Sad indead

I've been with UK Online for a few years, and they have been excellent, I won't be moving to Sky, obviously, as I can't get Be where I am the only choice will be to move as they are the only decent equivalent if I stay in Britain. So much for all the OFCOM BS about getting better broadband services in this country, perhaps the Coalition might do us all a favour and give them a poke or better yet take the network away from BT altogether and let a thousand LLU services bloom.

Carter helps repressive governments

What about people using Tor / Freenet / I2P2 etc to help people in countries with repressive governments circumvent their Internet restrictions, if their connection is used to share a copyrighted file will they be restricted to? What about people with WiFi with no encryption? Or cracked WEP? Or paid for with a cloned CC? Or using a web torrent service, will mere use indicate a copyright violation? Or being part of a botnet? Who is allowed to make a copyright complaint? Can I send them my noisy neighbours IP address and create a legal DOS attack? Or maybe against a company I don't like?

If this goes through it will destroy so much and gain very little as I would suspect anyone filesharing with even a tiny bit of knowledge will either use an anonymous proxy / Usenet / web torrent download service etc and therefore will not be caught, in other words, epic fail.

A simple formula for what should happen

Core network should run @ xGE where x is the current standard every time the standard goes up one notch the plans for backbone upgrade should be completed within 6 months and roll out started within 12 months and completed within 24 months for all major metropolitan areas and 36 months for the rest of the country, businesses should have access to the backbone directly at xGE and consumers at xGE/10, all connections should be full bore without download limits and this formula should be overseen by a government body and enabled by primary legislation, successful delivery of the network should mean a tidy bonus to those in charge, failure should mean they are fired and banned from holding any other government job.

The bombing of 2600 meetings starts

... in 5 minutes. - Obama channeling Reagan.

"In America, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the Muslims, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Muslim;

And then they came for the hackers, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a hacker;

And then... they came for me... And by that time there was no one left to speak up." - me, channeling Martin Niemöller

Now all they need to do is

Say Nazis, IRA terrorists, Spanish Inquisitors and pedos are evil, expose all in their midst and hand them over to the authorities where necessary and get rid of the Nazi Pope.

How to beat the "credit crunch"

1. Nip over the Channel.

2. Buy large quantities of booze.

3. Sell to anyone who doesn't have "proper" ID / Benjamin Button / etc.

4. Profit!!!

Perverting The Course of Justice

Is a crime and Milliband should be charged, but he won't, justice is dead in this country.

Global arbitrage

This is allowed for labour, stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies but not for copyrighted or trademarked goods, creating inefficient pricing of those goods, this stupidity is spreading for example Kenya and Ethiopia trademarking it's coffee- -

http://www.gachewacoffee.com/2008/03/kenya-repositioned-as-coffee-trade-mark.html

It is a form of protectionism and can only lead to more inefficient markets and lower economic growth.

HQ iPlayer == Bittorrent

As for charging content providers, the whole point of the Net is you buy an IP connection and what goes through it is dealt with according to certain rules which everyone knows and follows, if you choose not to play by the rules of the Internet you aren't supplying an Internet connection, plus of course the deep packet inspection necessary would fall foul of RIPA and EU privacy laws, I'd love to see people from the IETF pile on to uk.gov and our esteemed EU Telecoms Commissioner, Viviane Reding too. Even if this got off the ground everyone would just switch to Tor and encrypted VPNs or SSH connections anyway, so all it does is make things more difficult and expensive for the user. They don't suggest things like multicast and caching to alleviate congestion, which seems the obvious thing to do, but then why have a cheap engineers solution when you can have an expensive, slow, loophole filled solution created by corrupt politicians.

Semitic is a Language Group, Not a Race or Ethnic Group

Please get your terms correct-

http://www.counterpunch.org/hamod07122003.html

The correct term for the spoofed email would be anti-Zionist not anti-Semitic, sadly the likes of Bernie Madoff do lend credence to those who view all Jews as dishonest crooks, though the Madoffs of the world are nearly all rabid Zionists as the idea of being a Master Race chosen by God and endowed by him with the Chosen Land means they view all non-Jews as subhuman, a psychopathic belief system no different than any other tyranny of one group over another.

Gedankenexperiment

A little thought experiment. Could crime scene photos come under this law? Lets assume yes, then the police with those photos would be criminalized, so they go, the case is then taken over by other officers, who are now also criminalized and so on. Okay lets say the police are excluded, what about other people who handle the photos, barristers etc. they would be similarly criminalized, what about coroners who have the photos for an inquiry? As the law is so broadly drawn I can imagine that the possession of other types of evidence to be used in court proceedings may criminalize those who require it for justice to be done. .

Have the Met created more problems than they have solved

I was going to ask out of those 31,797 people stopped and searched how many might have signed the OSA and be in a position to compromise British security in some way, given that one poster has already mentioned signing the OSA and working in defence as I once did on the basis of a very unscientific roster of posters here that would make it 500+ people if 1% were angry enough about it to do something to breach security then the Met have not enhanced our security but compromised it at least 5 times.

In a deflationary environment

only abusive monopolies can raise prices, these require corrupt officials and government to look the other way, and I'm more convinced than ever we need a cleansing in this country to cut out the rot that is at its heart.

Thermite

Much more fun than a hammer, and has the anarchists cookbook geek factor.

What is the point of .NET?

I know it is used by many MS only shops, but other than lots of buzzwords (Managed Code etc) I've never understood the appeal, and I know that many who started by evangelising it have turned away in recent years, Java is at least crossplatform-ish (differences in threading etc), though these days it seems just as easy to use C++ with all the cross platform libs (Boost, wxWidgets etc) out there. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to why it should be chosen except for your thrown together, bog standard, VB.NET DB apps?

re:don't sneeze

Not everything the American government views as terrorism, there are a few exceptions-

1. IRA terrorists murdering British people.

2. Israelis murdering anyone they feel like who isn't Jewish.

3. Americans murdering anyone they feel like who isn't American.

4. Ex-Cubans murdering current Cubans.

Battelle

So the anthrax was produced by Battelle, the same company who employs Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov AKA Ken Alibek formerly of Biopreparat, the Soviet bioweapons manufacturer, who brought the technology to create the small particle, highly aerogenic anthrax used in the attacks to the US, but the FBI expects us to believe it was Ivins, who didnt know how to weaponise the anthrax? Of course the other question is why would a smart scientist like Ivins put anthrax with granularity smaller than the holes in a paper envelope in one to send it? Of course if it was part of the CIA operation that sent anthrax substitute around the US in tests that had a much larger grain size than the Alibek / Battelle weaponised anthrax it would make sense, but then we have CIA and Battelle bio-terror conspiracy.

re:weaponised

The anthrax would have to be milled to separate the spores and additives added to stop it clumping to form the highly aerogenic anthrax used in the attacks, this is consistent with the processes that came out of the Soviet bio-warfare program at BioPreparat and the technology was transfered to the US by Dr. Alibekov who went to work at Battelle Memorial Institute not Ft. Detrick so Ivins would not have had the know how or technology to do the weaponisation.

The moral of the story is

Don't ever communicate with Americans as you're probably being spied on, unless you want that free trip to Gitmo, afterall, you're not American, and therefore a terrorist. God these people are psychopaths.

If you want a dose of reality

Why oil is going through the roof at Market TIcker

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/2008/05/thrombosis-thursday.html

I would really recommend anyone who's interested in what is really happening in the world markets read his daily blog, he may use some trader terminology but once you get passed that his analysis is very good.

Less processing power than my GeForce

I get ~500GFLOPs out of my nVidia Geforce graphics card with faster (GDDR3) memory and how much do they want for a Cell blade I wonder, a lot more than my graphics card I suspect and I'm a generation behind, the 9800GX2 will do over 1TFLOP, of course you need an algorithm that can be parallized to get that, but using the CUDA SDK it's pretty easy to write code, it's not Occam on a T800 hypercube, but it is much faster if not quite as much fun.

@Baby naming

It's name shall be Damen and it shall be marked with the number of The Beast!

@Neil Greatorex

Any Entanet reseller, full 2meg for around £35/month, one of their resellers is www.ukfsn.org who use the profits to support UK open source if you're so inclined. Note: I have no affiliation to Enta other than as a satisfied customer for the last 18months.

re:I'm typing this on an m15X

Actually it should be useful for more than games as the Nvidia 88000GTX can be used for parallel processing under CUDA.

@Sarah Bee

You're way to Kew-l for S-kew-l...

@Alexander Hanff

Speak to him on the phone, record the conversation and send it to the Reg to go on as a radio prog.

re:Easy to avoid

Iraqi snipers already do that, Google for Juba.

The author is very naive

As many have said comments are incredibly useful in many ways, what hasnt been mentioned is when you need to point to supplementary documentation, for example when using an algorithm from Knuth or PhD paper or an SSE2 tutorial or when explaining hacks required when closed source you are linking to or hardware that does not behave as documented. That said comments do not always enlighten, I still would like to get my hands on who ever commented the SPICE source with such wonderful comments as // sanity check. Also comments are very useful for anyone joining a team, you can tell from quickly scanning the source who on the team knows their stuff and who hasnt a clue, and if management should start tossing out the good coders you know it's time to call the headhunter,

Simple compromise

Online data for free, paper copies and CDs charged at cost plus, that would allow useful mashups of gov.uk data while still generating some money.

Threats to Great Britain in order

Near term

1. gov.uk invading other countries thus starting a war with 1.5 billion people i.e. 1/4 of the human population of the planet, including some with nuclear weapons (Pakistan)

2. gov.uk saving it's over extended banker buddies thus destroying the value of the currency

(2 may infact save us from 1 if gov.uk cannot afford any more war, we'd be poor but alive)

Long term

1. End of cheap oil and gas / climate change

2. GM crops transfering genes to weeds creating superweeds that take over available crop land and cause mass starvation.

@Tim Spence

"and take him to your local disused warehouse to torture "

Boy you are behind the times, no one uses warehouses these days, it's Deigo Garcia so the torturers, sorry I meant very nice CIA/MI6 personnel, can get a tan between torture sessons, I also hear the mess bar does some wicked cocktails.

IP addresses are personal information, as seen on El Reg

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/22/eu_article_29_group_hear_our_roar/

"IP addresses - particularly when times are logged - can be tied to locations and often to individuals, and as such can be viewed as personal information. Exact details of the compliance regime are expected to appear in the full report."

So surely that scuppers any transfer of IP address information as it would be against EU Data Protection laws.

Also one assumes that the data from the torrent has to downloaded to verify that it is infringing, if the person that uploads the torrent includes data that is copyright to them then the BPI would be infringing on the uploaders copyright and therefore could be taken offline themselves. Or perhaps an even more cunning plan would be to add some scientology texts to music torrents, so the scientologists and the music industry could battle each other over who was infringing whos works, sort of a copyright Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla?

Hoping for leglislation

If a law is passed, and all that is required as proof is a screenshot, all I need to do is change the name of a torrent the BPI are part of in uTorrent to something I have copyright on, take a screenshot and we can get the BPI kicked off the Net.

@David Cornes

False positives like...

Iraq WMD / AQ connection?

John Charles De Menenes?

The Sarin Plot?

Liquid explosives on planes?

No conspiracy at all... right?