Posts by David

@Chris

8.1 seconds in a V8 Jag? You should try putting petrol in it and starting the engine

@Duncan Robertson

That must be 'cos you scots are all pug ugly and utterly charmless: In Cumbria, Men are men and the sheep wear lipstick and mascara and SHAVE.

Dirty Dave.

I don't read the comments either

Dave

@Conrad Longmore

"57% of notices to Google demanding that it remove links from its search engine database were sent by competitors to the company linked to."

In other words, (as I understand it) 57% of the takedown notices were to have *competitors* stuff removed.

If you write a nice book and get Google to link to it and I write a worse book on the same subject and want it to get better ratings, I could send a takedown notice to Google to get them to remove *your* book, so mine has less competition.

Dave.

Complete Crap

I thought that the film was boring and Heath Ledger no more than adequate as the Joker.

Even Tom Cruise could have done a better job.

@Dan

The saving grace of the Spanish system is its complete and utter inefficiency.

They can take whatever data they like, as soon as they put it down they can't find it again without having to get up and walk to a filing cabinet (which isn't in anybodies job description), and as for the idea of the central database actually working for more than half an hour a month, well, the less said the better.

So far I haven't had problems with the no-id card bit, most people happily accept a driving license as valid ID, so I don't need to drag the passport around.

Dave.

Re: Re: Sounds plausible

No it isn't. Good Riddance. Who wants a fucking stupid dog anyway?

What title?

"Operators themselves rarely stoop to such measures, for fear of exactly the kind of backlash that AT&T is now experiencing."

Rubbish, I get at least 3 promotional texts from Movistar (subsibiary of Telefonica) a week.

Re: Stunning Movie

I was bored the whole way through. it didn't work as a film of a comic-book, and as a thriller/action movie it was crap.

They should have chosen one or the other.

Dave

@Dave

No it fucking isn't.

Street value is the price that they would get for the gear on the street. Not the price that legit copies of the originals fetch in the shops. As the simple sums done by other posters show, this latter price is the one that was used to get to 1m.

Hear, hear on El reg doing some thinking occasionally and not just cutting and pasting police press releases.

(Another) Dave.

@AC

What planet do you come from?

HR, marketing and the Accountants are always the last to get fired. any fule kno that. The first to go are the lowest layer: the ones who do the real work. That last to go is the chief accounting git, (s)he has to hand the keys to the Administrators when the whole thing goes under.

Dave

Elrond Hubbard

What a jerk.

What title?

The problem is not the business model you adopt. The problem is the natural propensity of people to thieve, to get something for nothing. If there were a flat tax, an AMC, people would still find a way of dodging it: just ask the BBC. and as for the voluntary thing, well, we have one. they're called shops, and everybody is free to go in and buy music. There is also an online version: iTunes, and others whose names I can't remember. The voluntary business model is there (it's crap, but it would improve if more people started showing interest), but no one uses it 'cos the free model works very well. At the moment, for those prepared to do a little more work, it works much, much better than the voluntary model, AND it doesn't have DRM. Win-Win for the freetards.

The "free" model does have its costs: mainly in time. time taken to find the torrent, check it out, weed out the dross and the unwanted dog/duck pr0n or whatever.

The voluntary model will have to compensate for this extra effort the freetards make. i.e people will have to be prepared to pay for the convenience offered by the online shops.

As for the AMC. Well, the license model works for the BBC which is one entity. It takes the cash and spends it. it doesn't try and calculate/guess which actor/producer/cameraman deserves the most cash, it spends it where it sees fit on making telly. (whether you like it or not, and whether they spend it well is outside the scope of this comment). The agencies which nowadays collect the cash and divvy it up amongst artists according to some criteria of who has earned most are all very well for a small part of the revenue. It's just a bonus or something, each year (or whatever) the artist gets a few quid for having their song played a few times on radio one. Most of their cash will come from performing/record and tshirt sales and so on. If a larger part of their cash depended on the divvying-up algorithm, there would be little incentive to work extra hard: everyone would know exactly how much cash was available in total, and more or less how it would be spread around. We would simply get talentless gits who could game the new system better than anyone else.

I do think that most people would prefer a physical object to a downloaded one. If that physical object were sufficiently cheap, say a couple/few quid for a CD, then most of the people who download music would simply buy the stuff, and rip it for their iPods and so on, keeping the original as a backup. And so the online stores should go the same way: say a couple of quid for a lossless, DRMless encoding of an album complete with cover art and so on for those who want it, then I think more people would sign up. It would HAVE to be cheap, though. It would have to be easy to use, have lots of choice and bandwidth, etc.,.

Unfortunately I don't have a better option to offer :(

Dave

Twatdangle

no further comment

@A. Lewis

Did you mean Venereal Vultures?

@Sarah Bee

Sarah,

I want you to have my babies.

Love,

Dave.

P.S. Who the fuck is Amy Winehouse, anyway? Was she in Abba?

@Ken Hagan

Iraq springs immediately to mind, except that I thought that the Yanks just shoved their way in and didn't worry about passports at all.

David

@John Stirling

You're fired.

Dave.

stopping the thread

Does my mentioning Hitler in this thread (and saying that you're all just like him) mean that you'll all have to stop and go back to work now?)

Should I have called you all Nazis as well?

@David Harper

Someone has to maintain the class itself don't they? or is this a magical class that "just works", however you implement it?

David

@Matt Berg

The king was imposed by Franco and the army as a condition to their accepting a "democracy" rather than their having a fight over Franco's successor.

It is widely believed that the king was involved in the coup d'etat and then turned on his mates and shopped them when he got cold feet about the whole thing.

Most Spaniards I know would happily exchange him for Paris Hilton* 'cos she at least has her own cash and wouldn't need to sponge off the Spanish tax-payer so much**.

Dave.

* Apparently obligatory reference

** Though I doubt that that would stop her. (See Liz II for more information).

Hitler

Isn't it about time that we put this one to sleep?

hitler, nazi. etc.

David

re:Cats are an environmental menace

However, Some of them have nice tits.

Re: a well designed name could really screw up databases

the correct SQL syntax is

select (*) from details where name is NULL;

no quotes, no nothing.

It was a nice idea but it wouldn't work in practice. (Not on a proper database, anyway. I dunno about SQLServer or Access or similar things)

@Michael

*Yawns ostentatiously*

@Stuart

Oz has always been in the bible belt. They just think that they're not.

employment contracts

My contract states that, as well as my employer owning anything and everything that I do at work - not entirely unreasonable, I suppose - they also have first refusal over everything I do on my own time which is related to my work, or which uses the tools and/or software that my employer creates and/or provides. The contract also states that everything I do for a period of I forget how many years after I leave the company is also subject to this first refusal clause.

I have no idea about the enforceability of these clauses.

Bookmarks

I've just installed it on a Spanish version of XP professional. I didn't read the manual so I started to try to import my bookmarks using Bookmarks->Show all bookmarks and instantly got the "...Safari... caused a problem... ...would you like to save a dump file" message.

Uninstall is the next step I think.

.co.uk

Why go yank if you don't have to?

sennse of humour

JonClarke

you remind me of a bloke I work with, and he is the most boring wanker to whom I have ever had to listen.