Posts by Subliteratus

Heh, this is the same Claire Perry who got a bit miffed that the speaker wasn't giving her the chance to bang on about tuition fees in a Commons debate just over a year ago. She left the chamber in snit, went to the tea room and - using her outside voice - asked "What have I got to do to be called by the Speaker? Give him a blow job?"

I wander if part of her zeal for filtering naughty thing is to stop that particular search result from popping up every time the good people of Devizes google for info on their elected delegate?

Not a lawyer, but isn't this the sort of unilateral decision that gets CEOs sued by their shareholders for failure to perform due diligence?

As long as George Lucas gets told to take a hike...

This sounds like a pretty good idea - one licence to rent or buy the content with a number of ways of getting hold of the data. The only fly I could see in the ointment is some dick like Lucas coming along, selling a version of Star Wars, then coming back next year and superceding it with the Double-Secret Probation Edition and removing the earlier version from the servers (cos you know he would). Disney, with their limited-time releases of their animated features, aren't going to play cos anything that sounds like it might give their customers a fair deal brings their execs out in hives (probably).

The two questions I'd ask are: when you "buy" a film what are your rights if the distributor goes into receivership (i.e. is your licence held in escrow and whoever picks up the copyright has to honour your licence)? And do you buy licences separately for SD and HD content, or is it one price for every version?

I know his pain

Folk may bitch and moan about the plots being too dependent on twists, surprises, and the obligatory sudden reversals but I still think it's a dick move to have the privilege of an early screening then blab about it. For instance, I'm *still* pissed off with Zoe Ball blowing the ending to Buffy Season 5 on her morning show on Radio 1 10 years ago. I swear to God that gobby moo timed it so everyone whose alarm went off at 7am wouldn't be awake enough to get to the snooze button in time.

Tell people it's great or it's crap all you want but don't give away the ending without fair warning.

Proper space opera

Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy. Thrills, mystery, action, romance, spaceships, pirates, gangsters, satanism, spectral possession, antimatter explosions up the wazoo (very nearly literally in one case), inter-dimensional travel, god-like aliens - it ticks every box. It'd have to be a mini-series or about 6 films (going by the Harry Potter waste-of-a-film technique of splitting up nasty big books). The Greg Mandel trilogy would probably be easier and cheaper to adapt though.

While the more cerebral, speculative side of the genre exists, it's very hard to adapt into anything that people actually want to watch.

Hold on...

Which charities are we talking about here? Plenty of the national charities provide paid-for commercial services, have paid employees, organise marketing campaigns, sponsor entertainment events, lobby the government for favourable laws and in pretty much every way act like corporations. Except with the special tax status because they bung a few quid at some sociologists or some unlucky sod - and only a small percentage of their total turnover too. Why shouldn't they pay?

Try looking at a charity's published accounts sometimes - their spending is all wrapped up as 'programmes' where they hide how much they don't spend on actual people by bunging it together with all their admin and advertising costs. They look like they're spending a ton but are pretty cagey about how much actually makes it to the front lines.

If you want to help real people, try volunteering at a local level - don't only give cash to JAF corporate entity.

Pfff

I still can't get a new Virgin package with the 1Tb TiVo anyway - all I seem to be able to sign up for is the V+ HD box. Seriously, they've only been bigging up the damn TiVo for nearly a year now and only celebs and triallers seem to be able to get their mitts on them. If they even exist at all. So who cares about a non-existent 500Gb version?

Sweet merciful Jeebus, given how long it take these muppets to get a product to market, we'll all have the Alzheimer's before we see it. At least all our shows will seem like new again.

The past is a different country

A modern remake would make no sense - half the plot hangs on characters dying of diseases that can be cured with a two week course of antibiotics now. Are they going to have Catherine die of Super-AIDS?

Software, not hardware

Word on the forums is that it's a problem with a 3rd party bundled application, iStat and its fan control software (smcfancontrol), and the fix is to just yank it out.

As a test analyst, this sort of screw-up makes me smile - cos it means one more set of muppets gets the message on QC. Testing may not be rocket surgery but it is essential.

Is it really about teh kiddehs?

I ran into 3's filter trying to surf for info on breast augmentation the first week I got a SIM-only contract from them. I cancelled that contract less than half an hour later. I don't want to have to phone some call center minion and tell them I want to be put on the perv list.

But Vodafone, my next provider, were worse. I specifically told the salesperson that I didn't want adult filters on my contract, and I saw her click the checkbox on the application page to disable the adult content filters but they were still in place when I checked. Muppets. Luckily I'm on a SIM-only plan - ditching Vodafone at the end of the month now.

I'm convinced it's less to do with protecting the kiddies than it is with reducing their data volumes. Most customers would be too embarrassed to enable the content and there's no way (I can find) to do it online - you have to phone and talk to someone. Fewer skin pics = lower data costs.

Amateurs

Tickle Cock Bridge in Castleford. And yes, it is for exactly the reason you're thinking about.

Pluralism rules!

Yeah maybe back in the 1950s when there was only 1 phone in the house, you knew who's phone was ringing: yours. Now we're in the future, we need to be able to discriminate. And I don't mean who's phone belongs to whom, I mean we have to be able to hate the owner properly based on the couple of bars they chose to identify themselves. Classical music for a ringtone? Stuck-up douche. Steps? Metrosexual moisturising, eyebrow-plucking douche. House music? Brain-dead juvenile douche. Techno? Drug-addled poser douche. Default ringtone? Cheap douche. The watch chimes from A Few Dollars More? Me-too douche. The Professionals ringtone: coffin-dodging douche. GPO model 706 ringtone: trainspotting douche.

Haters be hatin'. Just as nature intended ;)

Not a walnut

It looks way more like a pistachio to me. If you're going to use a nut-based toxonomy at least visit a more upmarket supermarket than Lidl.

Samsung ftw!

I have a Samsung 40" LCD that I bought about 4 years ago so I probably took a hit from the price-fixing. But, in consolation, my telly was built by the sneakiest and smartest manufacturer - the one that managed to stitch up all the rest. Those are both traits I admire and, if their engineers are as sneaky and smart as their regulatory risk team, then it's just possible I got value for my money anyway.

Stuff's worth what people are willing to pay for it and, even with the price-fixing, can people really claim they were cheated? They felt the deal was fair when they ponied up their cash at the time. No-one made them pay £1500 for a telly...

Judgement tl;dr

You can find the judgement at

http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Judgments/o-shea-judgment-06122010.pdf

if you're interested. Actually the evidence against him is pretty good - they have logged IP addresses for his initial subscription, credit card billing addresses matching his home, hand-annotated credit card statements that mark the billed items (that he didn't query when he's followed up other items in the past), and passwords from the gateway site matching passwords (and account names) he's used for other subscriptions. All in, I'd say reasonable doubt had been met, cos the only alternatives are OCD identity thieves, police fitting him up, or magic fairies.

Alarm and distress? Really?

If I woke up at 5am, looked out my window and saw some oldster giving it the beans on a trampoline out the back I'd pee myself laughing. The complainant must have had a way sheltered life - so sheltered it's amazing that she even knew what she was looking at.

Of course, given the Daily Record's tendency to rip the arse out of any story with even a hint that social orthodoxy has been transgressed, and a large section of the Scottish population (I'm Scottish btw - glad to be out of it right now) willing to believe their inflammatory proclamations are holy writ, it's amazing this guy wasn't chemically castrated and sectioned.

A spank on the wrist from the coppers would have done the job, not an entry in the sex offenders register. And what ever happened to mens rea?

Aw boo hoo

Given that people go to live in the country to get away from all the bustle and crowding in cities, they just have to accept there's consequences too. One is that it's a lot more expensive to install and maintain telecoms to fewer houses that are further apart. Same reason no-one's built a metro system to get them to the local shop (for local people). Which they'll want next.

If they want half-decent broadband they can pay the extra it'll cost or get on their bikes to civilisation. If they don't like it, then resilient areolas to the lot of em. Bumpkins.

It's a nice idea but...

If it didn't bend, you could get 2 bikes on a lamppost, one either side, but this way you can only get 1 bike per lamppost so it's actually worse. And, it doesn't really do anything to enhance a bike's security. A pair of boltcutters are going to have most chains off in seconds even if threaded through both tyres. And, if a thief needs more time with a sturdier chain, all they're going to do is what they do now - thread their chain through your frame to keep your bike where it is til they can get at it at night.

But as a foldable bike for taking on the train it may well be a winner. Cos, let's face facts, those foldable bikes with the tiny wheels are for gimps.

Paris, for promiscuity/bicycle semantic conflation.

Never again

I once bought a nice bit of Belkin kit, a 4-port KVM switch. It was great and worked happily until VGA and PS/2 connectors went nipples-ascendant. In 1997. I made the mistake of buying their 2-port mutant octopus-looking KVM (DVI/USB) switch a couple of months ago (for £80!) and it was the worst junk I've ever paid money for. Seriously, if a company doesn't have engineers competent enough to put together a working 2-port KVM switch, who'd trust them with anything more complex? Pity you only learn this after getting burned...

Enough's enough

I paid my final payment on my 18-month contract to O2 2 days ago and I'm going to be asking for a PAC code today. Visual voicemail is not enough incentive to deal an entity whose official policy is waste my goddamned time. All the O2 stores I visited today had queues along the street and were sold out of the 32GB models to boot. The shop in Cannon Street was only serving one customer at a time even though there were about 2 or 3 guys standing in the store staring off into space. Let retards queue all they want for the iPhone - I'm done.

You'd think that given the iPhone's star is waning and Android's on the rise, now would be the time to play hardball with Apple on pre-orders and stock allocations. But no... O2's legendary ineptitude in every field of endeavour continues unabated.

Hmm

I'm an O2 customer with an iPhone and my contract's up for renewal this month. It seems that I am unworthy to receive the pre-order offer. I was planning on queueing up outside one of their less popular stores tomorrow to see if I could get lucky but they can go fornicate themselves if they think I'm paying to be treated like a second-class customer.

And this queue-up-at-the-store-and-take-your-chances bullshit is getting old.

Local news report

If you follow the local report link, the arrest report summary reads like the technician tampered with evidence by attempting to replace the wallpaper before searching for and finding more images, then reported the images to his manager. I don't know about anyone else but if I found even 1 image of a child being abused I'd close the lid, stop getting my fingerprints all over the machine, and call the police. I'd tell my manager but only to report progress, not ask permission. I certainly wouldn't try changing the desktop settings while the store's copper-friendly CCTV cameras record me, for accessory-after-the-facty goodness.

As for "How stupid do you have to be to take your kiddie-pr0n-o-tr0n in for repairs?", do we *really* have to keep asking? Nearly 7bn peeps on the Earth, plenty of them are going to be way, way down on the bad side of the Bell curve.

What they'll really be thinking...

... is "what a bunch of hypocrites!" We call ourselves a free country, and tell the world that we're the ideal liberal democracy that all nations should want to become. But then our coppers pull retarded stunts like this so they can throw a bone to the hard-of-thinking. And, of course, if anyone questions the coppers' strategy then it's all "do you want the terrorists to kill your granny?" and "all it takes is one".

Meanwhile, we're just hardening the attitudes of the guys that are the real nutters and handing them another set of grievances to get the kids (they blow up too fast these days) into the gang.

Facilitating legal access

I've always thought there's very little point in getting into an arms race with the copyright infringers - they're never going to pay. You can try making life difficult for them but that'll just mean someone's going to come along with an app that can use a decentralised tracker with encryption and proxying built in, along with a recommendation system for other torrents the infringer might be interested in. I'd give it a year or so now.

Then where do the content guys go after that? Where they should have gone in the first place: releasing a DRM-free version of their shows & movies for paid download when they're first shown/released and stop forcing people to go through the whole cinema/dvd/movie channel/itunes/tv cycle. Sell to the customers who'll buy but sell when *they want to buy*, not when studios want to sell. I don't want to have to wait for BBC2 to get around to showing Heroes before I can buy the DVDs.

Shows like Sanctuary demonstrate that approach can work but there have been no others I've seen taking up the same model. The producers of Sanctuary even give the SD version of the show away for free and only charge for the quality version. And, with brazen irony, they used all those websites that distribute infringing content to get their legal content out to the community.

In essence: you're a dummy if you expect people to wait half a year to pay you for stuff they can have free today. And that stays the same no matter how many conniving, unelectable, morally-bankrupt life peers you solicit.

Catch-22

As they've hosed folks' access to PSN, how are they going to get the firmware updates out? The next round of BDs from Sony? It'll be a laugh to see how this all pans out.

Apart from the bit where I'm not laughing because half my games don't work any more.

Oh boo hoo

I got into computers because it was all new stuff with shiny lights and buttons. The lure was being at the cutting edge of a new enterprise for humanity, finding out how to do new things on new toys. Now I'm surrounded by folks describing themselves as IT professionals who don't even have their own computer in their homes. And people are seriously whining about how they can't use the most modern version of Firefox on their superannuated junk piles? A program that did't even exist when they bought their dusty difference engines?

Ditch the old crap, send it to the 3rd World or just chuck it in a skip for the love of the sensless, uncaring, mechanistic universe. And buy a new computer even if baby's teeth have to grow crooked.

Here's an idea

Why doesn't the BBC stop buying a load of crap from the US and make decent programmes of its own instead? You know, like it used to. Then they wouldn't have to worry about the rights-holders getting all huffy.

Unless, of course, the real plan is to prevent us from recording the stuff they plan on knocking out later on DVD for themselves. Members of a public organisation pursuing their own agenda and willfully deceiving the British public? Unthinkable!