Terrible foreign thieves!

Interesting how all the thieves must be foreign... I can't imagine anyone in the US downloading...

My friend and his girlfriend have been on both sides of this equation.

He moved to NY from London when she (a native of the US, but indian ethnicity) moved back there after a couple of years in the UK. They quickly found that their company was hiring indian programmers for 1/3 of the americans, bringing them in under very dodgy visas, setting them up in apartments the company owned (and charged them rent for) and getting the americans to train them up before firing the yanks. They have been tied up in a class action for 10 years trying to get the company to admit to it (he on the immigrant's unfair pay side, her on the american unfair dismissal side!). They even interviewed an indian, who admitted he was only taking the 1/3 of the wage so he could get into america. Who could blame him? The company's representatives almost had heart attacks at the deposition. They kept one indian on even though he regularly turned up for work drunk, while she got fired for visiting her father in hospital on a Sunday. She's even given evidence before the senate about the abuse of the visa system. They tried to give up the case due to ill health, but the company is refusing to let it go now, it's become a vendetta on their side. They have managed to get some 'revenge' though, they told the top one hundred company investors of the company's wasting money on this vendetta and so many companies have pulled out it caused the shares to lose 500 million. They're still fighting the case even though they've lost so much money and through the ill health. So I would be very suspicious of these companies who want the visas expanded.

In Oz the level is atrocious....

Really, I thought we had it bad in the UK, but adverts can easily double the length of a movie over here. I wouldn't mind if it was limited to 4 breaks per hour, but it can be literally 2 minutes and then the ads come on again. It's okay though, there's very little worth watching on Oz TV that we don't already watch via the interwebs and then DVDs (absolving our guilt!) They've got digital freeview here now, but have yet to go through the sort out we went through in the UK, with the Beeb taking it over and making it half decent. 2/3rds of the channels are just clones of the remaining 3rd, not even usefully time shifted like the +1s in the UK.

Acer Liquid Metal for AU$128 (84 quid)

I got this phone pay as you go in Oz and while it's not the fastest chip on the market, it handles flash pretty well on it's 480x800 screen, has a 5MP camera with HD video recording and a micro SD slot so you can stick as much memory as you like in it. I was seriously suprised by the price for those specs.

with certain exceptions (these days, chiefly books).

Which is why all the book shops are going out of business, and even when Borders had its closing down sale with 50% off all books, you could STILL get them on Amazon for half those proces. The price cartels are basically killing the Australian retail industry, and their own ridiculous margins.

The other two were soooo good...

But I think this will have to wait till Christmas, or at least till I've finished Arkham City....I am in a gamer's dilemma!

Nasa's budget

18.7 Billion dollars in 2010.

Military budget for 2010? $685.1 billion

A guy called Fletcher almost blinds himself with a cross bow and no one notices?

That's got to be Darwinian Nominative determinism in action! Glad to hear you made it okay though with only a little impairment!

Possibly not the best idea Thomas....

For an example, see Zombieland and Bill Murray's attempt to carry off this gag...

Not just consumers EA likes to screw...

But devs for EA have long been complaining about working conditions, overlong work hours, etc. Basically treating the people who make them all their lovely cash like rubbish and not paying them much.

Didn't this already exist?

We spent all that tech and money on displays which had ever wider viewing angles and now they want to go backwards again :)

VIrus/malware checkers

So are there no virus checkers/malware shields available on android? I would have thought the AVG et al would be jumping into this new market...

This scam isn't going to last long hopefully....

My mother in law got called the other day by a guy claiming to be from Microsoft and saying there was something wrong with her pc. Fortunately she'd been told about it by a friend, and she immediately said 'No you're not! Aren't you ashamed of yourself?' and proceeded to tell him off till he hung up!

Surprise.....

Both Apple and Google seem to be in the business of harvesting user's information as a matter of course, they really don't seem keen on keeping their user's data private from anyone else either, and this has put me off getting a so-called smart phone till they've had a little time to work at least the most obvious of their quirks out.

Hmmm, MS might have it right

Mozilla is asking advertisers to respect a header and not scrape your info as you browse their web sites.... MS is withholding the info altogether unless you allow a site? That kind of sounds more trustworthy to me..... I MUST be confused...

A land grab from Apple? Shurely shome mishtake,,,,

So Apple are going to take over the subscription lists of newspapers, and setting up their own news delivery service... Nothing fishy there then....

I've been enjoying it

I've only quested vash, uldum and a bit of Twilight, but I've enjoyed it a lot. Lots of diverse questing, funny stuff in the goblin zone (including the Zoolander tribute) and the worgen area looks like dark fun, though I've yet to get too much into that. Levelling was fairly quick, but the dungeons are really hard on Heroic, as they should be. The only problem is everyone seems to have forgotten how hard dungeons should be when you don't have all epic gear and I've yet to actually get through a boss, or even keep a team together without someone ragequitting. Figuring out the encounters has been the most fun, when no one knows what to expect and didn't look it up on wowwiki. I thought I was going to hate the changes as I mainly play a mage, and I enjoyed the huge talent trees we had to configure, but they seem to work quite well, with enough talents to keep it interesting.

No doubt this is to build their own software industry.....

I haven't really seen the chinese do much which isn't at heart in their own self interest in some fashion.....

It's GIVE not gift

Please someone, nuke this defiling of the English language...

Don't sell our product's-- err customers' details...

...that's our job!

It's written by Sorkin...

But directed by David Fincher of Fight Club, Zodiac and Panic Room fame....

Still doesn't really appeal to me...

Why not actually pay the people whose privacy it violated?

Surely the class action should mean it pays everyone whose email it exposed since these were probably scrapped by every bot in the world... Which probably means it owes everyone with an email address...

Adobe is a far worse offender.

At the pound's peak of almost $2=1GBP a couple of years ago, Adobe were still selling Photoshop in the UK for 600 quid, while it was $640 or thereabouts in the US.

Quite a stunning mark up for basically a shiny disk. Makes Apple look fair in comparison.

Umm..

I'm running 3.0.5 and it's sitting at 44Mb in memory so has it really jumped that much?

The speed could be a lot better though.... I keep getting occasional several second waits switching between boxes. And it doesn't get rid of the letter notifier if I read all my mail but had it filtered out of the inbox beforehand, which is most annoying. Still prefer 2 atm....

And the jet engine..

Where the americans agreed to share info about jet engine development, and came over to see our working version, then never returned our calls after that...

re: pctechxp

But remember, they started off slagging off friendface too, then were sucked into it....

Yay! 2 more series to watch. The second was a bit iffy, but the 3rd was even funnier.

Damn these electric sex pants!

This is why I come to el Reg....

For the witty commentaries after the stories! Thank you all for the entertainment!

Don't believe the lies...

I moved here from blighty last november, and the weather has been rubbish. My Aussie GF lived in the UK for a year before that, and she was always saying 'When's the summer coming, when's the summer coming?' and then I moved to Sydney, and ever since then it's been about as hot and wet as England... Now I ask her 'When's the summer coming?'

Too much food.

I've been saying for months that restaurants at least give us too much food by at least a third. Plates are definitely bigger nowadays, and when I get takeaway, I can usually only manage about half what they give me. Everyone I ask agrees with me, and I always see half eaten meals when out at restaurants. When I had a meal in the US at TGI fridays, I was astounded with what they expected me to eat, I thought it would easily fill 3 people. So that far I at least believe to be partly true. Having dinner last night I had a portion more in line with what I reasonably expect to eat and believe it or not I ate it all, and didn't feel hungry afterwards. If restaurants provided half the food, we'd pay half the price (well I can dream), end up with less waste, or less waist, and double the capacity.

I do agree with pretty much everything everyone says here too, the UK could probably feed most if not all its population locally if they'd stop screwing the farmers into the ground, and got more local market buying. Over in Oz, they have Farmers markets, which are just like supermarkets, only 'run' by local farmers and all the produce is grown locally. The government should start getting a clue.

Only reasonable really.

I'm very anti censorship, but pro classification. It's just bringing them into line with dvds. When are they going to hit books and magazines though?

I own the methodology for filling out web forms...

So you all owe me a drink!

This is being tested right now.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1714614/posts

http://www.kavitachhibber.com/main/main.jsp?id=legal-Nov2005

Wilco is using temporary visas to bring in Indian labour at reduced costs to replace the Americans who train them. It's not a myth, it's absolute fact. I know Sona personally and she's as able and hardworking as they come. This is not a lazy American thing, it's a cut cost boost profits thing.

Byron

Actually I seem to remember reading some of Byron's views on this sort of thing and she seemed quite reasonable. She wasn't a 'all video games should be banned' kind of person as this quote from the Observer illustrates.

'She told The Observer why she believes portable games devices should be part of daily schooling, suggests a likely link between violent games and violent behaviour in CERTAIN CASES (my emphasis), and stresses the need for parents and children to balance virtual world risks as they would real world dangers such as crossing a road or talking to strangers'

Seems fairly rational to me. She might suggest that the current voluntary classification of video games becomes a law in line with video/dvd sales, so it becomes a duty of the shop to ensure they're not selling it to a child. This is better if shops hold up their end, because mommy can't sue the shop for selling it to jimmy, they have to sell it to her, and it's then her fault that jimmy got hold of it (if the shop sells the 18+ game to a 10 year old anyway, they've screwed themselves).

Less bureaucracy does not always equal less accountability

It just means less forms to fill in. And why all the complaints about webcams on police helmets. They're only going where the police go, and will back up statements made by both the police and public. i should imagine that cuts a lot of red tape. That's not to say the police can't take them off, but then that's the situation we're in nowadays anyway.

Degrees are useless...not

A lot of people moaning here about the quality of degrees being not as good as experience, that's certainly true in a lot of cases, but equally true the other way around. I've met lots of 'experienced' people who've written badly optimized, barely comprehensible or maintainable code, even (probably mostly!) by them, because they didn't have the faintest clue about the theories of writing good code. Degrees aren't just about theory though, they do real world case studies. What's worse is when these 'experienced' people go on to teach others their bad habits.

Rubbish CS again...

I became unable to log into Orange for 3 weeks. During this time I phoned and phoned and phoned 'Technical Support' and each time I got the same 'Lets try this series of tests' before they claimed they would do a line test. Only after 3 weeks did i manage to get some help from their Customer services, who said 'Oh there's a note about a modification to your line'. DOH! What is Technical support if it's a monkey reading off a card each time you call them? The one british guy I managed to get through was completely sympathetic, whilst when I told one guy I'd done this 6 times, said he wouldn't be help me if I was going to get irate... And then read off the card. they have you over a barrel too, as you have to have 3 MONTHS of 'support' before you can get arbitration and get your migration code to go somewhere else. Who can be offline (when you run a business online) for 3 months??

Something odd about those figures.

Only 0.6 film discs per player, with 12 games per player? What are all these wonderful games the PS3 players are playing? My friend who has one has a lot more films than games since PS3 has such a dearth of good games. I know good games have started to be released, but still, it sounds very unlikely...