide. In fact, why not spend it on writing the words "up yours, France!" on the moon?
Glad OFCOM had the sense to stall this into the ground. If they'd given a flat no, Murdoch would have wheeled out his million dollar lawyers and dragged them through the courts.
Freeview does suck, but squeezing a couple more channels wouldn't help when the signal is so weak you need a patch to the feckin' Arecibo dish to pick up half the channels! Crank up the watts, for the love of God!
...may bang on about himself for hours on end, with barely a CD inserted for considerable stretches... but have you HEARD what commercial radio is like? Capital or Fox FM presenters all make Alan Partridge sound like Jeremy Paxman and the amount of recycled material (how many times am I going to be told how much fun it is to work out my "porn name"?) is ridiculous. Personally I've got a DAB in the car and switch between 6 Music and 1Xtra - both BBC joints.
What was that all about? Usually articles on El Reg are quite good, but that was just a directionless rant!
Obviously, Yanks need to learn to drive a lot less. Higher fuel prices will do that. Clearly, collecting weeds and squashing them to get the grease isn't going to directly replace all fossils fuels. Yes, corn-to-ethanol is just another Dubya tax-handout to his pals.
What exactly did that article say that wasn't already blindingly obvious?
Do you lot have editors?
Having worked there (not for long, so this isn't bitterness), I would strongly urge anyone with any influence in educational IT not to spend a single penny on this bunch of jokers.
It seems all they do is get Server 2003 and bolt a load of proprietary rubbish to the side to stop anyone else provide support contracts. They then sell this at about double the price and watch as bemused IT officers realise they no longer know how to create a user account. This necessitates them calling RM support, where they get pinged back and forth between 20 different teams for an hour.
The staff there are incredibly demotivated, the management haven't got a clue what they're doing (I mean literally!) and the office is a converted warehouse with wobbly floors, dirty carpets and not enough parking spaces.
Out of all the jobs I have ever had (I used to travel a fair bit so that's quite a few), the month I spent at RM was unquestionably the worst.
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