I wonder how much Rupert Murdoch paid him?

..to write this obvious piece of astro-turfing, so biased you could open tin cans with it.

2016: News Headlines today...

- Online passport application service £2bn over budget, still not secure

- Black market flooded with fake British passports

- Passport Office not fit for purpose, says minister

Nominative Determinism?

Is Advocate General Juliane Kokott in her job because she is a tart? Kokott most likely comes from French "cocotte". See definition <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cocotte" target=_blank>cocotte</a>.

Our sweet Paris is of course a cocotte.

Oh to be a fly on the wall

in Steve Ballmer's office when that news came. I bet I would have learned some new swearwords. MS-Office is not going to be a cash-cow for much longer, and then the decline of MS becomes obvious even to the man in the street.

Any news on when Steve is getting his anti-aircraft missile launcher? I hear he wants to take out Larry's MIG while he's showboating in it...

[Paris, because she's both Libre and Gratis]

Not just corporate idiocy, but individual too

Lovely row recently, where a Microsoft customer service rep banned an Xbox Live user for the name of his home town, and refused to believe it was a real place, and refused even to look it up in an atlas or Google Maps. The name? Fort Gay, West Virginia.

"He was warned that if he put the location back on his profile he'd be kicked off Xbox Live and forfeit his membership fee."

The PR Microsuits have said "it was a mistake" and "we're going to make it right".. But no word on whether they are going to sack the homophobic asshole and tighten up hiring policies to exclude the wave of idiots that is engulfing the world.

Would someone turn Darwinian selection up to 11, please?

The Year of the Airship

I'm with Efros on this. It's been the Year of the Airship every other year throughout the decades, and it's never happened, for simple economic reasons - nobody can get the business numbers to work. The economic value of getting cargo to its destination quickly far outweighs the saving from cheap transportation. Which is why there's so many bloody container trucks on the roads, so little cargo on the canals, and so few airships in the skies.

Dream on...

>'Fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers and other foreign luxuries' will arrive like this. …<

Whoever wrote this line doesn't check the country of origin on the labels of the fruit and veg in the supermarket. For example, peas and runner beans - from Kenya or Ecuador - by airship? Not only won't it be fresh, but it is likely to be covered with hairy mould by the time it gets here.

Crap photo adds to embarrassing cockup

LuMan, you are so right. But that photo has been looked at and accepted for publication...hasn't it? Damn, I'm still making the assumption that the Beeb knows what it's doing. Now we know they have no content vetting process for their website - or possibly a vetting person who is as blind as a bat. [Yes, yes, I know bats aren't blind - it's a figure of speech, OK?]

Translations

I wonder what IBM has used as the euphemism his time. Could one of those affected please tell us?

The one before mine was CTP, Career Transition Program - rapidly renamed Cash To Piss off.

Mine was SRO, Skills Rebalancing Option - known as Smiling, Rich, and Out..

Ever worked with American companies?

"Less well known" = "comes from somewhere outside of the USA, and everybody knows those places don't really exist"

Americans as individuals are lovely, but their world view is ...er...narrow.

Who's checking?

>a requirement that Mr Heard does not access the internet or buy any item from which it is possible to use the internet <.

How would the court know if he breached this condition? This is a condition of HIS bail, and therefore places no obligation on his ISP to tell anybody about his use of his connection. Or, he borrows a laptop and goes wardriving, uses someone else's wifi. Who would know?

This is the kind of ignorant stupidity that brings the law into disrepute. Unenforceable law is bad law.

Eurostar Directors are Muppets

Saw a Eurostar director interviewed on TV. He said about the weather-related breakdowns that "this is unprecedented". No, mate, it isn't. The Stockholm commuter trains had exactly this problem during winters of 76, 77, 78 (they didn't learn from their mistakes either). We've all heard of the "wrong kind of leaves" - the Stockholm excuse was "the wrong kind of snow".

Did Eurostar bother gathering winter operating experience from around Europe before approving a flawed design?

I can promise all El Reg readers that standing waiting for a dead train on an outdoor platform in temperatures of -20C for an hour or two is quite arduous.

What's the Early Retirement scheme called?

I got early release back in 1993 after The Year No-one Bought Mainframes. This was about the time the ranking lists started. Two years later they tried to hire me back, but I was earning 50% more and taking home twice as much (tax break for start-up company).

We had such laughs from the weasel naimng of the schemes. First was Career Transition Programme - instantly renamed Cash To Piss off. My own one was Skills Rebalancing Option - became Smilling Rich and Out.

The Weather @By This

Where in the world did Lewis Page spend his summer? Indoors? In Wales? Here in Suffolk we have not had measurable rain in 5 weeks. The air temp has been above 30C many days, and not gone much below 23 C, even at night.. This summer has barbequed the humans, never mind the steaks.

@AC

"These criminals should be in prison pending their appeal." Perhaps you're talking about the executives of the music companies, who committed acts far more likely to get you jailed for hard time than anything PB did.

Swedish prisons are full - the lads will have to queue to serve their sentences. Violent offenders jump the queue, pushing all the non-violent offenders down.

And when they get there, the one-year sentence will turn out to be a couple of months - they'll be paroled quickly, to make room for people who actually are criminals.

On top of which, Swedish prisons are rather nice by our standards - individual rooms better furnished than your university dorm.

All of which assumes they won't get clear on appeal - after all, their trial was a complete travesty - many Swedes are not convinced the trial actually proved that they did anything that counts as a jailable offence in Sweden.

Librarians!

Please move Ballard's books to the Non-Fiction shelves, probably among the Owner's Manuals next to "1984", which is also an accurate guide to the world we see around us.

What's Your Experience?

I've had two different devices from Iomega - both were poorly designed (or designed to be cheap rather than repairable), and poorly made out of cheap materials in crucial parts. Both were expensive and used expensive media - both failed early in life, and in such a way as to chew up the expensive media.

Never again.

@aManfromMars

"And that is Sun Saved and Beaming and Frying the Opposition and all for the Price of a Team Coach in a New Power Control Paradigm. Man, is that a Bargain or is that a Bargain?"

OK friend, are you volunteering? We would so like to see that!

Been there, done that...

In the last house, I suffered (a) regular mole incursions to my lawn (b) do-gooder neighbours, who had opinions that were not based on actually having to deal with the moles.

I tried all sorts of stuff including various "humane" solutions, most of which caused some moles to die of laughter, and the rest to move in on me.

What worked in the end: have you discovered rook scarers? Out in the countryside, us locals can still buy serious bangers intended to emulate a 12-bore shotgun sound. (You poor nannied townies of course can't be trusted with toy firecrackers on fireworks night.)

Find a mole run (a series of mole hills in a more-or-less straight line). Dig a mole trap (scissors-type preferably) into the middle one, observing precautions against tainting with human smell. Then dig into both end hills, put a rook scarer into the tunnel at each end, fire them off (cover your ears if you want to be able to hear afterwards). This deafens the mole (who then can't find food) - he then blunders about and stumbles into the trap and gets killed.

Result: 6 dead moles in first week of this method, and a number of complaints from do-gooder neighbours brushed off.

Openreach loses 250,00 lines? Huh?

How can Openreach "lose" lines (I mean apart from their lousy documentation)? Maybe if replaced by cable? But is that number believable for transfers to cable? Maybe TFA means that 250,000 copper lines are lying unbilled because nobody is using them (after all the companies that have folded). If so, not a sign of Openreach business failure.

PH would know; she's not lying unused.

Pot/Kettle Part deux

"BT cynically places the onus on its customers to cancel their contracts – simply because it knows that many of them will simply forget."

No, BT knows the customers won't cancel, because the customers know ALL the other providers are just as rubbish as BT, especially TalkTalk.

Why take the risk/certainty of an incompetent screw-up on transfer when there's nothing better to be had elsewhere?

Believe me when I say this (I've worked in oversight of telecoms order handling), if your connection is working, let sleeping wires lie.

Co-op Insurance CIS was no better

With no stakeholders to answer to, it was run as a private club for the benefit of the directors. The grass roots worked their little tails off, their only benefit quite a nice lunch room. The directors swanned around in big cars meeting "clients" on golf courses in between bouts of refusing to invest in anything that would make the place run efficiently. (ie be less of a giant WTF).

BT outsourcing to India

Don't get me started.

OK you got me started.

Why oh why are the managers who decide on outsourcing so clueless about how to make it work? A large and very important development which requires multiple mods to multiple complex systems and multiple complex new components gets outsourced to India. After it's implemented, it becomes painfully obvious that fewer than 50% of orders go through correctly. I'm in a team engaged to find the leaks and plug them. I ask for a description of the end-to-end design. Cut a long story short, BT didn't explicitly ask for one, so it didn't get written, so the components don't talk to each other correctly. And of course there's no audit log, so you can't find out where the ball is dropped. And it takes literally months to establish those two facts because nobody will give a straight answer .

Old codger strikes back

[There'll still be no way to download the Beatles catalogue DRM-free legally, of course.]

Those of us who bought the vinyl on release day back in the 60's won't worry about that; thanks to Audio Cleaning Lab, it's still listenable despite damage done at the parties. But I am delighted to hear about Play.com. Let's all pile in and buy lots of music, so those idiots in the major labels get the message that we hate DRM.

Units of Armageddon

I absolutely agree with TeeCee; we desperately some WMD (Words of Mass Destruction).

May I suggest that the first and smallest unit be a WNF (Wales Nuked Flat) to describe something that's Bad but Doesn't Matter Very Much?

The first gusts before the storm

Those who have left are described as "managers". However, it's not just PHBs. Many are senior professionals who actually know a thing or two. Expect to see an even higher frequency of Male Bird Rising Events (or cockups to you and I), missed regulatory compliance targets, Ofcom and the industry getting ratty...