Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple

isirta

Why not? Well, it isn't enough characters. Also it stands for [I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again], the quite rude and weird radio comedy show mostly from the 1960s with the Goodies -and- John Cleese and Humphrey Barclay and... oh, look it up.

Maybe it's foolishly optimistic but I'd propose that a user should be allowed to tick a box to say that they understand why a really strong password is important, and then pick their own anyway - like that.

We have to use 8 characters mixed-case and a number and change once a month. I have RSI and I can't get to my keyboard-alternative without typing a password first. I get through it by pretending that the letters are a swear-word, and the number... my secret. (I hope.)

Re: Sour grapes?

Don't blame this slipping satellite... and, yes, is this scary? I am having trouble figuring out if it's meant to be scary.

Are we going to see Bruce Willis sent up on a Space Shuttle with a hundred rolls of metal baking foil, to wrap an asteroid up in reflective material and change its orbit?

Downvote because

It's widely accepted in the UK that children should not be allowed to buy alcohol or cigarettes even with their own money, and that it is rightly illegal to sell those items to minors. Not universally accepted, since there still are shopkeepers selling, and, of course, children buying.

I think there is a good argument that for younger children, in particular, their Internet experience should be restricted, as a norm - if not the actual law. But also I don't think that adults should normally be denied the freedom of general Internet access, including, yes, there seems to be quite a lot of pornography there to look at if you want.

We seem to have agreed that children also shouldn't be exposed to excessive advertising for toys, or for unhealthy food and drink items - which seem to be the only food and drink items that anybody wants to advertise to children.

Re: Java malware

Well, Java vulnerabilities usually became public when Sun or Oracle released a free update with the vlunerability patched, and therefore not vulnerable any more.

Even so, I wouldn't want to run Java with every web site out there, no. Nor Flash.

VLC

...oh, and I like being able to speed up or slow down media playback in VLC.

Also worth getting is smplayer 0.8, a nice Windows interface for mplayer. I have PVR files of "radio" programming that VLC won't touch but smplayer takes.

VLC preferences?

I seemed not to get hardware accelerated video in Windows until I disabled Aero, then it was much more satisfactory. Maybe there's a "Heck with Aero" preference to tick.

Less satisfactory playing certain PVR files, or converting them to MP4 last time I tried. Audio out of synch!

You made some good points.

Not everyone wants porn, but if you choose to access it then at least you should expect to enjoy it - or something's gone wrong. Aren't most porn users enjoying it?

Re: I am not a lawyer...

"this looks to me as though a company with a legitimate trademark registered in the EU is being banned from using it in a domain name in the EU in favour of a company not having registered said trademark."

I think we're being told that the judge decided that's what the US company and their EU front wanted you to think, but that in fact they -aren't- entitled to trademark protection.

A lot of the time in these stories, you can accidentally read too much of one side of the argument.

Re: familiar idea

[Snow Crash] has The Raft, but it's built of refugee ships mostly, which is pretty different.

Well, I was wondering

how blind merchants would get along with a card and a click-clack machine. They can probably manage chip & pin. On the other hand, you could sneak up and just quietly take the merchandise without them knowing, unless they have a specially designed creaky floor like in [You Only Live Twice] (the book anyway).

Re: see ID

Anyway I don't get it. Why do you not sign the card? What ID are we talking about?

I have a small signature; accordingly I sign the card several times, using all the space. Otherwise, it might be possible for someone to remove the signature and write in their own version. But UK commerce is now mostly chip & pin exclusively (or cash), I think, and the signature doesn't come into it.

You could sign your name and then write "wants you to ask for a photo ID", or something.

They don't say that.

In fact, some services have a contractual condition that you must provide true information.

Another service I've used wants to know the name of my favourite actor AND wants me to log in regularly and change the answer. What, so now I'm obliged to appreciate culture whimsically? Presumably they want me to be their loyal customer, but I can't be loyal to Ashton Kutcher? (...For example.) Also, presumably I have to keep the answers secret... the love that dare not speak its name... What if I secretly become a stalker (of whichever favourite actor we're talking about), and then, through no fault of my own, I get caught? Maybe I should just put down Glenn Beck no one will guess that.

Re: 1992 called. They want their network back.

Well, I think they can also distinguish walking pace. Or running.

And if drivers with phones have to slow down to 10 mph to avoid being cut off, they'll be easy to spot. :-)

Today it does sound a bit like

a lady's private accessory that takes batteries. NSFW.

I'm not sure how long that particular design has been rabbiting on.

nude women painted like cows?

The concept isn't doing anything for me yet, but I can't put it out of my mind. I may be Googling it by the end of the day, this is udderly ridiculOHGODNOMAKEITSTOP :-)

Require the phone companies to reject calls except emergency calls from and to a phone that is moving. And that isn't on a train (trains would need to become phone base stations for people using phones in them, except for the quiet carriage). This is all feasible.

Free?

If voice calls are priced in your service subscription then they aren't free, you're paying for them.

I think you're underrating the benefit (in principle) that if you have a computer on every desk anyway, then giving them telephony without separate telephone wiring is a big, big bonus. I'm just assuming that office telephone systems are still very, very expensive.

Having said that, something that works with a phone handset - and maybe without logging into a PC - will be easier to work with, for a lot of people.

There are USB handsets still in some stores, but I don't know if they're obsolete.

Reversible?

I don't think that's physically possible, but that's why you asked. In fact I don't think this is about transferring heat at all, but controlling where heat appears. In that case, for a microprocessor, it would be not so much a heat sink, as a structure where processing occurs inside the core of the component but heat is generated on the surface. I'm visualising a 1970s fibre optic lamp made of nanotubes, which is probably wrong. But pretty.

Re: RE: "that first paragraph was meant to be irony."

So you think that the American imperialists, plus of course Israel where your microprocessors probably came from anyway, -aren't- hacking the Internet in Iran as hard as they can?

Re: Perelandra

Aren't the characters in Perelandra nude throughout, or at least when Ransom gets to Perelandra? Or at least the planet's new Eve is. Of course, that also went for [A Princess of Mars], and Disney fixed that for [John Carter].

It is quite subtle when the Un-man supposedly is a zombie arguing with Ransom but seems to be eloquently putting arguments that he previouslyyproposed while a living human being, and I wondered at last reading whether you're intended to think, or suspect, that Ransom has gone schizophrenic in believing his opponent to be Satan his horny-headed self when it's just an objectionable but perhaps not wholly unreasonable bloke. An unreliable-narrator sort of thing, it's not real at all. Well, except that they're on Venus. (Which isn't like the real planet Venus at all - thank goodness. We put metal probes on Venus and they melt from the heat.)

Anyway, "subtle" = "completely ruined when they make the movie".

Re: More importantly

I think if your SDHC or SDXC device doesn't list UHS in its specification, it won't take advantage of UHS, but it will work with compatible cards using the slower protocol.

Wikipedia on "Secure Digital" says,

"Cards that comply with UHS show UHS-I or UHS-II on the label, and report this capability to the host device. Use of UHS requires that the host device command the card to drop from 3.3-volt to 1.8-volt operation and select the 4-bit transfer mode."

Given precedents with USB, watch out for weaselly product specifications that say something like "Compatible with UHS-I and UHS-II cards", since a device with no UHS features apparently is still compatible with UHS cards, it just won't use the UHS feature. Obviously.

Read the ANDs and ORs

"It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use any electronic or digital device and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person."

It's an anti-stalker and anti-scumbag law, and, golly, maybe Register readers and writers -will- have to think twice about what they say. The offence is to use (1) an electronic or digital device AND (2a) dirty talk OR (2b) a real verbal threat of physical or property injury AND (3) the deliberate intention to "terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend". Some of which words also may mean something different in a law bill, such as if "annoy" turns out to mean "to cost somebody money without their consent", but I am just guessing.

Misspelling annoys me, but to be an offence you would have to -deliberately- misspell words for that deliberate purpose. And they would have to be dirty or scary words like "bottum" or "nale bomb".

I liked his "Me-Arr Christianity", (great hook!) but I saw problems with the argument..

If you prefer a "Mutiny on the Bounty" joke, by all means write one.

And do you know -why- I want a cup of tea?

As far as I remember - radio version, anyway - Arthur Dent locked up the Nutrimatic Drink Machine, and then the spaceship's main computer, by asking the drink machine a rhetorical question - "do you know -why- I want a cup of tea" - causing it to go nuts trying to calculate the answer.

They did this in Star Trek

There are infinitely many prime numbers greater than 87. Each time Steve Wozniak asks Siri for them, it starts another everlasting process to work them out. Soon this will be the only thing that Siri is doing.

In Star Trek somebody finally invented a computer, unfortunately an evil one, that could recognise a stupid question and ignore it.

Take for granted?

I don't think we take MRI for granted. Those are very expensive machines. Lots and lots of people have done fundraising things for ages and ages to buy one for their favourite large hospital.

United Kingdom guideline price list for a go in one:

http://www.privatehealth.co.uk/private-healthcare-services/diagnostic-imaging/mri-scans/mri-scan-prices/

It's a treaty, which is like a contract, except you can break it whenever you like.

The point however seems to be that the European Parliament has decided that there's no need to have the treaty professionally examined to see if it's fair to EU citizens, and so presumably is just assuming that it is. So the vote is likely to be yes. Odd that the Register hints otherwise. I think it might be some kind of intelligence test.